In Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s, Diva Futura, female bodies occupy the center of the frame, but the film complicates a simple reading of the “male gaze”. On one hand, it reproduces aspects of what Maina and Zecca describe as pornography’s “principle of maximum visibility” (133): women are often shown nude, staged in ways that emphasize their youth, beauty and sexual availability. Male characters are never framed in this way; their presence is tied to authority and decision-making rather than erotic display. Moments such as Riccardo’s assertion that “le donne che lavorano con me si mantengono belle,” (Diva Futura 00:53:45-50) reinforce how femininity is tied to a commodified ideal, echoing the broader pornographic market’s emphasis on disposability and visual consumption. In these ways, the film reflects how the industry is gendered: men are valued for managerial or creative authority, while women’s performance is bound to bodily aesthetics that capitalism quickly discards. Similarly, the scene where Eva confronts the exploitative terms of her contracts dramatizes how women’s agency is curtailed by legal and economic structure that prioritize producers’ power over performers autonomy (Diva Futura 01:42:20-35). This highlights the fact that the men’s objective of these films is their own capital and success, with little to no care for their female performers’ agency. Narrative context adds a symbolic turn through Debora. She is the only principal woman who is never framed sensually; she’s consistently clothed, positioned as competent office labor and visually separated from erotic performance. She only becomes the narrator after Riccardo’s death, which can be read as a shift from a patriarchally authored history to a belated female authorship. Her desexualisation is double-edged: it demonstrates her credibility as witness and chronicler, but also suggests that authoritative female voice in this world is granted outside the erotic marketplace that defines other women’s visibility. Overall, women are framed as objects of consumption and bound to the precarious labor of sexual performance, while men occupy positions of control and narrative agency. Debora’s narration disrupts this dynamic, but only partially, leaving the film suspended between reproduction of patriarchal spectacle and critique of its inequalities.
The film situates pornography firmly within the circuits of consumer capitalism. Bodies, particularly female ones, are commodified as objects of exchange, their visibility tied directly to profitability. The scene where Eva breaks the fourth wall, declaring, “ma qui sei tu per giudicare… io sono qui perche esisti tu,” exposes how consumer demand drives the industry (Diva Futura 01:46:35-55): the audience’s desire is the very condition for the performer’s existence as a marketable figure. Maina and Zecca trace how Italy’s pornography industry grew within an environment of improvisational production strategies and unstable market conditions, driven by the urgent need “to capitalize as quickly as possible on a relatively unexplored sector” (125). The film dramatizes this instability, specifically in the scene where Eva is forced to continue filming despite feeling uncomfortable in the act. This echoes the reading’s discussion of Italian performers being pushed towards more hardcore, explicit acts to appease French distributors (127). Bodies thus become adjustable commodities reshaped according to fluctuating market demands. The consumerist logic extends beyond explicit sex to broader cultural shifts. As Ginsborg notes (cited by Maina and Zecca), Italian society in the late 20th century was marked by increasing hedonism, fashion consumption and leisure culture (119). As Diva Futura suggests, pornography was not an isolated phenomenon but part of this larger transformation. The reduction of women’s value to youth and beauty mirrors advertising strategies of the same era, where aging or imperfect bodies were systematically excluded. By highlighting this commodification, Diva Futura critiques the ways capitalism both exploits and discards women. The porn industry emerges as a stark expression of consumer culture, where desire is manufactured, marketed and consumed, and the body becomes its most visible product.
Diva Futura makes explicit how bodies are never simply private but always politically charged. As depicted in the film, the porn industry is not just about pleasure but is tied to law, censorship, contracts and gender politics. Bodies are treated as commodities that must be regulated, signed over and circulated within a legal and economic framework. The most striking example occurs when Eva realizes the exploitative terms of her contract. She confronts the reality that her body and autonomy had been taken advantage of for the benefit of producers and media production. This scene dramatizes how politics enters the most intimate of spaces: a woman’s capacity to control her own body is mediated not by her desires but by contracts and regulations. As Maina and Zecca observe, Italian pornography thrived on improvisation: in response to volatile censorship and legal pressures, producers prioritized fast profit over stability, creating a culture of opportunistic production (125). Eva’s contract realization encapsulates this dynamic, showing how women bore the risks of an industry structured to protect male financial interests. The film also reflects wider debates around morality and censorship. Italy in the 1970s and 80s saw the erosion of strict censorship, allowing explicit films to circulate more freely (Maina and Zecca 120-121). Diva Futura stages this shift by showing how producers push the boundaries of representation, while women’s bodies become the battleground where questions of “decency,” legality and profit intersect. The emphasis on female youth and beauty demonstrates how gender politics are inseparable from labor politics: women’s economic viability is tied to their bodies’ conformity to erotic ideals. At the same time, the film highlights resistance. Eva’s confrontation with her contract and the women’s arguments throughout the narrative expose how performers challenged the structures that confined them. This aligns with feminist critiques of the period, which politicized issues of objectification, violence and labor rights (Maina and Zecca 129). In Diva Futura, the body is both the site of exploitation and of protest: a terrain where political, legal and gendered struggles are fought.
The primary purpose of Diva Futura is to inform viewers about the rise of the Italian porn industry while simultaneously critiquing its exploitative structures. As a biopic, it reconstructs the history of a cultural phenomenon, offering insight into how pornography developed in Italy under pressures of consumerism, censorship and global market demands. But it does so critically, refusing to glamorize the industry. Key scenes underline this dual purpose. The commentary that women become undesirable with age exposes the industry’s disposability of female bodies, while Eva’s contractual entrapment dramatizes the lack of agency afforded to performers. These moments highlight the systemic inequalities at the heart of the industry. At the same time, aesthetic choices such as the growing explicitly and eroticization of sex scenes mirror the stylistic innovations described by Maina and Zecca, situating the film historically within the practices of directors like D’Amato (133). By connecting narrative and form, Diva Futura reveals how pornography was shaped by the intersections of commerce, politics and culture. It does not dismiss the industry as insignificant; instead, it positions it as an integral part of Italy’s late 20th-century transformation. This aligns with Maina and Zecca’s argument that pornography’s emergence was inseparable from broader shifts in leisure, fashion and media consumption. Thus, Diva Futura functions as both documentation and critique: it informs the audience of pornography’s cultural roots while laying bare the exploitative gender and labor dynamics that structured it. Its positioning is not celebratory but analytical, using biography and spectacle to interrogate the porn industry’s place in modern Italian history.
Bibliography
Diva Futura. Directed by Giulia Louise Steigerwalt, performances by Andrea Roncato, Sandra Milo, and Debora Caprioglio, etc., 2023.
Maina, Giovanna, and Federico Zecca. “Turn on the Red Light: Notes on the Birth of Italian Pornography.” Porn Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 22, pp. 118-136.