writing the terrorist self: the unspeakable alterity of Italy's female perpetrators

This paper examines texts written by, or in collaboration with, female ex-members of the Italian left-wing armed organization, the Red Brigades. The corpus differs from male-authored or male-centred texts in that issues relating to identity and selfhood lie at the very heart of the project of narrating the terrorist past; the primary concern of Italian women's post-terrorist narration is not to narrate the experience of belonging to an armed organization, but to construct a new identity distinct from a pre-existing self identified exclusively with the transgressive experience of political violence. I consider the corpus in the light of a number of critical problems posed both by the specificity of female perpetration and by the dearth of theoretical writings on perpetrator trauma more generally. I identify in each text an acute anxiety about the very act of speech or narration and find that, in order to circumvent the perceived prohibition on speech, the women of the Red Brigades subtly insinuate into their life writing a discourse of alterity bordering on subalternity that obscures the boundary between victim and perpetrator. The unacknowledged slippage between discourses of perpetration and victimization is explored in relation to Ruth Leys’ critique of Cathy Caruth's formulation of trauma as the wound that cries out through the voice of the victim. The paper concludes by questioning whether perpetrator trauma can ever be articulated as such and by considering the implications of that question for traumatized perpetrator and victimized society alike.     

sexyshock: networks that matter

Sexyshock emerged out of a huge demonstration in defence of the Italian abortion law in June 2001. It is a laboratory of communication on gender issues, managed by women but directed towards all genders. It is a public space that gives visibility to women's issues as well as being a permanent workshop on sexuality, a network of women involved in pink/queer activism within a communicative laboratory. As such, Sexyshock is a ‘space of contamination’ between transversal projects which exist among different political institutions and subjects all over Italy and Europe. Her challenge lies in ‘playing with’ and ‘deconstructing’ sexual and identity issues through an ‘open-border’ conception of politics.     

Finding postcolonial figures: rediscovering Elvira Banotti and her role in the Italian feminist movement

In the late 1960s, many western countries witnessed rising social movements that challenged traditional ideas of gender and race. Italy presents a particular case where divided post-war politics, rapid economic growth and strong Catholic tradition created conditions in which intersecting phenomena of feminism and migration challenged conventional order. Elvira Banotti, a feminist writer from Italy’s former colonies, offers one striking example of this new configuration hiding certain women’s narratives from the public debate. Although historians have already looked at the history of Italian feminisms through a transnational lens, a postcolonial perspective is lacking from these discussions. This article seeks to offer a new perspective, employing a postcolonial lens and a focus on Banotti’s narratives to assess how both voices of women engaged in public debate and of women less heard, particularly of migrants, could provide a new postcolonial view of Italian feminisms.     

precarious changes: gender and generational politics in contemporary Italy

The issue of a generational exchange in Italian feminism has been crucial over the last decade. Current struggles over precariousness have revived issues previously raised by feminists of the 1970s, recalling how old forms of instability and precarious employment are still present in Italy. This essay starts from the assumption that precariousness is a constitutive aspect of many young Italian women's lives. Young Italian feminist scholars have been discussing the effects of such precarity on their generation. This article analyses the literature produced by political groups of young scholars interested in gender and feminism connected to debates on labour and power in contemporary Italy. One of the most successful strategies that younger feminists have used to gain visibility has involved entering current debates on precariousness, thus forcing a connection with the larger Italian labour movement. In doing so, this new wave of feminism has destabilized the universalism assumed by the 1970s generation. By pointing to a necessary generational change, younger feminists have been able to mark their own specificity and point to exploitative power dynamics within feminist groups, as well as in the family and in the workplace without being dismissed. In such a layered context, many young feminists argue that precariousness is a life condition, not just the effect of job market flexibility and not solely negative. The literature produced by young feminists addresses the current strategies engineered to make ‘their’ precarious life more sustainable. This essay analyses such strategies in the light of contemporary Italian politics. The main conclusion is that younger Italian women's experience requires new strategies and tools for struggle, considering that the visibility of women as political subjects is still quite minimal. Female precariousness can be seen as a fruitful starting point for a dialogue across differences, addressing gender and reproduction, immigration, work and social welfare at the same time.     

