[Commlist] CFP: Bruttissima - Cultures, Aesthetics, and Politics of Ugliness in Italian Cinema and Media

Call for Papers

Bruttissima
Cultures, Aesthetics, and Politics of Ugliness in Italian Cinema and Media

International Film Studies Conference
University of Bari “Aldo Moro”
Bari, Italy
30 September-1 October 2026

In his now-classic Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy 
(2007), Stephen Gundle identifies feminine beauty as one of the primary 
cultural mechanisms through which Italian national identity has been 
constructed since the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century movement that 
led to Italy’s national unity. In his interpretation, feminine beauty is 
articulated through a repertoire of idealised feminine figures, such as 
the protective mother, the fragile maiden, and the fearless amazon. 
These recurring images constitute a symbolic terrain where national 
imaginaries, gender hierarchies, and identity formations converge. For 
Gundle, the media industries became a key arena for the construction and 
dissemination of this imaginary throughout the twentieth century. 
Indeed, the bodies and faces of film stars, and later television 
celebrities, came to embody some of the most recognisable and culturally 
powerful images of Italianness. Gundle’s analysis has had a significant 
impact on Italian film and media studies, providing a conceptual 
framework that has shaped a substantial body of scholarship on the 
intersections between female stardom, national imaginaries, and media 
cultures (see, among others, Landy 2008; Small 2009; Carman 2014; Bayman 
2015; Hunt 2017; Haworth 2022; Jandelli 2022; Vitella 2024).

Building on this established body of scholarship, the conference 
Bruttissima: Cultures, Politics, and Aesthetics of Ugliness in Italian 
Cinema and Media seeks to address an issue that has remained largely 
overlooked within critical debates. While studies of Italian cinema and 
media have identified female beauty as a privileged lens through which 
to explore the national imaginary, far less attention has been devoted 
to the meanings and values associated with ugliness in its diverse 
manifestations. Scholarly literature has largely engaged with ugliness 
only indirectly and tangentially, mobilising categories such as the 
grotesque and the monstrous to examine representations of racial 
otherness, sexual abjection, and social marginality (see, for example, 
Rigoletto 2014; Maina 2016; Giuliani 2018). The conference seeks instead 
to foreground ugliness as a distinct object of inquiry, with the aim of 
providing a systematic examination of its historical manifestations and 
articulations within Italian film and media culture.

More specifically, the conference explores ugliness through four 
interconnected analytical perspectives rooted in a long tradition of 
philosophical and theoretical reflection on the subject (see Bodei 1995; 
Franzini and Mazzocut-Mis 1996; Giordanetti and Mazzocut-Mis 2007; Eco 
2007): as morphology, a repertoire of forms and figures marked by 
disproportion, excess, and asymmetry; as phenomenology, a constellation 
of ambivalent perceptual and affective experiences situated between 
repulsion and attraction, fascination and unease; as ideology, a site in 
which values, hierarchies, conflicts, and mechanisms of exclusion or 
stigmatization are articulated; and as a heuristic, a critical framework 
through which dominant forms of representation may be questioned and 
dismantled, bringing to light historical and social realities that have 
been marginalized or suppressed.

Building on these premises, the conference welcomes proposals for 
individual papers and pre-constituted panels that explore the 
historical, aesthetic, and political articulations of ugliness in 
Italian cinema and media, with particular reference to the following topics.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

archaeologies and genealogies of ugliness in Italian cinema and media, 
with particular attention to the historical transformations of its 
cultural meanings and discursive functions;

figures and iconographies of ugliness in film and media, in their 
visual, physical and performative manifestations;

ugliness as a stylistic signature and marker of authorship, with 
particular attention to its poetic and ideological dimensions;

ugliness as a genre-specific code, convention, or stylistic feature, in 
its narrative and expressive configurations;

ugliness and forms of realism: between the aestheticization of reality 
and the politicization of the social;

ugliness and poetics of the comic, in their caricatural, grotesque, 
satirical, and parodic articulations;

theories of ugliness in Film and Media Studies, with particular 
attention to their epistemological foundations, methodological 
implications, and analytical uses;

