By reflecting on the character of Miranda, the set of values and narratives that she embodies and the connection between these features and the identity of the contemporary Italian woman what emerges is the Italian woman’s “uncanniness” in relation to her culture. On the one hand the contemporary Italian woman is exposed to the current debate about gender roles and emancipation and, on the other, her identity is still profoundly influenced by a traditional model to which she feels attached. This contradictory condition about being rooted in a culture and at the same time feeling alien in it is what characterizes Italian women’s uncanniness as a way to relate to her family and society as deeply contradictory. This article addresses how in my artistic work the uncanniness of the Italian woman is visually conveyed and how her condition can be understood by referring to the theories of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Rosi Braidotti.

The reflection on the uncanniness of the Italian woman in relation to Heidegger’s theory allows the description of the alienating relation of subject to her society. However, according to this theoretical framework, Heidegger’s white male European perspective is presented as general and universal and because of this it is limited in describing the uncanniness of the Italian woman in her specific, material condition.

In addressing the uncanniness of the Italian woman Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s analysis about language has the advantage of reflecting on this topic from a gender perspective and goes beyond the fake universality of the Heideggerian subject. In the same perspective, Braidotti’s theory underlines the importance of connecting the feminist subject to the material environment where she lives–Braidotti offers a way to go beyond an anthropocentric ontological (Heidegger) and post-structuralist (Irigaray and Kristeva) perspective on the uncanniness of the Italian woman by allowing an ecological reading of it.

The conventional way the Italian woman is represented in media is maternal, pure, loyal, and sensual. This way of representing the Italian woman is perceived by the young generation with a mixture of conflicting feelings. From one side the stereotypical representations of Italian women possess fascinating and charming connotations, and, on the other side, they are seen as the result of a patriarchal perspective. I personally grew up in a traditional Italian family and I was raised Catholic. As a child all the efforts of my family and relatives where focused on making me obedient and polite in addition to being always clean and well fed. There was also a mild concern about me having good grades at school. However, the interest about my future, about what I could become and how I could develop my intellectual skills and potential were never at the center of the family’s discourses.

Usually in Italy women have access to university education because of the low cost of the public schools. However, having a degree is more a social status than something pursued to develop personal skills or aspirations. This point can be analyzed in relation to the American middle-class. In the United States people belonging to the middle class are usually interested in the professional future of their daughters and they are interested in their daughters being accepted to good university programs that can help them in their future career. An important element to consider in this difference between Italy and the United States is that the lack of interest in the career of daughters by Italian families is usually not motivated by a lack of familial love. Rather, it is a cultural phenomenon. A daughter can be loved and surrounded by attention and, at the same time, discouraged from being ambitious and having a career.

If from one side Italian women grow up without being encouraged to have career ambitions and achieve positions of power, on the other side they usually inherit from the women of their family a series of skills related to cooking, being pretty, feminine, and taking care of the people in the house. As a child I cannot deny that I remember with joy the care and attention I received from the women of my family. I grew up surrounded by many women, such as my mother, my sister, my grandmother, and a large number of aunts. I remember them as an explosion of colorful skirts, blouses, curls, scented creams, and bright lipsticks. If, on one hand, it is undeniable that their hyper-feminine way of being women and good housekeepers is the result of a patriarchal system, on the other hand, they represent a source of inspiration in my art and a fount of aesthetic pleasure. This sentiment is contradictory, as contradictory are the artworks discussed in this article where the Italian woman’s problematic position of simultaneously loving and criticizing her native culture is addressed.

As an artist, the studies I am undertaking in the PhD program in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas are providing me a better understanding of the subject of my art and of my position as a feminist subject. More exactly, my position as a feminist subject is both the wellspring and contents of my art, in the way in my art I reflect on the identity of the Italian woman, her uncanniness, and her relationship with her culture and her environment. I explore this identity-my own and, more precisely, the uncanny Italian woman—through theory, philosophy, and the making of fine art.

Take for example Spaghetti, which I made in 2016. The image is a drawing made in silkscreen where I adopt a minimalist design by using a limited number of colors and lines. The decision to use silkscreen is motivated by the capability of this medium to produce flat bold colors and simple shapes that I adopt to make the style of my art direct and accessible. The image represents a woman eating a plate of spaghetti, a kind of food that is a symbol of Italian culture. The meal, however, is turned from a tasty representation of Italian cuisine, into an unpleasant parody. In the image the pasta’s consistency, instead of being an appetizing and tempting meal, is represented as a synthetic material that instead of nourishing the woman suffocates and harms her body.

