Editoriale
Giulia Calvi
Introduzione
Teresa Bertilotti, Elisabetta Bini e Catia Papa
L’invisibile linea del colore nel femminismo italiano: viaggi, traduzioni, slittamenti
Liliana Ellena
The invisible color line within Italian feminism: journeys,
translations, driftings
The relationship betwen gender, sexuality and politics is today being
radically reconfigured by processes of globalization, migration within and
outside Europe, as well as by the emergence of new political subjectivities. By
calling into question the relationship between political practices and memory,
black and postcolonial feminist theory push for a reopening of the historical
archive of the feminist movement. This article explores the potentialities of a
work of research and historicization on the invisibility of the color line within
Italian feminism starting from two different directions of research. Both focus
on questions of cultural translation in relation to transnational networks and
exchanges between the two sides of the Atlantic, as well as around the colonial
and postcolonial boundary. The first direction is represented by the relationship
between the recurrent reference to anticolonial and Afro-american movements
within the texts of early Italian radical feminism and the invisibility of the
position elaborated by black feminists. The second discusses the link between
experiences of political migration in Africa and feminism and focuses on Maria
Rosa Cutrufelli’s case, where the link between personal and political as well as
between different geographical and political spaces is crucial.
Federica
Connessioni transatlantiche: lesbismo femminista anni ’60-70
Liana Borghi
Transatlantic connections: lesbian feminism during the 1960s
and 1970s
Translations of early essays by Usa feminists circulated in Italy between
1970 and 1972 inspiring the consciousness raising practices that shaped the
early feminist movement. This essay looks at the beginnings of US lesbian
feminism in terms of the difficulties experienced by lesbians with and
within women’s groups. Some of their documents were also imported and
circulated in Italy providing guidelines for the budding G&L movement which
continued to define itself as feminist or feminist-friendly despite the lack of
acknowledgement from the women’s groups of those years.
Psicoanalisi e politica tra Francia e Italia
Federica Giardini
Psychoanalysis and politics between France and Italy
Between 1971 and 1972 Italian and French feminists met and lived
together in a week long camp. The core of the encounters was the creation of
a new conception and practice of “politics”, intersecting body and language,
fostered by the “Psychanalyse and Politique” collective. Going back to
reports of the event and considering some later historical reconstructions,
the essay presents both the general questions at stake and the voices and
positions of the participants, who quickly became the principal referents
of the different feminist political and theoretical options in France and in
Italy: Antoinette Fouque, Monique Witting, Luisa Muraro, Lia Cigarini, Lea
Melandri.
Compagna donna/Drugarica Žena: la conferenza internazionale di Belgrado del 1978
Chiara Bonfiglioli
Comrade Woman/Drugarica Žena: the Belgrade
international conference of 1978
The international conference Drugarica Žena. Zensko Pitanje: Novi
Pristup? (“Comrade Woman: The Woman’s Question: A New Approach?)
was organized between the 27th and the 29th of October 1978 at the Belgrade
Student Cultural Center (Skc). The conference is seen as the founding event
of second wave feminism in the post-Yugoslav region, and is still remembered
today through meetings, publications and commemorations. Beside its
importance for the local feminist scene, the conference also became a site of
transnational discussions between Yugoslav and Western European feminists,
who compared notes on women’s lives under socialism and under capitalism.
This article reconstructs the encounter between the Yugoslav organizers and
the Italian guests, by analyzing the different political contexts and the different
feminist languages adopted during the meeting. It relies on the reports published
in the feminist press after the conference, as well as on archival material and
oral history interviews. The essay also contains some transcripted excerpts of
an original audiotape recorded in Belgrade, in which Italian feminists present
themselves and their political experiences, assessing the subjective and intersubjective
changes brought by feminist movements in 1970s Italy.
Intellettuale, nomade, poliglotta: una strega ungherese e il femminismo italiano
Teresa Bertilotti
Intellectual, nomad and polyglot: a Hungarian witch and
Italian feminism
This article focuses on Agnes Hochberg (1964-1995), a feminist and
scholar, engaged in the Hungarian feminist movement since 1990 and, in the
meantime, in a research project on the history of the Italian and American
feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing in particular on the
practice of consciousness-raising and the ways in which it was transmitted
from one country to another. An analysis of her work is useful to look in
a critical way at our approach to the history of neo-feminism, and to rediscuss
methodological categories such as “transnational feminisms”, and the
periodization of feminist movements.
A volte ritorna: Monique Wittig e l’Italia
Simonetta Spinelli
Sometimes she returns. Monique Wittig and Italy
The article reconstructs the impact of Monique Wittig’s writings in Italy. It
highlights the constant removal of a passionate way of thinking characterized
by an unwillingness to mediate, which re-surfaces after generations at a time
when a new rigid counter-code is appearing in feminist and post-feminist
debates. Wittig is a figure of excess, an extraordinary creator of linguistic
inventions, who revolutionizes languages and syntactic structures, mixes
literary genres, destructures political axioms. She is loved and hated with the
same polemic ardour. Yet, even when all traces of her writings seem to have
been lost, she inevitably returns.
Giovani e lavoro nella società dell’incertezza: il caso italiano in Europa
Alessandra Pescarolo
Il mondo in gabbia? Promesse, delusioni e conflitti attorno alle conferenze Onu sulle donne
Gabriella Rossetti
The world in a cage? Promises, disillusions and conflicts
around the UN Conferences on women
While reviewing the history of the Un Conferences “on” and “of”
women, I shall try to recall perceptions of new openings but also feelings of
closures: images of “the world as space” which fed the hopes of those who
travelled to Nairobi, Cairo, Beijing, New York; the longing for discovering
other possible feminisms, but also the difficult negotiations with the
bureaucratic language of global organizations. At a time when the idea of
collective subjects was disrupted, women from all corners of the world were
shaping and reshaping transnational networks displaying constructive and
as well as destructive behaviors. Issues like the very meaning of “bonds”,
“solidarity”, “aid” were discussed while the traps of linking through the
borders of differences (often not acknowledged) were experienced. There
were those who saw the Un conferences as “bureaucratic cages” which could
empty and weaken women’s movements through coopting their issues. But
different stories can be told.
Diversamente storiche: una riflessione sulla condizione delle storiche nell’età del precariato
Laura Schettini
Le pagine della SIS
a cura di Rosanna De Longis