Contemporary Women’s Autofiction as Critique of Postfeminist Discourse

ABSTRACT

While commentaries on the phenomenon of postfeminism have centred on its manifestations in media and popular culture, this article highlights the potential of literature for extending existing debates within postfeminist studies. I argue that the emergence of contemporary women’s autofiction offers the possibility of a literary response to the individualising narrative of a neoliberal and postfeminist sensibility. I advance this contention via an analysis of two texts: Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2012) and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014). Their writing practice is resolutely political because it employs the confessional mode, as indebted to the emancipatory roots of the feminist movement, to reflect on the enduring marginality of female artistic identity. By foregrounding the inherently provisional nature of their being, both texts emphasise that the search for a viable artistic consciousness and experiments in artistic method are as crucial as the final product itself, especially when the definition of woman as artist still remains contested. I thus locate the existence of these texts in a wider social imaginary conducive for feminist organising. In this respect, the rising popularity of contemporary women’s autofiction may offer strategies crucial for remediating an otherwise diminished feminist politics of the present.     

Transnational Reception: Nordic Women Writers in Fin de Siècle Finland

Abstract

This article investigates the transnational and translingual reception of Nordic women’s writing (among authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish) in a multilingual country, Finland, around the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This contribution is a component of our work for the international Joint Research Project, Travelling TexTs. We concentrate on the presence of Nordic women’s writing in various languages in fin de siècle Finland by investigating a library collection from that time. We look at the complexities in the reception of Nordic women’s writing in translation in Finland, making use of the concept of the Nordic dimension of translation history, and introducing the notion of intranational reception. We emphasize the role of women translators as cultural transmitters, and the intertwining of national and transnational (or, even, in today’s terms, feminist) agendas. We also investigate the reception of Nordic women’s texts in the press of that time, by examining both literature written for adults and literature for girls. Working with large-scale digitized sources has enabled us to examine the question of reception broadly.     

Empire,Gender and the ‘Home Front’ in Fascist Italy

This article considers the ways in which Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the subsequent League of Nations sanctions shaped the tasks assigned to women within the Fascist Party. During the period of sanctions and, indeed, after their ending, right up until the Second World War, empire and women’s contribution to it became a core theme in Fascist propaganda. Female party members were mobilised for the imperial cause both as producers and as consumers and this led to a new emphasis on their importance to the nation. The activities of the Fascist women’s groups expanded considerably to include a range of new tasks such as running training courses on how to fight waste in housework, ‘autarkic cookery’ and so on. This article also discusses how young Italian women were prepared for a role in Italy’s ‘place in the sun’ through special courses created to train them for a future as colonial wives.     

The new left and labor: The early years (1960–1963)

This article analyses the labour history of Italy's recruitment of workers for settlement in the Italian colony of Eritrea. The quest for full employment, both in Italy and within its nascent colonial ‘empire’, was the main driving force behind Italian colonialism in general. Italy's labour policy, which started to take shape in the 1890s, was never linear. Unlike the previous liberal Governments, the Fascist regime's policy was far more determined to use its colonies as places to settle the Italian peasant masses (the same that were migrating to the Americas for a better life, a trend which Fascist Italy considered humiliating to the mother country). In keeping with its vision of the colonies as a means to attain full employment, Fascist ideology characterised the Italian colonial empire as an ‘empire of labour’. In fact, the reality of the labour situation that Italian workers found themselves in after settling in Italy's African colonies would soon show the fallacy underlying Fascist colonial ideology.     

