Feminism In Italy Research Articles

From Novels to Figures, Themes and Strategies of a Political Practice PART II: Sexual Difference: An Occasion for Being

The present paper is the last of a series of three papers, constituting a whole project of translation and commentary composed of translated extracts from the “Catalogo no. 2 – Le madri di tutte noi”, published by the Milan Women’s Bookstore in 1982. The idea for the project was conceived by Silvia Niccolai and Angela Condello, who selected the extracts and provided the written commentaries on the original texts. The Yellow Catalogue, in which we find collective discussions, pages of personal diaries and, overall, the enterprise of a group of women debating over their literary symbolic mothers (who to read? And why?), is an interesting example of a political use of literature. After four decades from its publication, it still proposes inspiring and fresh suggestions for feminist political action and critique, while representing an interesting occasion for researching the philosophical roots of feminism. In particular, the debate on the literary “mothers,” i.e. on the female authors that can contribute to the formation of a feminine symbolic, shows the kind of concerns of difference feminism in Italy (especially during the Seventies). The text offers, in other words, the opportunity to enter a world that nowadays – with the new, varied streams of feminism and the battles over the neutralization of sexual identity – is less frequent, and nevertheless we find it important in order to understand the social, political and cultural power of feminism. The project is composed like follows: Paper No. 1, In search of a feminine symbolic, by Angela Condello, already published on Law& Literature and Paper No. 2, From Novels to the Figures, themes and strategies for a political practice. Paper No 2 is structured in two parts. Part One, entitled “Interest in Reality.” For every woman’s autobiography, by Silvia Niccolai, is already published in Law & Literature; Part Two is the present paper: coauthored by Angela Condello and Silvia Niccolai, it addresses issues of sexual difference, identity and ambiguity, and the theories behind the idea of body and life at the core of the Catalogue.

Crossing the Borders and Challenging the Boundaries of White Feminism in Italy: Situated Rearticulations of Difference and the Impact of Antiracist Feminisms

Crossing the Borders and Challenging the Boundaries of White Feminism in Italy: Situated Rearticulations of Difference and the Impact of Antiracist Feminisms

The Mothers of Us All: Extracts, with comments, from the ‘Yellow Catalogue’ published by the Milan Women’s Bookstore

The present paper is Paper No. 1, and forms part of a series together with Paper No. 2 (From novels to figures: themes and strategies of a political practice – Part I), and Paper No. 3 (From novels to figures: themes and strategies of a political practice – Part II; Sexual difference: an occasion for being). Papers No. 2 and No. 3 are forthcoming in Law & Literature. The three papers constitute a whole project of translation and commentary composed of translated extracts from the “Catalogo n. 2 – Le madri di tutte noi,” published by the Milan Women’s Bookstore in 1982. The idea for the project was conceived by Silvia Niccolai and Angela Condello, who selected the extracts and provide the written commentaries on the original texts. The Catalogue, in which we find collective discussions, pages of personal diaries and, overall, the enterprise of a group of women debating over their literary symbolic mothers (who to read? And why?), is an fascinating example of the collective work of feminist groups of women, the themes they addressed and their methodology. In particular, the debate on the literary “mothers,” on the female authors that can contribute to the formation of a feminine symbolic, shows the kind of concerns of difference feminism in Italy (especially during the Seventies). The text offers, in other words, the opportunity to enter a world that nowadays – with the new, varied streams of feminism and the battles over the neutralization of sexual identity – is less frequent, and nevertheless we find it important in order to understand the social, political and cultural power of feminism.

At a different pace. Art and feminism in Italy since the seventies

Este ensayo analiza la relación entre el feminismo y los mundos del arte en Italia a partir de la década de los setenta. A través de este recorrido, se perciben las constantes divergencias que se produjeron entre la cultura política del movimiento, los mundos del arte y los ambientes académico-institucionales, lo que conllevó que los Women’s-Gender Studies no se incorporasen a la universidad sino tardíamente, en la segunda mitad de los noventa. Una vía italiana intermedia es la que representó la creación de una difusa red de estructuras/instituciones/asociaciones de feminismo cultural que funcionaron como ambientes de militancia, investigación y producción cultural. Las tres matrices teóricas del término “Cultura” (deconstructiva, esencialista e histórico-psiconanalítica) tuvieron también repercusiones significativas sobre las relaciones entre arte y feminismo. Las artistas participaron también de este contexto contradictorio de militancia e investigación, pero carecieron de una explícita elaboración teórica así como de una genealogía de género a la que remitirse. En lo que respecta a las investigaciones sobre arte y género, se publicaron escasos estudios en Italia en los años ochenta. Habrá que esperar al inicio del siglo XXI para que se consolide un interés histórico y cultural en torno a las relaciones entre arte y feminismo, con la aparición de numerosas publicaciones académicas, el surgimiento de una nueva generación de docentes e historiadoras del arte y, por último, el acceso de estudiosas y expertas a puestos de dirección en importantes museos y centros de arte nacionales.

