The ‘velina etiquette’

Giulia is not the most famous showgirl in the country (although at the time of writing this article, she was taking part in a popular TV show), but a girl who occupies a privileged position within the Italian entertainment industry, due to her role in Striscia la Notizia. At the time of the interviews that I conducted with her, in 2014 and 2015, she considered herself ‘a minor celeb’ compared to many of her colleagues, and relatively marginal compared to big business. That is why she is an excellent prism through which to observe the social production of visuality. Looking at the moral economy and the hidden text of Giulia’s image, it is possible to observe the overall rationality of its world.

Giulia belongs to the increasing affective labour force of ‘aesthetics workers’, whose whole person is put to work. As she said during one of our interviews:

Giulia is involved in both forms of emotional management: emotional labour (which she is paid for), and emotional work (invisible labour). Indeed, the velina is engaged in multiple social interactions where she mobilises seductive skills with which the economic exchange between the agents is modulated on the basis of a sexual asymmetry, following the lines of a market asymmetry between the demand and the offer; and on the basis of a gender asymmetry between the authorities (clients, intermediaries, managers…) (Gandini Reference Gandini2009) and the women engaged in affective labour in the entertainment industry. The power system described by Giulia is therefore characterised by sexual asymmetric power relations in the form of what Paola Tabet describes as a ‘sexual-economic continuum’: the transversal diffusion of sexual acts, used as bargaining chips to obtain professional positions and favours (Tabet Reference Tabet2004).

Within this ‘sexual-economic continuum’, the velina’s image is made up of the intertwining of an image capital, an etiquette and a character. The etiquette, in particular, is important as it reflects a specific formalisation of social aesthetics (Carnevali Reference Carnevali2012), made up of rules, and moral and gender norms, which the velina is subjected to and which concern both her corporeal appearance and her behaviour. Giulia’s image thus needs to conform to what she calls ‘the velina etiquette’. The etiquette rules are explicitly stated in the contract of employment of Striscia la Notizia, detailing the aesthetic and behavioural norms Giulia must respect: for example, it states that ‘you cannot modify your body during the whole period of the contract’ (Interview 20 January 2015). In a way the contract prescribes a life-form, similarly to the social-aesthetic treatises of good manners and taste of Moralist literature, as in Baldassarre Castiglione’s 1561 Book of the Courtier (Castiglione Reference Castiglione1994).

Giulia’s etiquette also implies implicit rules and characteristics, which, as she says, ‘everybody knows’. She further explains that, as a velina, ‘you must not trip over in public, so as not to give the idea that you are drunk, not go out with messy hair, you have to study diction, to be smiling all the time, to be nice and cheerful, and always wear makeup’ (Martinez Tagliavia Reference Martinez Tagliavia2016, 193). Striscia la Notizia’s director, Antonio Ricci is the master of the etiquette, but he doesn’t have full control over it. Indeed, during an interview, Giulia explains that during her daily interactions, she does not behave following the velina stereotype, but rather releases extensive interviews, showing that she can speak. Moreover, the etiquette corresponds to a stereotyped set of gendered norms, which Giulia experiences as stigmatising:

The label is, however, not only a stigmatising gender norm: it is also a marker of the link between social domination and aesthetic appearance. Nonetheless, Giulia possesses a degree of reflexivity and self-awareness, which make her capable of choosing her singular way of conforming or distancing herself from the etiquette. One example of this was Giulia’s performance during Striscia la Notizia’s popular casting show called Veline, in 2012. Here Giulia chose to embody the image of an ‘articulated doll’:

Giulia’s performance engenders an image which seems indistinguishable from her person, even though it is contradictory:

Embodying the etiquette of velina means internalising a series of behavioural rules, conforming to the figure of the ‘articulated doll’. The latter works as the visual form of the etiquette, sticking like a mask to Giulia’s person. The Greek and Latin etymology of the word person refers to the theatrical mask and to the face (Lallot Reference Lallot2004, 23; Vernant Reference Vernant1973, 23–37). As Giulia says, usually nobody ‘is curious to know anything about the person who hides behind the mask of velina’ (Interview 4 February 2015).

