Abstract

The article accompanies the Italian translation of the third chapter of Female Stories/Female Bodies (1998) by framing the intellectual figure of the author Lidia Curti (1932/2021)– an Italian feminist scholar and professor of English Literature who has been a foundational figure in the introduction and diffusion of British Cultural Studies in Italy. Starting with her first encounter with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham in the late 1960s, Curti participated to the wider formation of a feminist approach to the study of popular culture within Cultural Studies through her engagement with popular literary, cinematic and TV genres, from the theoretical perspectives of psychoanalysis, postmodernism and postcolonial studies. The third chapter of Female Stories/Female Bodies hereby translated engages popular TV genres aimed at women from the 1980s and 1990s (such as Soap Operas and Telenovelas) as well as the femininization of traditionally male genres (as in Detective and Crime TV stories and series).