The Unexpected Subject–1978 Art and Feminism in Italy

L’ouvrage, organise en quatre grands moments, se compose d’une introduction, d’un ensemble d’essais, du catalogue des œuvres exposees et de documents annexes comprenant des archives de Flash Art et les biographies des artistes. Historiens de l’art, ecrivains et commissaires d’exposition signent les textes sur les liens entre l’art et le feminisme en Italie. D’emblee, le texte de presentation sur le rabat de la couverture introduit le lecteur dans la famille des artistes de l’epoque : « A part...

Maud Anne Bracke.Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy, 1968–1983.

Maud Anne Bracke.<i>Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy, 1968–1983</i>.

The Travelling Concepts of Narrative ed. by Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara, and Lars-Christer Hydén (review)

Reviewed by: The Travelling Concepts of Narrative ed. by Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara, and Lars-Christer Hydén Thomas Van Parys Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara, and Lars-Christer Hydén, eds. The Travelling Concepts of Narrative. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. 311 pp. A collection of essays entitled The Travelling Concepts of Narrative — note the appropriate lack of a specifying subtitle — is potentially quite wide-ranging and far-reaching. While the various narratives contained in the book indeed largely attain that potential, they do so within the book’s own span. As the editors Matti Hyvärinen, Mari Hatavara, and Lars-Christer Hydén explain, this volume concerns itself with “three important divisions in narrative theory: the conceptual, the material and the contextual” — the main goal being “conceptual clarity” to advance interdisciplinary studies (5). The book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the narrative turn(s); the second with the fluid borders between fictional and non-fictional and between “natural” and “unnatural” narratives; the third with the cross-pollination between narrative studies and psychology. Hyvärinen’s “Travelling Metaphors, Transforming Concepts,” which opens the volume, can be read as its manifesto. Pleading for “a readiness for a reflective re-assessment of the tradition of narrative research itself” (16), Hyvärinen shows (at times quite polemically) how narrative “has not travelled around in the form of an intact, unchanging concept” (25). Focusing on the metaphorical connections between narrative and life, the main stake of his essay is “a series of conceptual clarifications and distinctions in order to help grasp the obvious tension between narrow and broad meanings of narrative” (28). Through the work of Paul Ricoeur, Mark Freeman subsequently explains “Why Narrative Is Here to Stay”: “the real, the humanly real, is itself inextricably bound to narrative” (59), he argues, as the “backward movement of narrativity” (“located in the work of hindsight”; 44) is key to our reconstruction of meaning and hence to the human experience. In “To the Narrative Turn and Back: The Political Impact [End Page 364] of Storytelling in Feminism,” Olivia Guaraldo goes back to Hannah Arendt to give an account of the historical importance of narrative practices for second-wave feminism in Italy. Paul John Eakin’s article, “Travelling with Narrative: From Text to Body,” becomes a narrative in its own right — a narrative of the evolution of the author’s research on autobiography, which makes the case for a unified field theory of narrative based on his reading of the work of neurologist Antonio Damasio. Closing off the first section with “Philosophical Underpinnings of the Narrative Turn in Theory and Fiction,” Hanna Meretoja widens the impact of the narrative turn from theoretical discourse to the cultural sphere, with twentieth-century French literature as a concrete case. She argues convincingly that the narrative turn is crucially also a turn “towards acknowledging not only the cognitive but also the existential relevance of narrative for our being in the world” (94). In “Fact and Fiction: Exploring the Narrative Mind,” Jens Brockmeier aptly dismantles the opposition between fact and fiction through a hermeneutic analysis of narrative “as a psychologically fundamental practice of meaning construction,” shaped “by a shared cultural canon of narrative conventions” (125). Conversely, Stefan Iversen, in his chapter “Broken or Unnatural? On the Distinction of Fiction in Non-Conventional First Person Narration,” convincingly questions “the validity and applicability of a unified theory of narrative based on similarities on a sense-making level” (142) by placing “fictionalized narrative in contrast to non-fictionalized narrative” (153). As he argues, “[t]he consciousnesses of the latter are imbued with an ethical obligation to pay attention to the narrating human as a human being, and therefore ask us to seek out and aid in the reconstruction of coherence and meaning even amongst the seemingly incoherent and dispersive” (153). Mari Hatavara, then, by “Making Sense in Autobiography,” encourages textual analysis in order “to investigate the text as a site for sense-making” (164), highlighting “the challenges and pleasures the literary organisation of the text provides for the reader” (166). In “‘Unnatural’ Narratives? The Case of Second-Person Narration,” Jarmila Mildorf in turn counters the assumption of “unnatural” narratology that...

