Narrazioni al femminile di Cosa Nostra

Abstract

Starting from the analysis of the important transformations that have characterized the roles of women within the criminal world of Cosa Nostra in the last decades, the article focuses on the dimensions of identity and communication through which the belonging of women to the mafia universe or their exclusion from male territories are defined. In the last two decades, the criminal organization, weakened by the many arrests, has increasingly entrusted to women the responsibility to preserve, affirm and reflect its image of power to the outside. In times of emergency, women are considered the most reliable interlocutors. Using direct evidence, interviews, letters and judicial materials, the article wants to reconstruct the story and the image of the Mafia conveyed by the women who live inside it or who have direct contact with it. The gender prospective emerges from these women’s stories both in the interconnection between personal stories and the mafia tales, both in the use of the words and of the cognitive worlds in which their stories have meaning. A mafia told through the gender’s prism that - in the mirror image comparison with the men narratives - discovers routes and new perspectives to know new facets of a changing world.