Journalist Loredana Lipperini astutely observes how in Italy “motherhood is the knot” in which are entangled different feminist philosophies, as well as patriarchal views of the maternal figure as the only acceptable version of female identity. In biopolitical terms, the maternal body is “the place where power expresses itself and where power, by assuming control of it, exercises its greatest repression (Lupperini 2007). This article aims to disentangle the “knot” of feminist aspirations and contradictory discourses on motherhood in contemporary Italy as it is explored in three Italian web series: Ivan Cotroneo’s Una mamma imperfetta (2013), Eva Milella’s and Elisa Giani’s Malamamma (2013), and Alessandra Bonzi’s Oh mamma mia (2015). references to feminist discourses, these media narratives of motherhood cannot escape the pervasiveness of postfeminist neoliberal ideology, and ultimately confirm the power structures they aim to challenge or subvert. Though these series try to question the validity of postfeminist models of perfect motherhood, they remain deeply enmeshed in the same dynamics that have made them powerful and pervasive—thus displaying the tensions between conflicting ideals and realities that all imperfect mothers face in their daily lives.
7. Cybermoms and Postfeminism in Italian Web Series
