Television Antiheroines

Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama

Milly Buonanno

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783207602
• eBook ISBN: 9781783207626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

With a foreword by Diane Negra and Jorie Lagerway

As television has finally started to create more leading roles for women, the female antiheroine has emerged as a compelling and dynamic character type. Television Antiheroines looks closely at this recent development, exploring the emergence of women characters in roles typically reserved for men, particularly in the male-dominated genre of the crime and prison drama.

The essays collected in Television Antiheroines are divided into four sections or types of characters: mafia women, drug dealers and aberrant mothers, women in prison, and villainesses. Looking specifically at shows such as Gomorrah, Mafiosa, The Wire, The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, Orange is the New Black, and Antimafia Squad, the contributors explore the role of race and sexuality and focus on how many of the characters transgress traditional ideas about femininity and female identity, such as motherhood. They examine the ways in which bad women are portrayed and how these characters undermine gender expectations and reveal the current challenges by women to social and economic norms. Television Antiheroines will be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in crime and prison drama and the rising prominence of women in nontraditional roles.

Part I

Mafia Women

Chapter 1

Godmothers in Italian Mafia Story: Or ‘Something Else Besides a Mother’

Milly Buonanno

‘Never Happen in the States’: It Happens in Italy

In season 2, episode 4 of The Sopranos (‘Commendatori’ 2000), Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) travels to Naples to make a deal with a clan of the Camorra, the powerful crime organization that reigns in Campania. Tony’s attitude to the trip is informed by his nostalgia-inducing imagination and expectation of a southern Italian world (or underworld) where the patriarchal power structure remains intact. Hence, his disconcerted reaction and sneering remark when he discovers that the Camorra boss with whom business must be conducted is a woman, the voluptuous Annalisa Zucca (Sofia Milos), who has replaced her senile father and her husband, jailed for life, as the head of the family. ‘A fucking woman boss? Never happen in the States. Never’ (‘Commendatori’ 2000).

An inconceivable violation of the gendered hierarchies of Mafia power, as perceived by Tony Soprano, the access of women to leadership positions within criminal organizations actually happens in Italy: both in real life (Fiandaca 2007; Ingrascì 2007; Gribaudi and Marmo 2010) and, more recently, in fictional representations of Mafia and Mafia-like groups in a number of media.

Although contemporary Italian cinema has tentatively explored the phenomenon of women involved in the business of crime – for instance, in Roberta Torre’s Angela (2002) (O’Rawe 2011) and Edoardo Winspeare’s Galantuomini/Brave men (2008) – deeply captivating stories and iconic figures are more to be found in television narratives. This chapter revolves around the fictional characters of two female bosses, Rosy Abate (Giulia Michelini) and Imma Savastano (Maria Pia Calzone), whose rise to power in the quintessential masculine domain of illegal trafficking and bloodthirsty violence has developed into a major storyline of the successful prime-time serial dramas Squadra antimafia/Antimafia Squad (Canale 5, 2009–) and Gomorra. La serie/Gomorrah: The Series (Sky Atlantic, 2014–), respectively.

Owing to the diverse mix of shaping factors, as will be seen in the following pages, Rosy and Imma emerge as quite different personae of female mob bosses. Each manages in her own way to gain control of criminal markets and families, either by challenging or taking advantage of the gender allocation of roles in crime organizations that preclude (Mafia) or allow (Camorra) women’s rise to top positions. Moreover, the dialectic principle of the ‘unity of opposites’, which seems to inspire the identity construction of the two characters, implies that a criminal career – the pinnacle of female transgression of womanhood boundaries – goes hand in hand with the pinnacle of ideal womanhood: motherhood (Rich 1995). Motherhood matters and makes a significant impact on Rosy and Imma’s lives, although neither can be considered a truly good or bad mother: they perform ambivalent motherhood in different and even opposing ways. The title of this chapter quotes Linda Williams’ famous essay ‘Something else besides a mother’ to indicate that Rosy and Imma’s ‘desire for fulfilment as a woman’ (Williams 1984: 16) rises above motherhood.

