What models or types of sexuality appear in one of the films you’ve recently seen? How does its historical moment shape these models?
In the film Bicycle Thieves directed by Vittorio De Sica in 1948 is a masterpiece of the postwar Italian Neorealism. The wife, Maria, is depicted as the worrier and homemaker of the household. She made sacrifice and pawns the linen sheets when Ricci needs money for his job. When Ricci lost his bicycle, she came to the rehearsal, looking worried but what she could do was to go home and wait for Ricci to come home, whether with or without the bicycle that she and Ricci both made sacrifice to purchase. Even though the determination in her move to rip off the sheets was quite admirable, it didn’t escape from but rather enhance the expectation that wives were supposed to firmly make sacrifice for husband even the husbands didn’t ask to. Maria was presented as superstitious and somewhat “dumb” in the scene when she consulted with the Holy One. Her sexuality was downplayed and repressed in the scene when Ricci teased her and she said “stop.” The image of Italian women as the marginalized members of society’s activities, as the homemaker and sacrifice-maker in the household and as the benighted and the incapable in the face of adversities is the traditional stereotype of female sexuality, but not, I think, a typical depiction of female sexuality on screen given the various modes of female sexuality in German cinema and Hollywood. The long-missed husbands finally returned to home from the years of suffering in the battle; the wives didn’t have to sustain the whole family by herself; the traditional sense of a family composed of a wife, a husband and a child were recovering and the traditional family roles of wives and husbands were reestablishing itself. To tell the reality, the movie showed what it was.
Another model of female sexuality was represented by Rita Hayworth, the star on the poster. In contrast to the downplayed female sexuality of Maria who was wearing a skirt, shirt and a blazer, or other Italian women depicted who were wearing long, somewhat baggy dresses, Rita Hayworth here is attractive, luring and sexual, wearing a tight strapless dress and displaying her armpit. I think by presenting the Hollywood sexuality on screen and especially in the scene where the bicycle was stolen, the auteur criticized the Hollywood voyeurism and its presentation of fiction and fables as the reality.
The presentation of Ricci’s masculinity was also very interesting. He was introduced very masculinely – getting a job, lifting her wife, riding the bicycle with her etc. But as the search for the stolen bicycle constantly failed, he became feminized by his weeping and his inability to sustain the role of a decent father in front of his son in the climax. The constant unemployment and the poverty after the Second World War had damaged and distorted the masculinity of Italian men, resulting in their inability to fulfill their role of the breadwinner in the household.
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