Journal title ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA
Author/s Olivia Fiorilli
Publishing Year 2016 Issue 2016/282 Language Italian
Pages 24 P. 209-232 File size 0 KB
DOI 10.3280/ic282-oa1
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The author analyzes the discourses surrounding health visiting assistants - a paradigmatic figure of biopolitics - in the decades following the end of the First World War. The Italian government’s effort to manage the population centered around the control of individual hygiene behavior, with the aim of rationalizing the nation’s "human capital". Visiting health assistants emerged in Italy under the auspices of the American Red Cross, and quickly became crucial to a strategy directed at spreading modern hygiene in the homes of the working classes and educating the population to engage in "healthy" and "rational" forms of behavior. These revolved around persuasion and the involvement of individuals in the management of their biological resources. This study of visiting health assistants - whose gender became their most valuable asset - sheds new light on the ways in which bourgeois femininity was mobilized in various biopolitical practices and institutions at a time when the Italian welfare state system was emerging.
Keywords: Biopolitics, Gender, Visiting Health Assistance, Government of Behavior, Hygiene, Socio-sanitary Politics
Olivia Fiorilli, Biopolitica dell’igiene nel primo dopoguerra. Genere e governo dei corpi nella costruzione dell’assistente sanitaria visitatrice in "ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA" 282/2016, pp 209-232, DOI: 10.3280/ic282-oa1