Ben Educare. Une Micro-archéologie du processus de féminisation des professions de la communication in Italie

35 years after the Conference in Brighton the tenets of historical revisionism seem not to be entered into the practice of film studies yet. On the one hand, historiographical reflection continues to denounce widespread unavailability of historical discourse on cinema and the media to confront with empirical data (Allen, 2006; Maltby, 2007; Biltereyst-Maltby-Meers, 2012), with their "exuberance" (Staiger, 2000); on the other hand, the empirical research tends to focus on case studies, which rarely give rise to wider readings and reconstructions. To escape these two trends, Cultural Studies propose to adopt a conjunctural approach (Grossberg, 2006), which looks at the history of cinema and the media through a bifocal lens: capable of returning the complexity of single phenomena (or processes or stages), – breaking the "horizontal consistency" of historical narrative – Topolski, 1985- and to reconstruct the conjunctures that define them. Furthermore conjunctural perspective solicits an systematic analysis of historical practice and it merges several approaches: institutional history, gender history, social history, ... . This paper moves from this perspective. Through the presentation of the project and of the first results of a research on "women, communication professions and media literacy" in Italy between 1960s and 1970s, it aims to reconstruct the complex network that linked the logics of women's placement within cinema and media industry, at the strategies of selection, training and orientation adopted by the main institutions responsible for management training of cultural industry (with particular reference to the Communication School of the Catholic University) and at the widest gender policies put in place in post-war Italy.