No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Transmitting stories of the longest revolution. Notes from Italy
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
CateriNa PeroNi 1 12. IL #METOO DI HOLLYWOOD E IL #WETOOGETHER DI NON UNA DI MENO. Dalla denuncia alla pratica collettiva contro le mo-lestie sessuali nel/del lavoro i. Introduzione In questo contributo descriverò la genealogia e alcuni risvolti della cam-pagna social #WeToogether lanciata dal movimento Non Una Di Meno nell'ottobre 2017 in risposta alla campagna #MeToo iniziata con l'ormai ce-lebre tweet dell'attrice statunitense Alyssa Milano in seguito alle decine di denunce di molestie sessuali subite da decine di attrici, tra cui Asia Argento, da parte del produttore cinematografico Harvey Weinstein rivelate nell'otto-bre 2017 dal New York Times. 2 Se in tutto il mondo #MeToo ha sollevato un dibattito complesso sul consenso, la sessualità, i rapporti di potere e di genere nel lavoro e in tutte le altre sfere della società, aprendo un nuovo scenario rispetto al protago-nismo e alla consapevolezza delle donne sulla propria libertà e autodeter-minazione, in Italia gli strascichi di una cultura e di un sistema di potere fondati sul sessismo e sulla mercificazione della libertà ereditati dal ven-tennio berlusconiano 3 hanno prodotto nel dibattito pubblico un effetto stra-niante: una controffensiva coordinata in cui intellettuali, giornalisti e think tank hanno tentato di rovesciare l'ordine discorsivo imposto dalla presa di parola collettiva delle donne, attraverso un processo di individualizzazione e colpevolizzazione dell'attrice italiana più esposta nell'affaire Weinstein, Asia Argento. A stralciare questo canovaccio consunto è apparsa un'altra attrice im-prevista, una soggettività collettiva che negli ultimi due anni, sulla scia
This article analyses La Difesa delle Lavoratrici, the first national periodical for socialist women, which was founded by Anna Kuliscioff and published in Italy between 1912 and 1925. The main exponents of socialism of the time, both members of the Italian Socialist Party and associations close to the Party, wrote and contributed to discussion in the magazine; however, we also find personal accounts from working women who wrote letters to the newspaper talking about the problems of everyday life. We can consider the journalists who wrote in the periodical political pioneers in the first mass party. Of particular interest are the discussions between interventionists and pacifists and the controversy over the autonomy of the female sections as compared to the male ones.
This paper focuses on the public debate in Poland and Italy concerning the right to abortion in the contemporary rise of populist neo-conservative forces in Europe and of a global feminist movement. In both countries, the historical Catholic interference into women's reproductive rights and self-determination has been enforced by the renewed alliance of right-wing governments and pro-life groups to converge into a transnational “anti-gender war”. This represents a real backlash against women’s achievements over the last decades in terms of reproductive and sexual citizenship, which appears to be the battlefield for redefinition of western citizenship in times of global crisis. Although different genealogies, we identified a common framing of neo-conservative discourse, and of feminist claims and practices, as that of feminist strikes and social mutualism. In this perspective, we consider these practices as a normativity from below, arguing that feminist movement is addressing a new paradigm of citizenship.
Focusing primarily on the European and “Western” context, this chapter addresses the question of online misogyny and anti-feminism from a materialist perspective. The chapter includes a brief overview of the culture wars and the liberal consensus alongside a discussion of the spread, forms and potential impact of online misogyny. Misogyny appears in spectacular attacks and banal everyday repetitions of misogynistic tropes, in the manosphere and in alt-right spaces. The chapter posits that misogyny is the methodology of female subjugation and exploitation, and that its re-emergence in the current historical conjuncture is symptomatic of changes in the social-political and economic order. It therefore proposes an understanding of online misogyny as a question of distribution of material resources. Building on the work of Federici (Caliban and the Witch, Autonomedia, 2004), it is proposed that online misogyny has a function similar to that of witch hunting. While witch hunts were used to violently and systematically coerce women to conform with the requirements of the emerging industrial capitalism, online misogyny is using digital violence to prohibit women from participating in building the forthcoming technological future. Any resolution of the digital violence to which women are subjected is likely to necessitate radical ways of redistributing power and resources rather than mere policy changes by social media corporations.