These portrayals of powerful women criminals and reprehensible mothers (to say the least) are totally unprecedented in the whole history of Italian TV drama and, more specifically, in the long tradition of the Mafia story that has been a staple of TV drama production and consumption in Italy since the 1980s (Buonanno 2012). This is hardly surprising and transcends the Italian case. Action heroines, armed women and violent and criminal women have emerged in different periods of cinema history, and television drama has recently witnessed a similar trend internationally. Current scholarship (Tasker 1993; D’Acci 1994; Brunsdon 1998 and 2013; Inness 1999 and 2004; Creeber 2001; McCaughey and King 2001; Mizejewski 2004; Lotz 2006; White 2007; Jermyn 2008 and 2010) has especially focused on police and action dramas, exploring the different ways in which television storytelling has engaged, not without limits and contradictions, in transgressing norms of traditional femininity.

For a female character to become the heroine of such a series, she must appropriate agency, action, command, the occupation of public space, discursive authority and the control of the investigative gaze. All of these, of course, run counter to the norms of femininity.

(Thornham 2007: 69)

Yet, in television and cinema alike, the genre that has mostly preserved the deep masculine connotations of its diegetic world (Larke-Walsh 2010), thus remaining largely impermeable to the rise of female protagonism, has been precisely the Mafia story. The Mafia story is by generic conventions ‘male’, by reason not so much of socio-anthropological faithfulness to the macho centrality and culture of Cosa nostra and Mafia-like organizations as of the deep symbolic connections between violence, power and money – the dominant themes in the Mafia story – and the social construction of maleness. The genre ‘traditionally foregrounds phallic masculinity’ (O’Rawe 2011: 329) and manifests ‘hostility towards women’ (Akass and McCabe 2002: 147) by reducing female representation to the dichotomy of usually powerless or ancillary mothers/wives and mistresses/femmes fatales (Livia and Carmela Soprano being evidently an exception, or rather a vanguard).¹

In the Italian context, a further determining factor comes into play. In keeping with the cultural policy adopted by public service broadcasting (RAI), which is the main producer of domestic TV dramas and boasts a track record of acclaimed Mafia stories, the characters of ‘bad guys’ and negative heroes are hardly, if ever, accorded the narrative prominence granted to them by the classic gangster movie and, more recently, by so many US cable series (Lotz 2014). As conceived and realized by public television drama departments, stories of macro-criminality very often turn out to be biopics of anti-Mafia fallen heroes, or, at any rate, the narrative emphasis is put on characters of law enforcement crime-fighters.

Public television has doubtlessly set the standard for a hero-centred version of the Mafia story, but the deep-seated fascination of the Italian public with this genre of drama has prompted free commercial and subscription-based television to make inroads into such a lucrative narrative territory. Crime storytelling has thus witnessed a re-configuration and has been, to a greater or lesser extent, re-imagined according to the ‘logics of distinction’ and identity strategies adopted by the competing players, differently positioned within the television system. Canale 5, the flagship channel of commercial broadcasting, has shifted the narrative barycentre closer to the criminal front (Il capo dei capi/The Boss of Bosses, 2007) without undermining the key role of positive albeit flawed heroes. It has also lessened the gender gap, in keeping with the trend already established in police series (Distretto di polizia/Police District [Canale 5, 2000−2012]) to represent women in command. As for Sky, in its ambitious pursuit of the HBO model, the satellite television that addresses niche audiences has chosen to focus on the dark side of Italian society, since its first move into the field of original production (Romanzo criminale/Crime Novel: The Series, 2008−2010), and is committed to narrating, in tones of gritty realism, the stories of criminal antiheroes who inhabit a violent and merciless world without heroes or redemption.

The increased visibility of female bosses on the national media and judicial scene may well have made an impact on, and provided inspiration for, writers² and producers. Retracing the genesis of the antiheroines Rosy Abate and Imma Savastano nonetheless entail acknowledgement that policies of differentiation, in the context of changing television system, helped to create the conditions for challenging the traditional standards of the Mafia story and exploring unprecedented profiles of femininities.

