Researching Italian Youth Across Time: An Interdisciplinary Approach

My current research project, which is funded by an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship, focuses on representations of contemporary Italian youth on the video sharing platform YouTube. I am interested in understanding whether social media can facilitate young people’s self-representation, and what image of contemporary Italian youth emerges from YouTube original content. In other words, my aim is to analyse whether online self-representations allow for a diversification of cultural representations of (trans)national communities of youth.

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Thanks to this project, I will continue my research on Italian youth cultures across time, which began with my PhD. My thesis investigated representations of Italian young people in youth-oriented magazines, films and television programmes in 1965-75, the period that is commonly regarded as marking the birth of a distinctly Italian youth culture. By focusing on visual and written descriptions of young people’s style trends and bodily practices, I outlined the expectations and anxieties that were projected onto this emerging social category. I subsequently concentrated on representations of youth in novels set in Bologna in the early 1990s, focusing on the role of spatial elements, like the city, in the construction of generational identities.

For a cultural historian like myself, to shift the focus from the past to the present is challenging. However, I believe that several assumptions emerging from my previous research can be applied to contemporary youth. First, just like gender, ‘youth’ is a performatively constructed category: it is the reiteration (in the media and elsewhere) of similar practices, acts, gestures, and language that defines what ‘youth’ is, rather than reference to biological age. To analyse popular media discourse around such practices, acts, gestures and language helps us understand what the meaning of ‘youth’ is in different time periods, both as an ideal and as a social subject.

Second, popular media representations contribute to homogenising young people’s practices, values, and desires. Both in the past and in the present, youth has been constructed as a homogenous group, an ‘imagined community’ with common interests as well as common struggles. My current research investigates whether young people’s supposedly greater control over representation in social media allows for a disruption of the fictional homogeneity of ‘youth’ in contemporary societies.

Third, style and the body are fundamental elements through which young people convey their subjectivity and collective identity. Commercial trends can visually express political and social claims, are mostly based on transnational influences, and may question naturalised ideas of sex and gender. In my current project, I investigate whether representations of young people’s style and bodily practices on YouTube mirror a change in ideas about nationality, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in Italian contemporary society.

Italian youth and style: Beat band Equipe 84 in the 1960s (left), and pop rock band Måneskin in 2019 (right).

Fourth, ‘the design, definition and control of spatiality is an active ingredient in the often contested social processes of construction [of youth cultures]’, as Doreen Massey has argued (‘The spatial construction of youth cultures’ in T. Skelton and J. Valentine (eds) Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, 1998). My current research explores what happens when the space where youth is socially constructed shifts from a physical – the city, the nation – to an online location. What are the consequences of virtual encounters within Italian youth? How does localised content produced in Italian interact with material created in English? How is content in Italian received by Italian and foreign Italian-speaking audiences? These are some of the questions that I will address in my project.

Yet, analysing contemporary youth requires the use of theories (such as Postfeminist Theory and Social Media Studies) and methodologies that I have not yet employed. For example, while my previous studies were based on archival research, I will now make use of interviews to analyse Italian YouTubers’ self-representation strategies and student surveys to examine young people’s reception of YouTube Italia content. By matching my previous expertise with the employment of new theoretical and methodological approaches, my research hopes to enrich our understanding of contemporary representations of Italian identities in popular culture. The examination of social media content as a cultural text aims to help overcome stereotypes, by giving new media the cultural relevance they deserve.