Feminism and Emotion: Love and the Couple in the Magazine Effe (1973–1982)

Drawing on recent scholarship on the history of emotions and on feminism in Italy, the article analyses the Italian feminist magazine Effe (1973–1982) and its attempt to rethink notions of love and affective relationships between couples. Whilst a reclaiming of emotions and a re-envisioning of female sexuality were central to 1970s feminism in Italy, Effe was unusual in identifying love — as abstract notion, but also as fact of daily life, both heterosexual and homosexual — as an issue to be addressed in its pages. The article argues that the magazine, influenced in particular by the ideas of American feminist Shulamith Firestone, presents a clear rejection of traditional romantic love, as intimately bound up with the subjugation of women, but that, perplexed by the continuing hold love apparently had over women, and also drawn to an ideal, indeed utopian, vision of love, largely exclusive to women, it is highly ambiguous in proposing an alternative.

The Catholic Church and the Woman Question: Catholic Feminism in Italy in the Early 1900s

At the turn of the twentieth century the Catholic Church promoted women’s associations in an attempt to reassert Christianity in a struggle against its liberal and socialist adversaries. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) called on Catholics to address a raft of serious problems resulting from social and economic transformations. This gave rise to a Christian Democratic movement and, within it, to Catholic feminism. Focusing on two Catholic women’s periodicals, L’azione muliebre and Pensiero e azione, the author studies the emergence and the nature of Catholic feminism as well as its suppression by the Church.

Wendy Pojmann, Immigrant Women and Feminism in Italy (Research in Migration and Ethnic Relations)

Wendy Pojmann, Immigrant Women and Feminism in Italy (Research in Migration and Ethnic Relations)

&lt;sc&gt;lucia chiavola birnbaum&lt;/sc&gt;. &lt;italic&gt;Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy&lt;/italic&gt;. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. 1986. Pp. xiv, 353. $25.95

lucia chiavola birnbaum. Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. 1986. Pp. xiv, 353. $25.95 Get access Birnbaum Lucia Chiavola. Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. 1986. Pp. xiv, 353. $25.95. Mary Gibson Mary Gibson John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 95, Issue 4, October 1990, Page 1243, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/95.4.1243 Published: 01 October 1990

Feminism in France: From May '68 to Mitterrand. Claire DuchenFrench Connections: Voices from the Women's Movement in France. Claire DuchenLiberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Lucia Chiavola BirnbaumWomen and European Politics: Contemporary Feminism and Public Policy. Joni LovenduskiWomen and Politics in Western Europe. Sylvia BashevkinWomen of Europe: Women MEPs and Equality Policy. Elizabeth Vallance , Elizabeth DaviesWomen in Culture and

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsFeminism in France: From May '68 to Mitterrand. Claire Duchen French Connections: Voices from the Women's Movement in France. Claire Duchen Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum Women and European Politics: Contemporary Feminism and Public Policy. Joni Lovenduski Women and Politics in Western Europe. Sylvia Bashevkin Women of Europe: Women MEPs and Equality Policy. Elizabeth Vallance , Elizabeth Davies Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change. Judith Friedlander , Blanche Wiesen Cook , Alice Kessler-Harris , Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe. Sharon L. Wolchik , Alfred G. Meyer Margaret Collins WeitzMargaret Collins Weitz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 13, Number 4Summer, 1988 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494476 Views: 5Total views on this site Copyright 1988 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Italian Communists, the Women’s Question, and the Challenge of Feminism

The period from 1968 to 1970, in so many respects a social and political watershed throughout Europe, marked the emergence of a women's movement in Italy. The Italian movement was patterned initially on the model of the American and, to a lesser extent, the British, French, and West German women's movements. However, feminism in Italy was always conditioned by its development in a country with, a long and vigorous tradition of left-wing politics, a militant mass workers' movement, and Communist and Socialist parties which, together, regularly won over a third of the votes cast in national elections.