Blood and Tears: The Queen of Palermo

Antimafia Squad was premièred on Canale 5 in spring 2009 and immediately gained both popularity and critical acclaim. It was still in production when writing this chapter after running for six seasons during which the serial – merging crime drama with melodrama – has unfolded what would be old stories of conflicts between state forces and the Sicilian Mafia, and of deadly wars between competing Mafia families, had not the conventional crime storytelling been refreshed by the unconventional allocation of leadership roles to female characters. As Charlotte Brunsdon puts it, ‘old stories can be told in new ways once the central generic actor is female’ (2013: 379). In Antimafia Squad, both the police unit and the criminal organization are led by women; Rosy’s counterpart, a friend turned antagonist, is the deputy superintendent Claudia Mares³ (Simona Cavallari).

Mafia drama and melodrama might at first glance appear to be polar opposites, as crime is associated with the male realm of action and violence, whereas ‘melodrama has frequently been identified as a woman’s genre’ (Gledhill 1987: 33) owing to the rush and clash of emotions, sentiments and passions (Brooks 1976). The reductive identification with the female realm of affects and emotionalism has turned melodrama into a long disparaged genre; and its spread into male territories is still liable to be regarded, from a commonsensical perspective, as an improper intrusion, a form of contamination in the true sense. In fact, the Mafia story and melodrama are much less incompatible than a simplifying dichotomous approach seems to take for granted. When it comes to the rush and clash of emotions, the Mafia story can be as good as melodrama; betrayal, revenge and suffering are central motives of both types of storytelling, whose merging has made the subgenre of gangster melodrama ‘a staple in film since the earliest days of silent movie’ (Messenger 2002: 8), well before exploding in popularity with The Godfather trilogy (Coppola 1972, 1974, 1990). Melodrama in turn resists exclusive identification as a ‘woman’s genre’, since the melodramatic mode is embedded in most of the male action stories, as Linda Williams (1998) has persuasively argued, calling into question the identification of melodrama as a gendered genre. Following Williams, Jason Mittell has recently recognized ‘the ubiquity of melodrama’ (2015: 245) throughout television. Furthermore, even assuming that melodrama is in the main ‘a heroine’s text’ (LaPlace 1987: 151), melodramatic heroines are not just suffering victims or damsels in distress; it is worth recalling in this connection that as early as in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the ‘serial-queen melodrama’ genre flourishing in American cinema created the first modern figures of action women. Admittedly, those heroines were virtuous and not inclined to commit crimes, but they dared feminine norms by appropriating traditional masculine behaviours, including the ability to fight and use weapons, and they personified fantasies of female empowerment (Singer 1996; Neroni 2005).

A gangster (cum police) melodrama re-focused on a female lead character, Antimafia Squad adopts a stylistic signature to both visually and symbolically recognize the double ascendency of a narrative of crime and affects and how this shapes feelings, drives agency and helps to build the protagonist’s identity. I refer here to the flood of tears pouring down Rosy’s face and to her own or others’ blood displayed on Rosy’s body and clothes in many scenes of the serial drama: a flurry of blood and tears intended to give high visibility to the intense suffering and the murderous way of life of the protagonist. The metaphor ‘to have blood on one’s hands’ is visualized whenever she throws herself onto the mortally wounded bodies of family members (in the double meaning of the word family), or persons she cares a great deal about (like Claudia Mares), and gets up with the blood-stained hands that are a prelude for her deadly vengeance. All this works as the reiterated reminder that (conventionally feminine) deep emotional suffering and (conventionally masculine) murderous criminal violence can be harboured in the same female persona. Thus, what I have defined as a double ascendency of the storytelling, the coming together of the Mafia story and melodramatic pathos, allows for dualistic definitions and representations of femininity and masculinity to be challenged and transgressed.