Spaghetti addresses the uncanniness of the Italian woman where from one side the Italian culture is, familiar to the Italian woman and it is connected to her memories and emotional sphere. It possesses elements that she loves and that represent her—that make her feel at home. On the other side, the Italian culture possesses connotations that the Italian woman perceives as dangerous and alien. The stereotypical beauty of the Italian woman, her maternal and sensual nature, her capability to make you feel cared for, is related to a nice sensation that many Italian women experience thanks to the love and the attentions of their mother and the other women of their family. On the other hand, these characteristics imply problematic and oppressive aspects. This mixture of admiration and refusal, the contradictory sensation of feeling part and alien to her background makes the Italian woman’s culture uncanny to her.

The same uncanniness is represented in Lunch which has been designed to be strongly ambiguous. The print represents a man from behind. He is in front of the kitchen’s table. From the side of the man it is possible to see the legs of a woman that sits on a table. Her body is covered by the body of the man, the only part of her body that the viewer can see is her legs. From these few details, which are the back of the man and the legs of the woman, it is impossible to understand if the scene describes an act of violence, seduction, or intimacy. Does the man want to assault the woman? Or is he looking at her with affection? Does the woman want to seduce the man? Are the two of them just having a conversation? In the drawing the woman’s sandal is hanging from her right food and the other foot is bare. This detail contributes to the ambiguity of the scene. Is the woman relaxed, in danger, or provoking the man? All these options represent possible readings of the image and contribute in making this depiction of the Italian woman as uncanny to her domestic space.

These ideas have been molded in part by the ideas of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of uncanniness as discussed in Being and Time. The human being, according to Heidegger, is uncanny to herself, in the way the unfamiliar, and the otherness, the alien, is part of the constitution of her subjectivity. Heidegger arrives to this description of the human being by analyzing the feeling of anxiety and the circumstances that cause this sentiment (183). Anxiety, in Heidegger’s reading of this sensation, represents an experience during which the person achieves awareness about herself and her relationship with society. In Heidegger’s description of this event the person realizes that she is confined in a determined social and historical context that precludes her from a large number of possible perspectives. The social context we are born in, our family, the education we receive, determine our future and the feasibility of our desires. This limitation about our possible expectations is called by Heidegger “thrownness”. This term recalls the image of the human being thrown into the world, at the moment of her birth, in a certain historical and social situation that she did not decide and that opens certain options while, at the same time, closing others. The individual’s awareness about being entrapped and confined into a limited number of possible perspectives is coexistent to another one where the individual is aware of being free, responsible for her future, and for the realization of her desires. This awareness causes “anxiety” in the person that feels the burden of her freedom and the responsibility for her future. In this perspective the uncanniness is part of the human being’s personality as a result of the description Heidegger makes of the human being as both entangled in a certain world and free to project her future. This double movement is exemplified in the definition that Heidegger has of the human being as da-sein, being-with: Heidegger defines the human being as being-with, as a person without boundaries and separation between her subjectivity and the surrounding environment, where her individuality is prosthetically extended to the rest of the world, to its objects, and to other human beings. As a consequence of this way of understanding the human being, what is other, foreign, and alien to the subject, as the external world, becomes a component of the subject’s personality. This double movement can be used to describe the uncanniness of the Italian woman as that subject that is at the same time rooted and alien to her culture.

Take for example Laugh which I made in 2016. In making this work I thought about a family gathering during which the male members of my family get drunk and tell jokes with loud voices. In Laugh a man is laughing at his own jokes, embracing his partner and pretending she finds him fun. The woman, however, does not find what the man is laughing about as amusing. She is entrapped, physically and vocally, in a male discourse. She feels strange and alien in her own family environment that takes for granted what she has to find as fun and entertaining.

The uncanniness of Italian woman addressed in Spaghetti, Lunch, and Laugh can be discussed by referring to Heidegger’s reflection about uncanniness. However, Heidegger in his philosophy speaks about the uncanniness of the human being understood as a general impersonal entity with no distinction of sex, race, or location. According to this point, a way to understand the uncanniness of the Italian woman from a gender perspective can be analyzing it according to the feminist philosophy of Irigaray and her understanding of the problem of language. Irigaray describes language as a system of meanings and values developed and decided by man. According to Irigaray, every time the woman speaks, she speaks the language constructed by men. By connecting Heidegger’s uncanniness to Irigaray’s understanding of language, what emerges is that the Italian woman is uncanny to her language, where language is not reductively meant by Irigaray as the ensemble of words we use to write and to speak. Rather, it represents our entire culture, and our way of assigning meaning to concepts and events, and to decide the values and principles of our life. According to this perspective the uncanniness of the Italian woman in Laugh is related not only to her relationship with the familiar space but more exactly to her language, and her culture, symbolized by the man’s laugh that makes the woman feel alien in her own home.

