SOLL staff achievements: an interview with Emma Barron
Emma Barron is a cultural historian whose research focuses on Italian mass culture. She was recently awarded the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS)-University of Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellow for her project, ‘Modern Women: Mass Culture and Social Change in Post-War Italy.’
Monica interviewed Emma about this project and her research trajectory.
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To start, I’d love to hear more about your academic journey. How did you come to undertake doctoral research into Italian mass culture?
Well, I’m something of a late bloomer on the academic front. I studied history and popular culture as an undergraduate, then worked in federal and state governments on grant programs, cultural policy, and technology policy for nearly a decade. When I started learning Italian just as a hobby, I kept noticing the richness of the popular culture – one of my favourite examples is the comic book Dylan Dog, when Umberto Eco turns up as ‘Professor Coe’ and talks about translating alien languages with various references to semiotic theory along the way! Years later, I was working in international relations at a technology research institute and learned about co-tutelle degrees, where you can do an international PhD across two universities. So, I ended up doing my PhD jointly at the University of Sydney and the University of Bologna looking at the ways high culture was part of mass culture in post-war Italy – from television variety show adaptations of classic literature (all singing, all dancing Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) to Pasolini’s cultural advice columns. Living in Italy and researching in Italian television and advertising archives was an amazing experience.
Picture from Dylan Dog comic book with Professor Coe (Umberto Eco’s character). Photo by Emma Barron.
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What do you hope to achieve in your current project, ‘Modern Women: Mass Culture and Social Change in Post-War Italy,’ and how does it build upon and depart from your previous research?
The big goal is to write a new history of Italy in the 1950s and 1960s by looking at women’s access to ideas about the modern world and their place in it. The project continues my work on the ways Italy’s visual mass culture circulates information at a time of low levels of formal education, but now with an even greater focus on gender and class. There is rapid economic development and widespread engagement with mass culture, yet it is also a boom time for companies and governments to track consumers and citizens – think Mad Men and early computing. I use these audience responses and circulation data to better understand the scale and impact of different ideas across sex, class, and education. My approach is to look at ideas in mass culture content and the people it reached. I’ll be digging into three areas of significant social change for women: employment, consumerism, and relationships.
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It strikes me that your research is particularly interested in the role of mass media as an active force of social transformation. I’m wondering how you situate this agency in relation to both the producers and consumers of mass media. Can you speak to this a bit?
What a great question! Popular culture is often dismissed as being rubbish and the people who like it are seen as passive or brainwashed. Or it gets wrapped up in nostalgia like you see in the film Cinema Paradiso. The interesting thing about Italy in the 1950s and 1960s is the rapid growth in mass culture consumption as part of the larger economic and social transformation. For most of the population, magazines, television, and cinema shape how they experience and understand social change. Just to give you an idea of the scale, by 1963 in an average week 23 million people (or 62% of the population) read a magazine, almost 24 million people watched television, and around 7.5 million Italians went to the cinema. While the importance of Italian cinema is recognised, the role of television and magazines is less studied.
Much of this mass culture product is commercial, and magazine publishers make their money on advertising, not magazine sales. Although, the state and the church also produce and distribute cultural content to provide mass culture aligned with Christian values and project a moral modernity.
There is agency in the choice of content and the range of ideas beyond what many people, particularly women, would have had access to in their families and communities. You could read the women’s slightly racy photo-story magazine Bolero Film, or the church supported Famiglia Cristiana… or watch the state monopoly television and then go to see an American film: people engaged with different and often contradictory views on modern Italy and the social changes underway.
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As is well known, the Italian state held a monopoly over mass media – particularly television – in post-WW2 Italy. In such a context, how does your research navigate the differing ways in which mass media was taken up and impactful for ordinary people, particularly women, and the ways in which mass media was embedded in a broader, state-led project of industrialising the Italian economy, promoting mass consumption and spreading a national language?
Most of the histories of the Italian government broadcaster (the RAI) take a top-down view. The RAI had an in-house audience opinion research group surveying hundreds of thousands of television viewers. The data tracks how many people watched programs and if they enjoyed them. This information helps to understand the impact of different programs and how it changes over time. There’s a lot of interesting work going on in the field, questioning some of the myths about this period of broadcasting and challenging the received view that everything was always tightly controlled, or that audiences were easily shocked. Clearly, some management regimes or programs are very conservative, however, programs like the current affairs show TV7 would address social issues such as female unemployment, or variety shows might make veiled or overt social comment. These exceptions are worth exploring. Even with the state media monopoly control over broadcasting, there is a broader ecosystem of information and ideas. You may not be able to show adultery on television, but you certainly can see it at the cinema, or read about it in a weekly magazine.
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I noticed that you gave a public lecture last week on the Italian cultural icon, Mina Mazzini. Can you tell us a bit about her significance, and how the lecture was received?
The Italian singer Mina’s experience is a great example of the contradictions of state support for economic growth with its attempts to control television content. In 1963, Mina announces that she is pregnant to a married actor at a time when divorce is illegal and being an unmarried mother runs against moral and social norms. Mina’s so-called ‘television ban’ by the RAI to condemn this moral lapse is one of the big myths of 1960s television history. Most histories and fan-sites say the state broadcaster banned her for ‘years’, yet Mina continues to appear on advertisements throughout 1963. The communication of a public punishment by the RAI was important, and her television appearances are reduced. Yet, her advertising campaigns, return for a television variety special in early 1964, and complete return to variety shows in 1965, were significant breaches of this ban. An unmarried mother remaining on Italian television would have been utterly unimaginable only a few years earlier.
The lecture attracted international scholars on zoom, colleagues from the university, as well as Mina fans and people who provided their own stories about how important Mina was in their own families. This close connection with the Italian community is one of the great things of coming to work at the University of Melbourne.