In conclusion, the gendered stereotyping of the velina corresponds with her etiquette. Following a phenomenological viewpoint (Wacquant Reference Wacquant2004), this embodiment requires material media or carnal flesh. In this sense, the velina etiquette is a ‘feminine’ sexual phantasmagoria, and an ideological visual product.

The revenge of the doll

In the previous section, I have shown that Giulia’s etiquette is a gendered complex of corporeal and behavioural prescriptions. In this section, I will describe some acts of resistance performed by Giulia in her everyday social interactions. As a cultural producer, Giulia negotiates a tension between critique and consent, during conflicting social interactions with other cultural producers of her world, such as TV producers and directors, agents and other cultural and aesthetic intermediaries.

Precisely because very little attention has been given to the everyday acts of resistancefrom the viewpoint of a female worker engaged in affective labour in the context of visuality, in this second section I will relate how, in the day-to-day relations of domination in her labour and work interactions, Giulia protects herself and speaks out, for herself individually but also building alliances with other women. Giulia traces her singular and specific pathway through a network of accomplices and enemies, intertwining individual and collective action, consolidating intimate ties between family and friends, and deploying a secret resistance. She explains:

‘To keep smiling’, as we have seen in an earlier citation, is one of the gendered norms of the velina’s etiquette, as well as a living product of her affective labour, as implicitly prescribed by the work contract of Striscia la Notizia. It is implicitly suggested to Giulia by her intermediaries, in each and every life and work context, until its complete internalisation. When asked if her affective labour was also social, as well as corporeal, Giulia answered:

Giulia describes how she applies, in her free time, the rules of her etiquette, as they have been prescribed by the management of the show, and to which she has formally agreed the moment she signed the contract. But this is also a description of Giulia’s everyday staging of affective mannerisms, used as masks to conceal her true feelings in an uncomfortable situation. In her own narration of herself (Goffman Reference Goffman1973), Giulia declares that she is engaged in a constant internal critique against the violence she faces daily, along with her female colleagues. This internal critique is regardless of the masks she decides to put on (the affective mannerisms she decides to perform), so as to convey the right emotion to her interlocutor, following the etiquette explicitly and implicitly prescribed by the contract. In common with other workers in the television industry, Giulia expresses emotions in her daily job, whether at Striscia la Notizia, during an advertisement, or when she interacts with the public. In all these cases, she must ensure the transmission of good emotions to convince the public. This means charging her image in accordance with the emotions prescribed by the management (Hochschild Reference Hochschild2003). In the gaps between labour and work, she must repress emotions contrary to those that are prescribed, always making sure to keep her face concealed behind her mask. The power of the etiquette, what animates it, is Giulia’s living labour: her emotions generate the persuasive effect of her image. If embodying an articulated doll is the performance she initially chose to demonstrate her ability to perform the gendered etiquette of the velina, inside the doll hides Giulia, its manipulator. The mask is seized, overturned, and used as a weapon, like a puppeteer disguising himself inside a puppet. By posing as an idiot through an eroticised self-infantilisation, she gives her clients the illusion that they exert total control over her behaviour and appearance. Through this illusion, she is able to gain a subtle advantage over them, as this extract illustrates:

The club owner believes in Giulia’s staging of the velina’s gender etiquette, as if it were her true self. In other words, he believes in her self-representation as an articulated doll. Giulia is aware of the fact that playing the idiot doll confers on her the power to exploit her brand of velina – her income source – on the market, while affirming her subjectivity and without risks. The tactic seems to reflect the popular Neapolitan joke: ‘I’m not a fool, but I act like a fool, because in so doing, I fool you’. Following the tradition of the humorous inscriptions ancient Romans used to hang at their doorways (such as ‘Beware of the dog!’ when there was no dog), the phrase was popularised, in cinema, by the famous Italian actor and performer Toto, in the comedy Toto d’Arabia (de la Loma Reference Loma (de la)1965). Famous for highlighting, with satire, the vicious habits of Italian society, at a time when Italy was ruled by the Christian Democrats, Toto plays the role of the one who plays tricks on the powerful, fooling and cheating them, aiming at reversing temporarily his subaltern class inscription in the hierarchy of authority. To play the fool means to play the role of someone who doesn’t care to prove his or her intelligence to others; the role of those who pretend to be ‘incapable of appearing differently from where and how they are’ (Rosset Reference Rosset1977, 42). During a social interaction, the strategy of the fool consists in the staging of his or her own idiocy, in order to lead the counterpart to abandon her or his self-defence, and hence to fall into all sorts of dramaturgic traps. The revenge of the subaltern is therefore to make the dominant appear to the audience as an idiot. By disclosing this strategy during the interview, Giulia demonstrates a certain amount of self protection, using the very same but lucrative stereotype of the idiot doll that she doesn’t acknowledge as hers, similar to Paola Bonifazio’s account of the Italian TV stand-up comedian Luciana Littizzetto (Bonifazio Reference Bonifazio2014).

To sum up, I have described a set of acts of resistance performed by Giulia in her everyday social interactions, to protect herself, to speak out and to build alliances, against the violence implied by the stigma attached to the velina’s gender/class norm (which I consider postfeminist, as we will see next). In the last section of the article, I will apply the concept of visual infrapolitics to the open field of practices that materialise masked conflicts, invisible resistances and consents, through which a female worker of the entertainment industry daily criticises the gender-based violence implied by her labour form and by the stigma attached to her gender label.

Visual infrapolitics in the secret visuality

As Nicholas Mirzoeff has shown in his decolonial visual genealogy of modernity, ‘visuality classifies by naming, categorizing, and defining […]. [Visuality] separates the groups so classified as a means of social organization […] It makes this separated classification seem right and hence aesthetic’ (Mirzoeff Reference Mirzoeff2011, 3). Visuality is the process through which political authority represents itself as ‘self-evident’. On the other hand, ‘countervisuality’, Mirzoeff writes, ‘claims autonomy from [the] authority [of visuality], refuses to be segregated, and spontaneously invents new forms’ (Mirzoeff Reference Mirzoeff2011, 4). Also, contemporary Western visuality is characterised by a ‘misogynist aesthetics’. Visuality ‘is not just “masculine” or “heroic” but actively depends on misogyny for its ability to claim legitimacy’ (Mirzoeff Reference Mirzoeff2017). Still, as James C. Scott has demonstrated (and since then, many subaltern, feminist, cultural and queer studies), in his exploration of everyday forms of peasant ‘infrapolitics’, the dominant class does not exert ‘total social authority’ – to use Stuart Hall’s expression (Hall Reference Hall1980a, 331) – on the subalterns (Scott Reference Scott1985, Reference Scott1989, Reference Scott1990).Footnote ² In contexts where open rebellion is too risky, subalterns perform secret everyday practices of resistance: a multitude of offstage ‘infrapolitical’ acts, in ‘invariably quiet, disguised, anonymous, often undeclared forms’ (Scott Reference Scott1989, 37). The genealogy of this specific set of acts of resistance to power can be found in Moralist literature, and particularly in the literature on courtesans. In 1641, just to cite the most famous, the Italian Baroque Moralist Torquato Accetto published the treatise On Honest Dissimulation (Accetto Reference Accetto1990). In the context of the Spanish domination, the author describes the behaviours one should adopt to defend his or her humanist values. Like the courtesan’s dissimulation of her true feelings, the mask of the idiot doll is pure simulation. Every time she lets her mask down and speaks out, Giulia breaks the ‘working consensus’ (Goffman Reference Goffman1973), without caring much about the consequences. This implies a subtle capacity to manage her own social aesthetics, with all the means of artifice. The aesthetic etiquette is a normative code of being, which implies its manipulation (Carnevali Reference Carnevali2013, 29–48).