I am also interested in the uncanniness of language as set in relief by the philosophy of Irigaray. In Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Irigaray discusses how the woman’s perspective on existence was negated and repressed in the history of western thought to preserve and impose the mono-sexual discourse of men. The word “speculum” of the title is in relation to the word “mirror” used by Lacan in his essay “The Mirror Stage” (1966). In his essay Lacan discusses how the experience of looking in the mirror is an essential part of the psychic development of the child. According to Lacan, when a child observes herself in the mirror for the first time, she starts to construct her identity and to become aware she is a person with her specific personality and character. The “mirror stage” takes place between the first 6 and 18 months of the child’s life and it is the moment when the child’s mind starts to construct the nucleus of her “Ego”. Lacan in his seminar “The Psychoses” (1955-56) discusses how the mirror stage, made of “images”, comes before the “Name of the Father”, made of “words”. The Name of the Father imposes the “Symbolic Order”, where the symbols are represented by words and language. The language constructed in this phase of the psychological development of the child transmits to her the values and the meanings of the society where she lives, a society where, historically, the words “male” and “female” have different meanings and importance.

In comparison to the Lacanian mirror, the speculum is the optical concave tool used by doctors to look inside the cavity of the human body. It is usually used to observe the female genital organ. In comparison to the speculum that is used to observe what it is hidden; the mirror is the object that reflects the external reality and that we use to look at the image of ourselves. By adopting a Lacanian terminology, Irigaray discusses how the function of the woman, in the symbolic order represented by the name of the father, is to work like a mirror where the man can observe himself. By looking at the woman and her condition of inferiority, the man perceives himself in his condition of dominance and superiority. According to Irigaray, the man does not see the woman for what she really is, but as an absence and a lack that he likes to see as the opposite of what he is. The phallus for the man is wholeness, fullness, activity, where instead the vagina is lack, passivity, nothing. In this perspective the symbolic order of man, his language, is “phallogocentrism”: a way of existing that places the man, his phallus, and his discourse, at the center of everything.

By reflecting on Heideggerian anxiety and uncanniness in connection to Irigaray’s reflection on language what emerges is that the Italian woman, by speaking the language of the other, the man, is uncanny to her own discourse, uncanny to herself. Woman, every time she speaks about herself, she speaks a language, broadly meant as culture, society, existence, which is the result of a historical process based on her exclusion. It is according to this definition of language, male discourse, and phallogocentrism, that in the reflection on the Italian culture it is possible to address the difficulty for the Italian woman of using language to speak about her own condition.

This idea is materialized in my work Hidden (2015) which represents a girl whose age is between childhood and adolescence. Her back and face are turned to the spectator. Her posture suggests the act of hiding something, something she does not want to show, and that she is ashamed about. Her posture communicates the fragility of her age. She is becoming a woman and by doing this she will have to face a number of difficult issues connected to her role in her culture. She is not yet a grown woman, however, her uncanniness to her culture is already present.  The posture is clumsy and timid, she looks at the viewer with a mixture of shyness and hostility. The image expresses the act of perceiving danger and vulnerability while at the same time struggling to give voice to this situation, to find a language to speak about it.

In the analysis about what in the Italian culture can be considered as beautiful, magic, unique, and the result of a fascinating tradition and what else is instead oppressing and sad the good and bad aspects are so connected that the effort of speaking about them becomes the challenge of speaking about the contradiction, the effort of keeping the contradiction together as contradiction without trying to resolve it. In this regard the work of the Italian director Lina Wertmuller represents point of reference in dealing with the contradiction that characterizes the uncanniness of the Italian woman. Her movies present a mixture of grotesque, tragic, hilarious, and serious elements that she uses to portray and criticize Italian society. Her artistic style is ambiguous and appreciated by both feminist and sexist audience. Her movies, at first glance, look like a hilarious narration of misogynistic behaviors and, by doing this, they seem to justify and defend the sexist elements of Italian culture. A deeper reading of her work, however, allows a more complex interpretation of it. Wertmuller in her movies describes the fantasies of the Italian man and the way he likes to think about himself as dominant, violent, feared, and respected by woman. At the same time, Wertmuller portrays him as needing a maternal figure, someone willing to cuddle, adore, and take care of him. Wertmuller’s work provokes a double and conflicting reaction in the audience. From one side, what the Italian man sees in Wertmuller’s movies is the representation of all his fantasies and desires. By doing this Wertmuller’s movies provoke pleasure in the male spectator. On the other side, the feminist audience, by watching Wertmuller’s work, can observe a detailed representation of Italian male fantasies that in this way she can make fun of and analyze in an analytical and critical way.

