Photographer
Women have always been under-represented in mafia storytelling. Although this has started to change in the last decade, women, especially those from the South of Italy, are still too often portrayed either as silent, passive, never touched by criminal organizations due to a theoretical ‘honour’ code that would imply not hurting them or as lady bosses, more evil than men. Either as saints or as devils, southern Italian women acting within, against and becoming victims of mafia are often represented in stereotyped ways that don’t reflect neither the complexities of criminal organizations capable of combining tradition and adaptation to modernity nor that of a diverse southern Italian society and feminine world for which backwardness and underdevelopment cannot be the anymore the only valid keys to interpretation.