Dalla parte di Eva: Female Alliances and Genealogies in Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Writing Practice

Abstract

ABSTRACT My contribution examines the creation of female collective memory and legacy in the works of Sicilian-born feminist writer Maria Rosa Cutrufelli. I analyse this aspect as both a literary and a political strategy aimed at retrieving a ‘sisterhood’, well-known to second-wave American feminism. Cutrufelli’s novels are filled with female protagonists, or personagge, who rarely act on their own. In fact, at the basis of each character’s struggle to achieve an individual agency one can identify various forms of relationships (friendship, love, political alliance, family bonds). Moreover, as is the case with her dystopian novel L’isola delle madri, unexpected connections among extremely diverse women become decisive in challenging social and symbolic paradigms, such as biological motherhood and its bond with a capitalist exploitation of reproductive bodies. Cutrufelli’s reinvention of female memories corresponds to the construction of a collective legacy that reads against the grain of the Italian literary canon, in which individual heroism – along with gendered asymmetries and power relationships – has often implied an automatic identification with a strong, self-centred masculinity. On the contrary, Cutrufelli’s stories insist on female relationships that go through different phases of negotiation and forms of losses and appropriation, thus calling for substantially different notions of non-hierarchical femininity. This is also confirmed by Cutrufelli’s own filiations and active collaborations with fellow women writers belonging to different generations. In the light of the above, my chapter explores various forms of female bonds in Cutrufelli’s writings, while also taking into consideration the significance of extra-textual elements in the writer’s biography and current engagement, in order to argue for her originality in pursuing a specific, ‘hybrid’ approach to 21st-century feminism.