Take for example Breast which I made in 2015. The image represents the Italian woman in an idealized way according to a series of Italian male fantasies. In Breast the subject of the image is at the same time maternal, sensual, submissive, sexualized, and attractive. Those excessive number of elements belonging to the male fantasy make its visual result strange and bizarre. The woman looks at the spectator with an expression between hostile and ironic. A gaze that at the same time makes fun of and criticizes the male gaze. Like in Wertmuller’s movies, however, the male spectator can still enjoy this idealized representation of the woman.

The mother is a central figure of the Italian culture–she can embody the uncanniness of the Italian woman, like in Breast as she can also represent a way to use language that is alternative to the male discourse. The relationship between the mother and her way to produce a language with is alternative to the male discourse is addressed by Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984). In this work Kristeva analyzes Lacan’s theories of the “mirror stage” and the “symbolic order” in its connection to the Oedipal phase characterized by the “name of the father”. The language represented by the “symbolic order” is produced by the imposition of the father’s law that introduces the child into the norms and values of her culture. This moment is considered by Kristeva the beginning of sexual marginalization, where the child learns that “women” and “men” have different attributes and values. Kristeva discusses the difference between “symbolic” and “semiotic” order. The “semiotic order” comes before the Oedipal phase and is characterized by the identification with the mother and the relationship with her made of a pre-linguistic communication characterized by signs and gestures. The semiotic order is a form of pre-language that precedes the language of the symbolic order. Kristeva underlines the importance of this moment in the child’s life: by privileging the semiotic order Kristeva underlines the importance of the mother-child relationship as a kind of communication denied and marginalized by the succeeding symbolic order.

Kristeva compares the pre-linguistic dimension of the semiotic order to what Plato’s defines in the Timaeus as khora. The khora is described as the indistinct reality when beings are still not articulated into a specific identity. It is a condition beyond being and time and comes before the physical dimension of the object as combination of form and matter. The khora, as the maternal dimension of the semiotic order, is what comes before the signification: it is not yet a signifying, but it represents the possibility of producing it. The khora is mother and nurturer and ontologically represents the primordial receptacle that wards and preserves life. In this perspective the semiotic is a modality of the signifying process that is not yet symbolic, and that produces articulation and communication at a pre-symbolic level. It represents a pre-linguistic premise for the linguistic structure. The semiotic is made of sounds and gestures connected to the maternal body that are expressed in a pre-phonetic speech. In opposition to the semiotic speech, the symbolic language, is a codified system made of normative syntax and linguistic categories. When the semiotic order manifests itself in language, it works as an attack and destabilization of the symbolic order of language. It breaks into the codified realm of the symbolic by producing alternative kinds of signifying processes that question the norms of the systemized culture. The primordial realm of the khora is like an arrow that penetrates the symbolic order and questions its linear structure.

Kristeva’s understanding of semiotic order and khora is materialized in my work Mother (2015). The image represents a baby girl giving a kiss to her mother. The baby girl’s sweet gesture produces joy and pleasure in her mother, however, their relationship is ambiguous and strange. The mother’s mouth is open in a way that suggests at the same time emotional torment and physical pleasure. The mother’s teeth are excessively big and too close to the fragile and little cheek of her daughter. This nearness suggests the act of eating, harming, and, at the same time loving and desiring. There is a cannibalistic element in the mother’s reaction to her daughter’s kiss provoked by an excessive love, and pleasure for the contact with her daughter’s body.  This portrayal of the daughter/mother relationship expresses ambiguous dynamics and a mixture of attraction, repulsion, and desire that can be related to the realm of khora and semiotic order.