The production of the socially acceptable stigmatising semantics of the velina has had a considerable political weight. From a visual and feminist viewpoint such as that offered by Alessandra Gribaldo and Giovanna Zapperi, the Italian public debate on the intertwining of sexuality and politics has been fought out on the battlefield of the visual, as a sexualised and feminine dimension (Gribaldo and Zapperi Reference Gribaldo and Zapperi2012; see also Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2010; De Simoni Reference De Simoni2012, Morini Reference Morini2012; Demaria and Sassatelli Reference Demaria and Sassatelli2013). Sexually stigmatising semantics have mobilised and overlapped the following oppositional pairs: ‘real’ versus ‘fake’ femininity; feminine mystique versus uncontrolled sexuality (Ottonelli Reference Ottonelli2011); reality versus images. On the one hand, the stigmatising oppositional semantics fulfilled the need of the anti-Berlusconian press (such as La Repubblica) and mainstream feminist media critique (Zanardo, Malfi Chindemi and Cantù Reference Zanardo, M. Chindemi and Cantù2009) to defend a white, middle-class, moralistic and iconophobic decorum (Ghigi Reference Ghigi2013).Footnote ³ On the other, the exploitation of misogynistic stereotypes has reinforced the general and popular masculine appreciation for Berlusconi’s virilist masculinity. The corollary to the mystical and moralistic iconophobia has been a postfeminist set of discourses celebrating the neoliberal spectacularisation of the self, and of a sexually active femininity, according to the values of freedom and individualism (Fraser Reference Fraser2013). In the Italian mainstream debate about the velina, the reaction to the anti-Berlusconian moralistic accusations against the veline, derives from commentators belonging to Berlusconi’s political area and media, which can be located within the broadest postfeminist constellation: they claim that the velina’s whore stigma is not an element of subjectification, but rather a tool of emancipation. As an example, the liberal journalist Annalisa Chirico’s polemical pamphlet is emblematically entitled ‘We are all whores’ (Chirico Reference Chirico2014) and celebrates the ‘power of erotic capital’ (Hakim Reference Hakim2011). Feminist intellectuals have replied that even if the velina’s whore stigma can be considered a tool of individual emancipation, it still does not question the structural nature of ‘masculine domination’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2001), because this is based on a sexual division of labour. Therefore, the emancipatory potential located in the ‘sex-factor’ cannot be confused with a collective liberation from the capitalist exploitation of women’s affective labour (Rossi Reference Rossi2014; Morini Reference Morini2014; Busi and De Simoni Reference Busi and De Simoni2014; Dominijanni Reference Dominijanni2014).

One of my interviews with Giulia took place in a café that she often goes to, located only a few metres away from ‘10 Corso Como’, a luxury concept store in Corso Como, Milan’s fashion street. Corso Como is a panoptical urban site, full of TV screens, walls as looking-glasses, camphones, visual technologies, surveillance cameras and paparazzi. Accordingly, the café reflects this prison-like environment. The interview lasted approximately four hours, and was recorded with a camera. I positioned the camera to hide Giulia’s face, exclusively recording the gestures of her hands on a computer screen, as she shows and interprets critically her visual performance in the Striscia la Notizia TV programme. This and three other interviews I conducted with Giulia show that in the space between her spectacular and her secret person, she acknowledges her stigma and criticises it, from within the panoptical male gaze of visuality, as an intersection between gender and class domination. Moreover, she speaks out, both for herself and for other women. Giulia can ‘enact’ and ‘re-enact’ the gendered norms implied by her etiquette (Butler Reference Butler1988), momentarily escaping from their grip. Giulia’s narration of herself seems ascribable to a postfeminist sensibility and femininity, claiming that women are not just the objects of the male gaze (Mulvey Reference Mulvey1975). As Rosalind Gill writes, this set of discourses ‘offers women the promise of power by becoming an object of desire’ (Gill Reference Gill2003, 104). Sexual objectification can be considered ‘not as something done to women by some men, but as the freely chosen wish of active, confident, assertive female subjects’. Postfeminist femininity is centered around ‘sexual confidence and autonomy’ (Gill Reference Gill2003, 103), where the feminist rhetoric of choice and empowerment celebrates sexual female objectification, as a tool to achieve gender parity (Walter Reference Walter2010). I would claim, rather, that women inside as well as outside the entertainment industry can seize their sexual objectification as a seductive weapon and challenge the labour/work gendered relationship implied by their work contract and working consensus. While fitting in her own etiquette, Giulia performs a moral detachment, and establishes a critical relationship with a world whose dominant logic doesn’t conform to her choice, and in which she occupies a subaltern position. In other words, while submitting to the rules of the etiquette, Giulia can perform what Claude Lévi-Strauss referred to as ‘bricolages’ (Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss1966, 11), and open up temporary space-times of freedom. As in one of Michel de Certeau’s case studies on subaltern tactics of resistance in everyday life (De Certeau Reference De Certeau1984), sometimes Giulia resembles a poacher, capable of tracing her own way in the visual battlefield:

