Strategie di controllo del corpo: la campagna per il Fertility Day

The Italian Ministry of Health has launched in 2016 a media campaign to promote awareness of fertility because of its continuous decline across the entire Italian population. The thirteen digital postcards created for the Fertility Day, and spreaded online, gives us the opportunity to critically address the still widespread concept of the female body (despite the achievements made by feminist movement) as an “object” upon which others make decisions and intervene, as if the female genre should only be regarded as a secure source of nurturing, making personal sacrifices, surrendering to the will of others and being obedient. All these features suggest a weakness in the principle of self-determination, acknowledged by society and by the State and, in reality, only meant to conceal a perennial condition of significant disparity. Gender is, therefore, instrumental in order to give value to these ritualized habits that are reinforced by institutions and society. These power mechanisms, according to Foucault, constantly “act” on the human body and on the female body in particular.