Drawing on creative practices from the eighteenth century to the present, the session aims to trace a lineage of Italian feminist activism, or “work,” that employs the body (textual and physical) as a discourse for countering violence and reclaiming subjectivity. How does creative expression function to theorize and “talk back” (hooks) to institutionalized prejudice, producing alternative systems of knowledge and relationalities? Panelists will consider how the reanimation of historically marginalized—and gendered—voices inaugurates new modes of reading and writing, and offers inclusive imaginaries beyond the hegemonic patriarchal gaze.
From this perspective, a turn toward reviewing feminist history is timely: the socio-political climate of the last decade has pressed Italian literary and cultural studies to embrace transhistorical, transnational, and postcolonial frameworks. Building on work in Transnational Italian Studies highlighted by the MLA convention in 2021, and new perspectives on corporeality in the Italian canon (e.g., Bond 2018; Duncan 2020), our session asks how the study of activist practices within Italian literary studies (broadly understood) interact with the interpretive frameworks of revision and rewriting.
Each speaker will present for a maximum of 15 minutes, leaving ample time for discussion. Kate Driscoll will begin with the work of Luisa Bergalli and her eighteenth-century initiatives to unsilence the lost library of early modern Italian women’s poetic production—a corpus of literary output that speaks in direct response to contemporary measures to codify Italian poetry as a space strictly reserved for men. Bergalli’s recovery of the continuity (and not exceptionality) of early modern women’s poetry demonstrates how instances of textual repression and correction call upon the collective need to act—an urgency to intervene in literary historiography such that its widely excluded figures may regain their voice and recognition.
Alice Fischetti will extend this inquiry further by analyzing the deployment of masculinist language and the overt refusal of scientific discourse in Anna Radius Zuccari’s (aka Neera) novel Teresa (1886)—which centers continued, collective knowledge and self-pleasure as tools for resisting patriarchal confines. Responding to medical discourse dismissing women’s lament as hysteria, Neera’s depiction of the “madwoman” de-pathologizes “feminine” affect by giving it social rather than biological causes. The novel thereby enacts activist work in revising commonsense knowledge, altering the language used to delineate the female body to offer new pathways towards self-fulfillment.
The body operates as a site of resistance in Mariagrazia De Luca’s presentation on the deconstruction of race and Italian-ness (italianità)—often articulated through whiteness, Christianity, masculinity, and monolingualism— by contemporary Italian translingual writers of color. Under special discussion will be the latest novel by Uba Cristina Ali Farah, Le stazioni della luna (2021); focusing on flesh as re-signified through language, De Luca examines the depiction of a collective body of Italian women whose identities embrace hybridity and fluidity in 1950s segregated and postcolonial Somalia.
The panel concludes with how rewriting manifests itself physically in Giulia Fabbri’s analysis of the transfeminist activism of the Women’s House Lucha y Siesta in Rome, a space of political development, women’s mutual support, and collective resistance. Women’s voices emerge with particular clarity in interviews Fabbri conducted with several activists—the point of departure for her examination of the counternarratives through which Lucha y Siesta’s women claim agency, in a space that functions as a fundamental site of feminist theoretical elaboration.
Together, these papers will expand upon and complicate understandings of Italian feminist activist work. The transhistorical approach offers a lens for identifying an undercurrent of the Italian literary tradition, namely, a discourse of the body and collectivity that implicates the corporeal and textual as subversive spaces. All panelists share a commitment to interrogating the boundaries of the “canonical” and “Italian” as understood today, as well as demonstrating how institutionalized gender discrimination is deeply intermixed with other axes of oppression. This panel will generate questions concerning the freedoms at stake in women’s liberation movements (in Italy and the US); how theory works to restore value to marginalized voices; and how, in the transnational and transhistorical context of Italian Studies, creative works may serve to further liberation within and beyond institutional spaces.