The uncanniness of the Italian woman in relation to her culture can be expended to the consideration about how the Italian woman relates to her territory and to the geographic area of the Mediterranean. This can be understood by referring to the idea of the feminist subject as addressed by Braidotti in her The Posthuman where she discusses the necessity of considering the specific material condition of the subject as situated and always speaking from a determined temporal and spatial place. In this perspective the Mediterranean is understood as a physical and mental space capable of affecting both the haptic and theoretical dimension of existence. The Mediterranean is not only a geographical element and a characteristic of the Italian territory. Rather, it is as a strong part of Italian ethos. For the Italians the beach and the sea are not just a physical entity, rather, the sea represents a theoretical horizon, a temporal container that regulates and influences rhythms and habits of Italian society. In Italian culture the beach symbolizes holidays and summer vacations. Usually an Italian person, especially if she lives close to the sea, from the end of May to the beginning of September spends weekends and vacations at the beach. The beach is a familiar place, a habitual location, a seasonal unmissable appointment. It also represents a space where the Italian person gets transformed in her physical and mental existence.

The phenomenology of the beach, as the time and place where a body’s metamorphosis occurs, is something that the majority of Italians can relate to. The skin gets browner, the perceptual apparatus is expanded, and the person becomes more receptive to the surrounding smells and colors. By spending several days at the beach and by swimming and taking the sun for several hours every day, the person perceives a dilatation of time and a change in her breathing, she experiences the sensation of becoming healthier and more connected to the environment. This state of mind requires time to be achieved. It is a powerful sensorial experience.

This relationship between the Italian person and the beach is not only a romantic and esthetic experience that can inspire an artist in making art. Rather, it is a meaningful ecological practice that can be understood in dialogue with the current debate addressed by Braidotti in The Posthuman about the challenge of the anthropomorphic approach in humanities. The experience of the beach represents a way of understanding the shift from a cartesian ego meant as a subject, a cogito ergo sum, a defined individual separated from the environment, an ego cogito that constructs rules and parameters by using his rationality to dominate nature, to a more fluid and complex way of understanding the human being that has no margins and boundaries between her and the environment. According to this point, Braidotti addresses the necessity of understanding the human being as something broader than the way she was defined during the history of philosophy as a disembodied subject disconnected from the material world where she lives. Braidotti addresses how the feminist scenario does not have to be described according to a systematic, universal theory, rather, it has to be understood as a cartography. The feminist subject always speaks from a certain place and in a certain time, it is an embodied subject dwelling a specific territory. This territory is not something that surrounds the subject as an irrelevant characteristic, rather, it influences the way the subject thinks, feels, and speaks. In this way Braidotti connects aspects of the current debate that are usually discussed as separated such as what the human being is, how feminism can be practiced, and the ecological discourse. According to Braidotti’ s perspective the identity of the Italian woman and her uncanniness can be related to the Mediterranean and its haptic universe.

This idea is represented in Red Sea where there is a woman immerged in water and viewed from behind. The immersion in the water works as an amplification and extension of the sensory systems that also affects the mental sphere. Red Sea portrays the dark side of vacation and the illusion that is possible to forget the problems belonging to the domestic space when someone is far from home. What usually happens during holidays is that the same problems and dynamics that someone has at home are repeated on the beach. The beach expands and works as an intensifier of the subject’s inner life and can become a second home where daily problems are repeated and intensified. In the same way as the beach affects our physical perception it also affects our relation to life and to its problematic aspects. The beach can be interpreted as a spatial device that produces awareness and reflection. In Red Sea the woman is on vacation, she should be happy to swim and take in the sun. Instead, she stares at the horizon–the beauty around her is incapable of bringing joy, the problems that she thought she could leave at home haunt her and disturb her vacation.

In Red Sea the uncanniness of the Italian woman is portrayed as nostalgic and sad. In other works, such as Umbrella the phenomenology of the beach is represented as grotesque and hilarious. In the image the family is struggling to make their beach spot comfortable and equipped. In the effort of organizing their beach space they repeat the stressful attitude they have in their domestic space. Umbrella’s mixture of intimate, grotesque, sad, and hilarious elements represent the visual expression of the ancient Greek literary technique of the spoudageloion which consists of mixing different stylistic registers in the same literary work (from spoudaios, serious and geloios, comic). This approach is in dialogue with Braidotti’s understanding of feminism as a practice that requires irony and laughter in addition to political commitment and denunciation of marginalization. According to Braidotti the feminist subject is not only involved in the definition of her identity and in the condemnation of her oppression, but also emotionally connected with the political instances that she sustains. A feminist woman, in addition to her ideas and her political commitment is a woman that ardently desires freedom, justice, and self-realization. She is not only defined in terms of political opinion and theoretical instances but also in terms of passions, desires, and in feelings of love and aspiration toward the feminist struggle. In this perspective Braidotti’s approach to feminism represents a way to investigate the identity of the Italian woman and to produce artistic work by adopting a joyful and vital approach while at the same time denunciating oppression and marginalization.