Toilets and resistance in Italian factories in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

In the literature on industrial conflict, the Italy of the 1950s is often described as marked by worker acquiescence and an absence of conflict, ensured by high unemployment and the severe repression of union activism. My research challenges this. While formal, organized collective action subsided, workers continued to show their defiance and opposition to factory authorities by means of diverse acts of individual resistance that have escaped scholarly study. Drawing on anthropological theory, particularly Scott’s notion of ‘weapons of the weak’ – the strategies used by subordinate classes when facing heavy repression or lack of resources – this article undertakes an innovative analysis of the use of insults, irreverent behaviour, rumours and mockery of foremen and bosses to undermine the authority and legitimacy of factory hierarchies. It casts new light on the protest cultures and practices of Italian workers in the 1950s and improves our understanding of post-1945 industrial conflict.     

Defining Female Subjectivities in Italy: motherhood and abortion in the individual and collective memories of the 1970s women's movement in Bologna

In Italy, women have long been stereotypically marked as either objects of sexual desire or as producers of new life. This changed radically in the 1970s, when second-wave feminism redefined gender relations and experimented with new paths of life not determined by matrimony and maternity. The legalisation of abortion, during the second half of the decade, is now hailed as one of the primary achievements of the women's movement. A theme closely connected to abortion such as motherhood, on the other hand, seems to have been excluded from the public memory of 1970s feminism. Drawing on the outcomes of an oral history project, this article unearths the dominant discourses and individual and collective silences within the public memory of the 1970s women's movement in the Italian city of Bologna, and explores the processes of creating ‘composure’ among women as they remember their experiences of motherhood and abortion.     

A picture in black and white: modernism,postmodernism and the scene of ‘race’

‘Writing, in its noblest function’, says He´le`ne Cixous, ‘is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.’ Cixous' hopes for the possibilities of writing are the starting point for a very new and startling piece of Australian writing, Kathleen Mary Fallon's ‘how violence made a real mother-of-a-mother of me’, writing that possibly gets closer to the ‘heart of the matter’ of contemporary Australian black-and-white relations than any other white-signed literary text. What might Fallon's writing attempt to ‘unerase’, to ‘unearth’? What is the primitive picture, according to Fallon, that so frightens us? Here, I want to explore the questions Fallon's writing asks, and to explore more generally what ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ might mean in the contemporary Australian context, and I do this in terms that might seem at first to be surprisingly anachronistic. I read this very contemporary, some would say postmodern, example of Australian writing in terms of a paradigm that is described by the field of critical studies of literary modernism. This is a paradigm that emphasises what feminist critic Marianne DeKoven calls the ‘irreducible ambiguity’ of some texts, their ‘radical undecidability’, their ‘impossible dialectic’. I am seeking to recuperate this paradigm and the critical impulses that it generates for a project whose objectives are far from those of literary modernism with their alleged origins in a white European and, for some, a masculinist aesthetic of the late teens and 1920s. I am interested in revisiting modernism, not only as a kind of writing practice but as a critical practice, and therefore as a reading practice, one that has possibilities for reading ‘black’ and ‘white’ in Australia now: for reading what might be called the ‘impossible dialectic’ of relations between whites and Indigenes. How might we read Australian writing now, in particular its efforts to ‘unerase’, to ‘unearth’, that picture that, I argue, frightens ‘us’, as white Australians: the picture in black and white, the original scene, the scene of invasion and dispossession, the scene in which the words ‘terra nullius’ were first uttered, the scene that continues to structure our perceptions of the Indigenous ‘other’ and of our white selves into the present?     

the feminization of labour in cognitive capitalism

The article starts with a definition of the concept feminization of labour. It aims to signal how, at both the Italian and the global level, precarity, together with certain qualitative characteristics historically present in female work, have become decisive factors for current productive processes, to the point of progressively transforming women into a strategic pool of labour. Since the early 1990s, Italy has seen a massive increase in the employment of women, within the wave of legislation that has introduced various flexible contracts – so-called atypical work. I show how cognitive capitalism tends to prioritize extracting value from relational and emotional elements, which are more likely to be part of women's experiential baggage. The results of a study conducted in November 2006 among freelance workers of the Rizzoli Corriere della sera group, the largest publishing group in Italy, will be used to show how women are able to move more easily on the shifting sands of precarity, within the context of cognitive work.     

