Bodily Regimes

Bodily Regimes

Italian Advertising under Fascism

Karen Pinkus

$26.00 Paper
ISBN: 0-8166-2563-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-2563-5

A provocative reading of the use and manipulation of the body in advertising under Italian fascism, Bodily Regimes offers an enlightening look at the relationship between fascism and capitalism. Acknowledging the "backwardness" of Italy compared with other Western economies of the 1930s, Pinkus explores the reciprocal relation between the emerging "modern" market, advertising, and the individual body of the consumer.

Bodily Regimes is unique in its focus on the intertwined relations of race, class, and gender in the construction of the Italian subject. Pinkus examines the meanings that abject African black bodies brought to peninsular white ones; the short-circuiting of the traditional economic cycles of production-distribution-consumption in images of Italian workers, puffy white homunculi, and steely automata; the encoding of desire as a feminine quality that must be purged from the ideal male fascist; and the eventual disappearance of the body as its contour faded under the gases and toxins of the modern state.

Throughout the study Pinkus highlights the importance the fascist regime placed on autarchy—the State project for economic self-sufficiency—and links it to social and cultural images. Her emphasis on this project helps illustrate ways in which fascism served as a means to bridge the gap between the Italian economy and that of more developed forms of capitalism. Her analysis is especially timely as racial questions emerge in Italy at a moment when the party structure that has effectively masked or repressed the continuity between the fascist and capitalist regimes since World War II has dissolved.

"Karen Pinkus's Bodily Regimes is one of the most interesting products of the recent resurgence of interest in the cultural practices of the fascist period. This is certainly one of the best studies of the everyday life of fascism." —Italica

"The book is full of ingenious, and thought-provoking interpretations of the advertising posters it takes into consideration. A very welcome study that deserves its place in the fast-growing library of Italian Cultural Studies." —Rivista di Studi Italiani

"In Bodily Regimes, Karen Pinkus has applied the tools of linguistics and psychoanalysis, along with a thorough knowledge of political events, to the use of the human figure in Italian advertisements of the 1930s. Bodily Regimes, as well as other application of cultural studies to graphic design, can offer new ways of viewing, recording and reacting to our visual past." —Communications Arts

Karen Pinkus teaches in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University. She translated Giorgio Agamben's Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, and Renato Barill's A Course On Aesthetics.

Winner of the 1994-1995 MLA Howard R. Marraro Prize and Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Literary Studies

288 pages | 65 photographs | 5 7/8 x 9 | 1995



Bodily Regimes *Italian Advertising under Fascism* Karen Pinkus		$26.00 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-2563-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-2563-5
A provocative reading of the use and manipulation of the body in advertising under Italian fascism, Bodily Regimes offers an enlightening look at the relationship between fascism and capitalism. Acknowledging the "backwardness" of Italy compared with other Western economies of the 1930s, Pinkus explores the reciprocal relation between the emerging "modern" market, advertising, and the individual body of the consumer. Bodily Regimes is unique in its focus on the intertwined relations of race, class, and gender in the construction of the Italian subject. Pinkus examines the meanings that abject African black bodies brought to peninsular white ones; the short-circuiting of the traditional economic cycles of production-distribution-consumption in images of Italian workers, puffy white homunculi, and steely automata; the encoding of desire as a feminine quality that must be purged from the ideal male fascist; and the eventual disappearance of the body as its contour faded under the gases and toxins of the modern state. Throughout the study Pinkus highlights the importance the fascist regime placed on autarchy—the State project for economic self-sufficiency—and links it to social and cultural images. Her emphasis on this project helps illustrate ways in which fascism served as a means to bridge the gap between the Italian economy and that of more developed forms of capitalism. Her analysis is especially timely as racial questions emerge in Italy at a moment when the party structure that has effectively masked or repressed the continuity between the fascist and capitalist regimes since World War II has dissolved. "Karen Pinkus's Bodily Regimes is one of the most interesting products of the recent resurgence of interest in the cultural practices of the fascist period. This is certainly one of the best studies of the everyday life of fascism." —Italica "The book is full of ingenious, and thought-provoking interpretations of the advertising posters it takes into consideration. A very welcome study that deserves its place in the fast-growing library of Italian Cultural Studies." —Rivista di Studi Italiani "In Bodily Regimes, Karen Pinkus has applied the tools of linguistics and psychoanalysis, along with a thorough knowledge of political events, to the use of the human figure in Italian advertisements of the 1930s. Bodily Regimes, as well as other application of cultural studies to graphic design, can offer new ways of viewing, recording and reacting to our visual past." —Communications Arts Karen Pinkus teaches in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University. She translated Giorgio Agamben's Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, and Renato Barill's A Course On Aesthetics. Winner of the 1994-1995 MLA Howard R. Marraro Prize and Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Literary Studies 288 pages \| 65 photographs \| 5 7/8 x 9 \| 1995