Barbara Gasparini

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The article starts from the consideration of how the basic and structural role that the family represents in the human experience and in the social fabric exposes it to be the object of consideration of cultural agencies and collective subjects which often represent it according to, partial, when not distorted logics. So the cohabitation of a plurality of discourses about the family, publicly pronounced from different social subjects are able to produce as many images and collective representations of the family. The focusing of this contribution concerns some typologies of social subjects responsible of the media discourses on the family, the ways in which they conceive the family experience and its priorities today, how much they are aware of this subjective perception, what they think it is the common feeling about the family reality, and how this awareness today – together with the with those more strictly professional related to the markets, the languages and the public which they address – enter the process of construction of their discourses, and therefore in the media imagination depending on them. The article examines the aware and unaware conditioning which drive the process of mediation operated by those professional categories of mediators and cultural operators on which depends the production of a real social representation of the family experience: journalists of the printed paper, on one side, fiction scriptwriters and producers advertising creative people, on the other. Every type of family representation produced is investigated; the rules and the inside limitations to the discursive genre and the specific productive system; the awareness level of the operators with respect to such norms and, consequently, the perception of the limitations and inadequacies with respect to the representative, creative, and axiological demands, of the operators themselves A plurality of images of families emerges on one side anchored to the common sense, but showing on the other the plurality of meanings and the changes to which the family is submitted in the present society. Therefore, the strategies of the discursive production on family, according to the considered sector, stir along the axle that almost goes from the adherence almost ‘naturalistic’ to the complexity of the family reality to its fictional transfiguration.