The article analyses the participation of young people in emerging social movements, focusing on the experience of the Italian Non Una Di Meno (NUDM) movement combatting male violence against women. Challenging scholarly assumptions of growing youth apathy in democracies, the analysis reveals high levels of participation on the part of the younger population engaged in gender-related struggles. Hit by both conservative and austerity policies associated with the economic and political crisis, feminist and LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexual) Millennials reacted by increasing their involvement in contentious politics. In the protest arena, they have crossed paths with older generations, activating processes of exchange, but also intergenerational tensions. Based on original qualitative data from ten semi-structured interviews with movement activists in Florence and Bologna, this piece of research sheds light on the role of young people in the birth and evolution of NUDM, and the relationship between different generations of activists within this movement. More specifically, it explains continuities and discontinuities between veterans and younger activists’ sources of theoretical inspirations, organizational models and mobilization resources, strategic priorities and action repertoires. Millennials embrace intersectional feminism and queer theory; opt for grassroots, horizontal organizing; adopt a conflictual attitude towards the state, and dialogical, introspective dynamics within the movement. Intergenerational disagreements especially relate to sex work, and surrogate motherhood.
This article aims to achieve a better understanding of how online networks contribute to the organization and the symbolic production of social movements using big data coming from social media platforms. It traces and compares online social and semantic networks that emerged on Twitter during two protest events organized by the feminist Italian movement Non Una Di Meno (NUDM) - a national strike organized on March 8th, 2017 and a march organized on November 25th of the same year. Our results suggests that, over time, online networks created on Twitter remain sparse and centralized around the movement handle but that they continue to host an interactive dialogue between the movement, its activists, and supporters. Also, over time, participants to online conversations around NUDM tend to use Twitter to discuss different aspects of the mobilization - paying more attention to the spaces of the protest during the strike and to the issue of gender-based violence in November.
This article examines the development of campaigns against “gender ideology” in Europe, leading to the emergence of a specific family of mobilizations that we call anti-gender campaigns. These campaigns, started in the mid-1990s as a Catholic project in reaction to the results of the UN conferences of Cairo and Bejing, but developed significantly in several European countries after crucial encounters with right-wing populism. While recognizing the importance of these crossovers, we contend the interpretation that mobilizations against “gender ideology” and right-wing populism are the two faces of the same coin, and we plead for a more complex understanding of the ways in which distinct—and sometimes competing—projects can converge in specific settings. We argue that research on the “Global Right Wing” should therefore disentangle the various components of this phenomenon, and locate them in concrete settings. We show that this research strategy allows us to better grasp the specificities of each project and the ways in which they interact. Opening our eyes on crucial developments in contemporary Europe, this strategy also prevents researchers from falling into the trap of a global and unqualified backlash against everything achieved in terms of gender and sexuality in the last decades.
At a time when the legitimacy of democracies is in question, calls to improve the quality of public debate and deliberative democracy are sweeping the social sciences. Yet, real deliberation lies far from the deliberative ideal. Theorists have argued that linguistic and cultural differences foster inequality and impede democratic deliberation. In this empirical study, the author presents the collective practices of political translation, which help multilingual and culturally diverse groups work together more democratically than homogeneous groups. Political translation, distinct from linguistic translation, is a set of disruptive and communicative practices developed by activists and grassroots community organizers in order to address inequities hindering democratic deliberation and to entreat powerful groups to work together more inclusively with disempowered groups. Based on ten years of fieldwork, Political Translation provides the first systematic comparative study of deliberation under conditions of linguistic difference and cultural misunderstandings. Proposes a new vision of democracy and deliberation in culturally diverse civic groups and social movements Introduces a new model of 'the third' within deliberative democracy Presents a working model of democracy that makes possible cooperation and coalition building in heterogeneous groups and settings characterized by structural inequality and geographic distance, based on case studies in Europe and the US.