the reception of ugliness in spectatorship, with particular attention to 
dynamics of repulsion, disgust, fascination, and ridicule;

ugliness in critical discourse and public debate, with particular 
attention to the ways in which it is codified, (de)valued, or reclaimed;

ugliness and television cultures, with particular attention to the 
carnivalization of everyday life and the spectacularization of 
nonconformity in reality television, talent shows, and factual 
entertainment;

ugliness, social media and digital cultures, with particular attention 
to practices of shaming, mockery or hate speech;

ugliness and intersectionality, in relation to the asymmetries of 
gender, sexuality, class, race, age, and ability that shape the media 
visibility and social acceptability of bodies and subjects;

ugliness and the construction of otherness, with particular attention to 
processes of enfreakment and otherization affecting non-normative bodies 
and subjectivities in the public sphere;

ugliness, age, and ageism, with particular attention to processes of 
aesthetic, symbolic, and social devaluation associated with ageing in 
media representations;

ugliness and stardom, with particular attention to processes of symbolic 
deconstruction and reconstruction of the star;

the celebrification of ugliness, with particular attention to the 
aestheticisation of nonconformity and the glamorization of corporeal 
difference;

ugliness and transnationality, with particular attention to the 
circulation and hybridisation of aesthetic models and representational 
conventions across different national contexts;

ugliness and intermediality, with particular attention to processes of 
translation, remediation, and transcoding of languages and discourses 
across different media and technological platforms;

ugliness and the aesthetics of cult, trash, and bad taste, as sites for 
the redefinition of the boundaries between aesthetic legitimacy, 
spectatorial pleasure, and cultural value.

Interested scholars are invited to submit a 300-500 word abstract, 
accompanied by a short biographical note, by July 10, 2026, to: 
(gabriele.landrini /at/ uniba.it) and (federico.zecca /at/ uniba.it).

Applicants will be notified of the outcome of the selection process by 
July 5, 2026.

Each accepted paper will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation.

The conference languages are Italian and English.

References

Bayman, L. (2015). The Operatic and the Everyday in Post-War Italian 
Film Melodrama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Bodei, R. (1995). Le forme del bello. Bologna: il Mulino.

Carman, E. (2014). “Mapping the Body: Female Film Stars and the 
Reconstruction of Postwar Italian National Identity”. Quarterly Review 
of Film and Video, 31(4): 322-335.

Eco, E. (2007). Storia della bruttezza. Milano: Bompiani.

Franzini, E., Mazzocut-Mis, M. (1996). Estetica. I nomi, i concetti, le 
correnti. Milano: Bruno Mondadori.

Giordanetti, P., Mazzocut-Mis, M. (2007). Rappresentare il brutto. 
Napoli: Scriptaweb.

Giuliani, G. (2018). Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy: 
Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture. London: Palgrave 
Macmillan.

Gundle, S. (2007). Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy. 
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Haworth, R. (2022). Many Meanings of Mina: Popular Music Stardom in 
Post-War Italy. Bristol: Intellect.

Hunt, L. R. (2017). “Una diva non come le altre: Le streghe (The 
Witches) and the Paradoxical Stardom of Silvana Mangano”. In Revisiting 
Star Studies: Cultures, Themes and Methods, edited by S. Yu and G. 
Austin, 240-258. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Jandelli, C. (2022). Tre studi su Claudia Cardinale. Venezia: Marsilio.

Landy, M. (2008). Stardom, Italian Style: Screen Performance and 
Personality in Italian Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Maina, G. (2016). “Vallinferno. Interpretazioni di genere di una diva 
‘del passato’”. Bianco e Nero: Rivista quadrimestrale del Centro 
Sperimentale di Cinematografia, (586): 79-91.

Rigoletto, S. (2014). Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, 
Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh 
University Press.

Small, P. (2009). Sophia Loren: Moulding the Star. Bristol: Intellect.

Vitella, F. (2024). Maggiorate. Divismo e celebrità nella nuova Italia. 
Venezia: Marsilio.

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