What happens when the daughter of a writer who has always been interested in gender issues decides that she wants a Spiderman backpack to start primary school?
What happens is that Giorgia Vezzoli writes Mi piace Spiderman… e allora? (I like Spiderman… so what?), a shot story for both young and adult readers, edited by Settenove.
So, first things first. Giorgia Vezzoli, originating from Brescia, is born in a family that has always tried its best to stimulate her in many different ways, letting her grow aware of the massive presence of stereotypes in our society and educating her on how to recognize them and defeat them. She works as a communication advisor and copywriter and she’s specialized in projects of ethic and social education, just as you can read on her webpage. She defines herself as a «poet», because «it’s a beautiful word, full of meaning and ethically correct». A storyteller and a blogger, she founded in 2009 a blog called Vita da streghe (A witches’s life), and she has worked with the Zero stereotipi foundation, which features a decalogue on how to communicate while respecting women, among other things.
Beside all this, Giorgia is a writer as well. She published her first novel, Mi piace Spiderman… e allora?, in 2014, based on her own experience as a mother and woman who’s active in the field of gender stereotypes debates.
This book can surely be described as a pioneer in a field of literature that’s still not-so-much populated, the one of kids’ novels aimed at defeating stereotypes.
The impact this great little book has had is very strong, and it has been reviewed on the Huffington Post U.S. Edition, Vanity Fair, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Il Corriere della Sera, among others, and Serena Dandini talked about it on her show Stai Serena on Radio 2.
But there’s more. Mi piace Spiderman… e allora? was adopted as a textbook by Valentina Timpani, a primary school teacher working in an Italian school in Buenos Aires, because what this book tries to do is showing with the innocence and easiness of a six-year-old girl things that might seem complicated.
That’s right, the book has a first person narrator, and this narrator is little Cloe, the girl who has chosen a Spiderman backpack to walk into her first year of school, without realizing the consequences of this choice. Everyone but her parents commented her decision with, «but it’s for boys!», down to her aunt and the shop owner who sold her the backpack. Cloe’s answer always was, «Spiderman is for everyone!».
Soon Cloe begins to see how the world around her follows strong gender stereotypes – she can’t play football, she receives invitations for birthday parties that are different for boys and girls, and the hairdresser tells her that a short haircut is «a boy’s thing».
And so she comes to the breaking point – Cloe comes home from school telling her mother that «this Spiderman’s backpack sucks». She can’t handle her classmates’s teasing anymore, their judging glares and disgusted faces.
But her mother (that is to say, Giorgia), has an idea – she posts a picture of the Spiderman backpack on Facebook, to seek help and acceptance from other people. The result is that the picture «got a lot of thumbs up and fifthundred people liked it». And this is how Cloe starts to think that maybe she’s not doing anything bad, maybe it’s everyone else who is seeing things the wrong way, and most of all she understands that this experience is really important. She starts an educational itinerary that aims at destroying gender stereotypes with the help of her parents and all of those «thumbs up», until at the end of the book she says that what she wants from life is «happiness, love and calmitude».
Through Cloe’s experience and through a simple but powerful narration, Mi piace Spiderman… e allora? introduces and deals with different gender stereotypes.While she progresses through her journey of conscience and knowledge, the young protagonist discovers that there are so many kinds of stereotypes.
There’s the clearly visible one, the center of the story, the ever-growing division in genders inside society (picture the toy section in a mall – there are girl’s toys and boy’s toys), but the book focuses on racism, homophobia, fat and skinny shaming, hypersexualization of the female body in commercials as well. Cloe can see all these stereotypes and discriminations and she describes them with the clearness and quickness of a child.
This is precisely the reason why a book like this should be read by kids, so that they can be taught in a simple way to recognize and fight stereotypes, but by adults as well, so that they can reflect on how much children can learn and interiorize stereotypes around them.
When I asked Giorgia how much time she thinks will have to pass before books like Mi piace Spiderman… e allora? become the norm and not just novels for a niche, she laughed and said, «That’s the million dollars question».
What’s certain is that the buzz around the issue of gender stereotypes is always growing, just like more and more are the people who talk about it, so we can hope (Giorgia and us) that the road goes on like this, never stopping.
In conclusion, I’d obviously like to thank Giorgia Vezzoli for her kindness and her time.
I also thank the association Kuma – Culture Volunteers of Palazzolo (Brescia, Italy) for organizing the event and for being incredibly nice.
And a huge thanks to Alberto Bastianon, who took the pictures featured in this piece.
