Staging Interruption: Quotation, Montage, and Feminist Thought in Carla Lonzi’s Autoritratto

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reads Carla Lonzi’s collective self-portrait Autoritratto (1969) through the interpretive lens of interruption. I identify interruption as a critical and unexplored stylistic feature and formal strategy that is fundamental to the text’s nascent feminist sensibilities and praxis, and to the alternate personal history it imagines. Interruption functions as a structuring principle and mode of critique that is generative rather than destructive: by interrupting the content of audio interviews and re-staging her experiences textually, Lonzi creates a space where the acts of listening and dialoguing are revealed as essential to creative expression and auto-narration. Although the text predates Lonzi’s radical feminist writings, it engages with gestures central to Italian second-wave feminist discourses: namely, the personal and communicative goals of autocoscienza. In part, this article addresses how the social and historical critiques within Lonzi’s feminism find earlier expression in the narrative techniques and ambivalent self-assertion in Autoritratto.