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The Photoromance: A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture by Paola Bonifazio, Cambridge, MA, and London, The MIT Press, 2020, x + 248 pp., $29.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-262-53928-9
‘How does participation function in the pre-internet era?’, I take this to be the central question in Paola Bonifazio's book, a compelling, engaged, and highly personal research into a genre that still struggles for its identity in academic discourse: the photoromance. Emerging from Italy's postwar culture in 1947 and spreading successfully to France, Latin America, and the United States in the late 1970s, the photoromance is a hybrid artifact that moves across media and visual economies: cinema, literature, magazine culture, advertising, popular music, and celebrity culture. Its literacy is conceptually sophisticated as it draws romance and storytelling from the screen world and a modern culture of feuilleton, deploying technical strategies from the comic strips. Its business economy is advanced in the synergy it promotes across publishers, producers, and media industries (TV, music, publicity). Despite the exciting breadth of media, languages, and contents that this genre entails, the photoromance has been denigrated by liberal as well as conservative groups. From the start, Marxist intellectuals in postwar Italy criticised it as a silly and escapist genre, feminising its readers as helpless victims of capitalist culture industries. Catholic groups have, not surprisingly, denounced the seductive photo strips for their potential corruption of traditional family values. These positions, remarks Bonifazio, ought to be revisited in light of the particular context in which the photoromance originated and thrived – Italy's postwar reconstruction and economic miracle – and the new role of women. Bringing a gendered perspective to this study, Bonifazio...