Goggio Lecture - Simona Di Martino

Teenage Girls, Witches, and Popular Culture: Cultural Memory in Italian Girlhood 

This lecture examines female adolescence and popular culture, highlighting the importance of recognising teenage girls as a vital demographic through the study of cultural products specifically designed for them. While research on girlhood began in the UK with Angela McRobbie and Penny Tinkler in the 1990s, and expanded in the Anglophone world (Driscoll 2002, Gill 2007, Kearney 2011, Hains 2012, Round 2019), cross-cultural scholarship remains limited, with Italian girlhood receiving minimal academic attention. Key exceptions include a themed issue of gender/sexuality/Italy on ‘Girl Cultures in Italy from Early Modern to Late Capitalism’ (2017), Marini-Maio and Nerenberg’s The Winx Project (2020), and the A Girls’-Eye View project (2021–2024) by Hipkins and Andò.

Since the 1960s, the trope of the teenage witch has emerged as a central lens for exploring female adolescence, reflecting societal ideas about youth, gender, and transformation. Once feared as an outcast, the witch has been reimagined as a beloved heroine and has attracted significant scholarly attention in recent years (Chollet 2022; Corcoran 2022; Kosmina 2023). Teen witches, from Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch to Harry Potter, have normalised the witch while embracing her complexity, often serving as feminist allegories of coming of age. This talk focuses on W.I.T.C.H. (2001–2012), a transnational magazine created by Disney Italia, as a prominent Italian popular cultural product aimed at adolescent girls. Through its metaphor of magic and witchcraft, W.I.T.C.H. uniquely shaped Italian girlhood and achieved global success, reaching 63 countries and becoming a cultural phenomenon by 2005. Despite its widespread popularity, the magazine remains underexplored in academic studies, with few notable exceptions (Pellitteri 2009, 2018, Di Martino 2024).

My analysis explores how W.I.T.C.H.’s storyline and characters address themes of independence, friendship, and self-discovery, blending manga, European comics, and Disney influences into a unique hybrid style. Beyond its narrative, the magazine engaged readers through interactive features like quizzes, surveys, letters, advice columns, and DIY sections, fostering a sense of community and creating a generational media memory – a collective sense of belonging and identity tied to a specific moment in time. Drawing on Carolyn Kitch’s concept of magazines as vessels of memory (2001) and an analysis of reader responses gathered during recent research, I argue that W.I.T.C.H. validated girls’ voices, empowered identity, and contributed to collective memory. By reflecting popular trends and cultural touchstones of the early 2000s, it became a pioneering media space and a repository of cultural memory for Italian teenage girls, where voice, agency, and creativity converged to shape shared identities. This study lays the groundwork for further exploration into how popular media empowers adolescent girls globally.

Bio. Dr. Simona Di Martino holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick (UK) and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. Prior to this position, she held fellowships at the universities of Warwick, London, Leeds, and Reading. Her research, Wonderful Witches (WoW): American Models of Girlhood from ‘Archie Comics’ to ‘Disney Italia,’ focuses on the Italian reception of the empowering trope of the teenage witch from American popular culture. Simona has organized and participated in national and international conferences and published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her latest publication is the refereed article “Empowering Girls in the Transnational W.I.T.C.H. Magazine and Comic Series” in Girlhood Studies 17.3 (2024).

.All times stated in Eastern time.