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Mafiosa: Crime, Comics, and Women

Sunshine Barbito writes; Have you ever wished you were someone other than yourself? Ever planned your alternate-life-future in your head all afternoon, when you should've been working? The story of Nicoletta Marchesi is the story of someone that was given one option in life: get married and reproduce. While at the same time, the men around her were given two options: join the family business or do just about anything else that tickles your fancy while keeping the family secrets and occasionally getting your hands dirty.

But our Mafiosa, she had other interests.

As someone who has spent a lot of time wanting more options, wanting to be other than myself, I love stories. I love art and movies and works of fiction that allow me to transport into different worlds. Different bodies.

But even in fiction, women don't get very many options. We get to be school-girls, fighting crime in our tight-fitting skirts and our high ponytails. We get to wear head-to-toe leather jumpsuits and seduce our prey. We're the damsel in distress or the overly thoughtful school teacher.

Homely or sex, sex, sex.

And sometimes, it feels good to be watching a bombshell fight crime. But other times, it feels alienating.
Nothing feels better than when you're reading a story or a comic, and you can feel the action in your bones, like it's your story. You get these butterflies in your stomach and the lows hit lower, the highs hit higher. While writing Nicoletta's life, I thought about the women who miss out on that feeling. Because not many are writing their character traits, their insecurities, their confidences, their desires for more.

Organized crime has always been a man's game. MAFIOSA is the story of a woman claiming her seat at the table, picking up her pool cue, and telling anyone who has a comment to talk to the hand. Not because she doesn't like being a woman. Not because she doesn't love ballet and her family and her body and her femininity. But because she knows that she's capable of everything her brothers can do and more. And she isn't ashamed of her violent side.

The organized crime genre has always been one of my favorites, because it takes more than muscle to get organized. To make the real bucks. It takes the ability to be thoughtful, calm, patient, to undergo a lot of stress and not crack under the pressure; it takes your heart and your brain.

Instead of being about bullets and explosions (which are still essential to the genre) it takes the traits that a woman has to use on a daily basis. A lot of keeping your mouth shut, and planning your next move, while everyone else thinks you're just quiet. Shy.

In the office, in the arts, at school events and in hospitals, women and people without representation have to learn how to stay organized, so that the powers around us don't close in. And that is why I love MAFIOSA so much. Because it's the organized crime. It's the Mafia family and the tradition, the blood and gore. But it's also a woman, outsmarting the status quo in a real body, with real struggles.

And she's just getting started.

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