Transmitting stories of the longest revolution. Notes from Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Building on a digitally mediated autoethnography within a contemporary Italian feminist movement, the paper analyses the transformations of feminist media practices in Italy since the start of the 20th century. If during the 1960s and 1970s Italian feminism reached its higher visibility as one of the largest in Europe, since the 1980s, it continued to operate in submerged ways through the creation of feminist bookshops, publishing companies, women’s archives and centres while engaging with practices, ideologies and texts that were circulating transnationally. Since the early 1990s Italian feminist groups started engaging with digital technologies, creating new virtual spaces of dialogue, an autonomous internet service provider, an alternative search engine, digital literacy programmes and practical laboratories. Over the past two decades, the online space became the privileged sphere for activists to challenge the hegemonic gender discourse, debate topics otherwise suppressed or misrepresented by traditional media and create a record of struggle. Expanding from a conceptualization of feminist activism as a process of transit, in this paper, I analyse how feminist media practices gradually transformed, shaped by historical and contextual specificities.