‘Great Expectations’: Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets

Formulating a definition of ‘good’ poetry is, and should be, impossible. Yet women's poetry of the First World War seems generally to have been condemned as ‘bad’. It inspires an ambiguous response from readers who recognize the value of its historical, social and psychological content, but shudder at the limitations of its form. However, I believe that a much more fruitful reading of these ‘recalcitrant’ texts is possible. It is not my intention to deny either their problematic nature, or the diversity and complexity of male responses to the war, but rather to emphasize that women's experience of the First World War was radically different from that of men, and we should not therefore be constrained by the traditional parameters of 1914-18 criticism when we explore these works. This article examines a selection of this poetry in the light of the psychological processes of grief and bereavement, and in so doing indicates other areas in which constructive readings of these texts might be made.Why do we expect the articulation of a radically new and uniformly consistent poetic voice from what was a large and diverse group of women? The expectations of modernism ironically have created a literary ‘mainstream’ out of a selection of experimental, and largely male, writing. I hope to show that the ‘failure’ of these women to conform to our textual ‘great expectations’ is irrelevant. The single most characteristic feature of these women's experience of war was isolation. Their position had neither the homogeneity of the trenches, nor the intense intellectualism of experimental circles. Predominantly middle class, alienated by absence and bereavement, they attempted to articulate the unprecedented nature of their experience. That their experiments were not wholly successful is perhaps indicative of the near impossibility of the task they undertook.     

“I made myself small like a cat and ran away”: workplace sexual harassment,precarious immigration status and legal violence

This article examines the intersection between workplace sexual harassment, immigration status, and insecure employment status (‘precarious work’). Although a rich body of literature explores how gender impacts all three fields independently, less is known about how they interact. Drawing on narratives from migrant women with precarious immigration status in Toronto, Canada, I propose that experiences of sexual harassment illuminate the workings of migrant illegalization through ‘legal violence’. Furthermore, findings demonstrate that precarious status migrant women do not experience sexual harassment in isolation; other axes of oppression interlock to exacerbate it. Despite this, precarious status migrant women negotiate their experiences, sometimes enduring sexual harassment; referred to here as aguantar, and sometimes resisting it explicitly.     

red girls’ revolutionary tales: antifascist women’s autobiographies in Italy

This essay focuses on recent autobiographies written by Italian women born in the 1920s who engaged in revolutionary politics during and after the Second World War: Luciana Castellina (La scoperta del mondo, 2011), Bianca Guidetti Serra (Bianca la rossa, 2009), Marisa Ombra (La bella politica, 2010), Marisa Rodano (Del mutare dei tempi, 2008) and Rossana Rossanda (La ragazza del secolo scorso, 2005). In these autobiographies, personal narratives of passionate engagement are entangled with the urgency of antifascist resistance, and with the social and political conflicts that traversed Cold War Italy. Women’s multiple forms of political engagement within the Italian Communist Party are analysed, as well as the contradictory, ambivalent connection between Western European communist activists and Eastern European socialist regimes. The intersections between antifascist, communist and women’s rights politics are also explored, since some of the authors were leaders of the nation-wide left-wing Union of Italian Women. The autobiographies tell the story of an antifascist, left-wing ‘middle wave’ that fought pioneering battles for women’s political and social rights, and narrate its complex, conflictual encounter with second-wave feminism in the 1970s. These writings, therefore, allow us to reflect on changes in gendered subjectivities and revolutionary politics across time and generations.     

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.     

comparing different generations of feminists: precariousness versus corporations?

This article focuses on the gap and conflicts in Italy between the so-called ‘historical feminists’ of the 1960s and 1970s, and the generation of young women who entered the public and political arena from 1990 onwards. It discusses the absence of a critical and self-critical perspective within the Italian historical feminist tradition, the various political conflicts that emerged before and during the Berlusconi right-wing government at the beginning of 2000 and the absence of an active visible presence of young women in the media and in politics.