Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman

Abstract

Interpreters of futurism are often fascinated by its most violent and misogynistic aspects, ignoring its other sides, and the liberatory effect that its attack on bourgeois values had on a considerable number of women. Yet one of the elements which make the complexity of futurism evident is the substantial participation of women in it. Valentine de Saint-Point, Enif Robert, Maria Ginanni, Irma Valeria, Rosa Rosà, and Benedetta (Marinetti's wife) were inspired by its groundbreaking, transgressive energy. As futurist writers and artists they contributed to alter and enrich the movement and its language, countering its misogyny, and taking futurism in different directions. Mina Loy, one of the greatest and most influential among the experimental writers of the twentieth century, was inspired by futurism to seek her personal and intellectual liberation as a futurist-feminist woman, and started out her literary career essentially as a futurist poet and iconoclast. Her work, although written in English (a language that Marinetti did not know), is some of the best and most interesting in the literary history of futurism.