Comment on Bandelli and Porcelli/1 - Against Moral Panic, in Defence of Data

Elisa Giomi’s commentary is an answer to Bandelli and Porcelli’s essay “Femicide in Italy. ‘Femminicidio,’ Moral Panic and Progressivist Discourse” [2016]. Although Giomi assumes that Bandelli and Porcelli effectively illustrate the instrumentalization of lethal violence against women in Italian political discourse, yet she criticizes their reading of the “femminicidio narrative” as a phenomenon of moral panic that locates the threat in the typical Italian heterosexual family/couple: all the available empirical findings confirm that these are precisely the contexts where lethal aggressions against women most frequently occur. The author also disagrees with the authors’ conclusion that the femminicidio narrative authorized “the application of a gender paradigm to the official reading of domestic/partner violence” in 2012/13 Italian public discourse. Finally, she contends that in their essay the “feminist discourse” is represented in a stereotypical way, one that is instrumental in depicting it as a hegemonic discourse.