But there is no transgression at the beginning of Rosy’s journey. Rosy Abate is in her twenties when she comes back to Sicily from New York, where she has grown up with her three brothers,⁴ to marry her Italian-American fiancé in her family’s homeland. Educated and brought up as a princess by her older brother who treasures her, the future Mafia boss makes her entrance in the shape of a pretty young woman who does not refrain from somewhat childish manifestations of affective exuberance and who nurtures – as a yesterday’s girl rather than an emancipated New Yorker of the 2000s – the simple dream of marrying the man she loves, raising children and cooking great Sicilian food. The capricious despotism that she inflicts on her fiancé, who is mildly disposed to let her tyrannize him (‘I have no right to speak, she’s the boss’: [Squadra antimafia/Antimafia Squad 2009]), nevertheless gives us a glimpse of the commanding temperament of a potential ‘woman on top’ and the reversal, in the couple’s relationship, of traditional gender roles.

The shrewd concealment strategy put in train by her brother has allowed Rosy Abate to be unaware of the criminal nature of the family’s lucrative activities. This unawareness stands for guarantee and protection of her innocence – even according to the police, who keep the Abate family under constant surveillance: ‘she is clean’ (Squadra antimafia/Antimafia Squad 2009), The camera shots of her arrival at Palermo airport that linger over her fashionable shoes, her visible cleavage in the plunging neckline of her short and close-fitting dress, her glossy red lips and, in addition, the mischievous performance of a mock quarrel with her fiancé followed by a passionate reconciliation, emphasize the young woman’s sexualized corporeality (if only in a soft mode) and her impulsive and romantic temperament. Her lively and seductive femininity, while it equates Rosy to other women of her generation, helps to substantiate her extraneousness to the norms of female containment enforced by the patriarchal Mafia culture. Hence, her identity ‘is initially represented by difference’ (Larke-Walsh 2010: 182), as in the case of Michael Corleone in The Godfather⁵ (Coppola 1972): a prelude to the radical redefinition of identity following Rosy Abate’s later integration into the Mafia’s culture and organization.

Rosy Abate’s process of identification with Cosa nostra goes through a sequence of traumatizing experiences: her brothers arrested, in flight, in hiding, then put to death by killers from rival families or during police operations, her own life exposed to ambushes and attacks, her husband becoming a victim of one of these. The excessive weeping and gestures to which Rosy succumbs in her reaction to trauma and mourning are peculiar of a melodrama character. But here, in particular, the uncontrolled display of her emotions exteriorizes not only the grief of separations and losses, her rage against those responsible, her desire for revenge and her sense of being overwhelmed by the outbreak of hostilities and threats, but also the huge emotional pressure generated by the radical rupture with her innocent past and her growing awareness that she is going through the process of becoming a Mafia woman (‘I look in the mirror and can hardly grasp who I am’ [‘L’incontro/The Meeting’ 2009]). When Rosy’s younger and most loved brother dies riddled with blows from the police, she first flings herself on his body in despair but then gets up dry-eyed with a posture and expression of someone who is ready for a challenge, a veil of deceitfulness in her stare. She would say later that at that moment she finally felt certain that she was a Mafia woman, ‘I finally grasped who I was’ (‘Scontro finale/Final Clash’ 2011). Accordingly, as the only surviving Abate, she would later decide to stay in Sicily to gather up and manage the family’s inheritance.

It is worth insisting on this point: Rosy Abate’s ‘Mafiosity’ in the narrative of Antimafia Squad has the almost ineluctable compulsion of a destiny and is presented in a deterministic framework that is entirely consistent with the framework applying in the past to gender belonging: that is to say, ‘one is born a Mafiosa’ (or, in the words of the character, ‘I was born a Mafia woman and I shall die a Mafia woman’ [‘Scontro finale/Final clash’ 2011]). In fact, by identifying herself with Mafia culture and criminality, Rosy is expressing her (proud) acceptanc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Editor's Introduction
• Part I: Mafia Women
• Part II: Drug Dealers and Aberrant Mothers
• Part III: Women in Prison
• Part IV: Villainesses and Anti-antiheroines
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover