Emotions and gender in oral history: narrating Italy's 1968

Abstract

The year 1968 was and remains an emotion-laden topic in Italy, and yet few historians have used emotions to parse the history and memory of this period. This paper draws on a collection of interviews with former activists in the student movement and the New Left to explore the ways in which expressions of feeling in life-history narratives can flag up possible lines of difference in women's and men's stories. It draws on three emotive themes – rebellion, violence and liberation – to explore the interaction between gender, feeling, narrative, and what the author calls the ‘third person in the room’: meta-narratives of 1960s activism that can exert a powerful weight on the interview, blending and blurring the lines of individual and collective experience.