Abstract
Women of the Mafia dives into the Neapolitan criminal underworld of the Camorra as seen and lived by the women who inhabit it. It tells their life stories and unpacks the gender dynamics by examining their participation as active agents in the organization as leaders, managers, foot soldiers, and enablers. Felia Allum shows that these women are true partners in crime.
The author offers an innovative interdisciplinary analysis that demystifies the notion that the Camorra is a sexist, male-centric organization. She links her analysis of Camorra culture within the wider Neapolitan context to show how mothers and women act and are treated in the private sphere of the household and how the family helps explain the power women have found in the Neapolitan Camorra.
It is civil society and law enforcement agencies that continue to see the Camorra using traditional gender assumptions which render women irrelevant and lacking independent agency in the criminal underworld. In Women of the Mafia, Allum debunks these assumptions by revealing the power and influence of women in the Camorra.
The author offers an innovative interdisciplinary analysis that demystifies the notion that the Camorra is a sexist, male-centric organization. She links her analysis of Camorra culture within the wider Neapolitan context to show how mothers and women act and are treated in the private sphere of the household and how the family helps explain the power women have found in the Neapolitan Camorra.
It is civil society and law enforcement agencies that continue to see the Camorra using traditional gender assumptions which render women irrelevant and lacking independent agency in the criminal underworld. In Women of the Mafia, Allum debunks these assumptions by revealing the power and influence of women in the Camorra.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Place of Publication | U. S. A. |
| Publisher | Cornell University Press |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781501774799 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 15 Jul 2024 |
Acknowledgements
This is a book that has been a long time coming, but thanks to COVID and the first lockdown in March 2020, it was written before I thought I would write it, before it was scheduled in my head! In a strange way, COVID allowed me to write about this subject, which has been part of me since I first started to focus on the Neapolitan Camorra back in the early 1990s. Finally, I had the time, as an outsider and a foreign woman researcher who has an intimate relationship with the city, to go deeper into my relationship with Naples, the Camorra, and Camorra women.In 2017, I was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to study the role of women in transnational organized crime groups (TOCGs), and I thought I would include my analysis about the Neapolitan Camorra in this general comparative study. However, it soon dawned on me that this would not do justice to the question of Camorra women, especially with all the material I had collected and continued to collect. COVID closed down my ethnographic interviews for my research on TOCGs, so I settled down at home and wrote this book.