De Certeau’s book was first published in 1980, five years after Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (Foucault Reference Foucault1979; see on this topic Perrot Reference Perrot1988, 117–121). Even though she is besieged by social control and by a massive quantity of stereotypes, Giulia acts ‘on the wing’ (De Certeau Reference De Certeau1984, xix), tracing her singular pathway, poaching snippets of narration and images, here and there, and performing them at her will, following possibilities that do not coincide with the etiquette’s norm. Although her clients have the power to control and influence the velina’s public behaviour and aesthetic appearance, Giulia can expropriate, decode and recode (Hall Reference Hall1980b) her mask in her own way, and uniquely perform her person on the spectacular stage of the everyday social interactions. This way, Giulia individually attempts to resist from within the panoptical surveillance of visuality. As John Berger writes:

Such an infrapolitics of subtle visual intelligence does not pertain to the sphere of the open struggle with authority, but rather to the sphere of the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ (Bayat Reference Bayat2009). Its field of study pertains neither to the political iconology of the dominated (Boidy Reference Boidy2014), nor to the political iconography of domination (Theweleit Reference Theweleit1987; Michaud Reference Michaud2003; Bredekamp Reference Bredekamp2007; Parotto Reference Parotto2007; Mitchell Reference Mitchell2009; Coladonato Reference Coladonato2014; Garofalo Reference Garofalo2016), but rather in the grey zone crossing both fields. Such a ‘secret iconology of visuality’ would embrace the secret, off-stage and therefore infravisible forms of ordinary resistance, performed in the tension between hyper-exposure and spectacularisation, between self-concealment and invisibility, and intertwining individual and collective action.

Other than her secret activism, Giulia’s staging of an everyday secret activism seems the prerequisite for her to speak out, openly, in public:

Giulia also affirms that she builds alliances with her female colleagues and speaks out for them, in contexts where they face symbolic violence:

In our interactions, however, Giulia spoke out not only against misogynistic labour-work violence, either towards herself or other women. More importantly, we can see how the open acts of rebellion occur on the basis of a constant critique of everyday life, exerted in what I have qualified as a ‘secret’ visuality. Furthermore, the postfeminist sensibility (Gill Reference Gill2007) that emerges in Giulia’s own ‘backstage’ behaviour (Goffman Reference Goffman1973) demonstrates that visual culture is a political site of resistance, and we should take seriously into account the visual infrapolitics of the female workers of the entertainment industry. There are countless acts of resistance hiding backstage in the spectacle, as its off-stage prerequisite. From a strategic viewpoint, in these secret actions women craft the weapons they will seize to individually assert themselves publicly, but also to build open and collective political alliances.

In conclusion, we will see that such a wide field of practices performed by women pertains to a postfeminist sensibility, because they materialise the conditions for possible collective acts of resistance.