Since the mid-1990s, the Vatican contests the concept of gender as forged by feminists to study social arrangements through which the sexual order is naturalised. This contestation came with the distortion of the analyses and claims formulated by feminists and LGBTQ scholars and social movements. This article understands the Vatican’s invention of ‘gender ideology’ as a new rhetorical device produced both to delegitimise feminist and LGBTQ studies and struggles and to reaffirm that sexual norms transcend historical and political arrangements. It also investigates how the transnationality of this discursive construct relates to the specific features it has taken in two different national contexts – France and Italy. The article is structured as follows: it first highlights the logic and structure of the anti-gender discourse. Then, it analyses how the same argumentative device is performed in anti-gender demonstrations. Finally, it scrutinises the rhetorical and performative strategies through which anti-gender actors have formulated their views and argues that ‘gender ideology’ can be understood as a political reaction against the entry of minorities into the fields of politics and theory.
Abuse directed at visible and audible women demonstrates that cyberspace, once heralded as a new, democratic, public sphere, suffers similar gender inequalities as the offline world. This paper reports findings from a national UK study about experiences of online abuse among women who debate feminist politics. It argues that online abuse is most usefully conceived as a form of abuse or violence against women and girls, rather than as a form of communication. It examines the experiences of those receiving online abuse, thereby making a valuable contribution to existing research which tends to focus on analysis of the communications themselves.
The complexities of Polish gender politics can be conceptualized as a series of paradoxes. Until recently, Polish feminists had deined the very possiblity of a Polish women's movement. This article argues that Polish feminism resists the chronology of "waves": it uses styles and tactics characteristic of the third wave (irony, high theory, camp, cross-dressing, etc.) to achieve typically second wave aims (reproductive rights, equal pay, etc). It then engages with a historical paradox: the phenomenon of backlash before feminism. Rejecting the political in favour of the personal was compatible with psycho-sexual dynamics already in progress - these were a defence against the intrusiveness of state involved in building a deeply conservative private sphere. The article then moves onto an examination of the present deadlock between the Catholic church, the post-communist government and the women's movement.
This paper connects current studies of post-socialist nostalgia
to the issue of feminist genealogies in the contemporary European
context. Studies of post-socialist nostalgia can prove significant
not only for the former socialist East - to which they
have traditionally been limited - but also for the “former
West”, that is post-Cold War Western Europe. In the first part
of my paper I draw a connection between feminist genealogies
and post-socialist nostalgia in the former East, looking in particular
at the phenomenon of Yugonostalgia from a gendered
and feminist perspective, and taking my research on the 1978
Belgrade feminist conference Drugarica Zena/Comrade Woman
as a point of departure. The narrative about Yugoslavia being
closer to Western Europe and to Western European feminist
movements in the 1970s, in comparison to today’s marginalization
of post-Yugoslav successor states, indicates that
changes in gender regimes are deeply connected to shifts in
ideological and geopolitical relations, including the shifting
boundaries of Europe after 1989. In the second part of this essay
I transpose the study of post-socialist nostalgia to the former
West. When looking more closely at Western European
countries, particularly at those who had significant communist
parties such as Italy and France, it is clear that even in the
West certain articulations of post-socialist nostalgia for radical
pasts have emerged, helping us to unravel women’s and feminist
movements’ genealogies that have been made invisible. I
take the case of the recent Italian movie Cosmonauta as a
symptom of post-socialist nostalgia in the former West.
The aim of this article is to analyse the strategies of the first Italian commercial broadcaster (Fininvest/Mediaset) in the media sector, from its foundation to the present, considering four parameters: politics, the market, technology and society. Analysing the uniquely Italian political, economic, technological and societal traits and the strategies adopted by Fininvest/Mediaset in each of these four areas, the authors read the company's history in a new light and identify some elements that have contributed to its success over the last 30 years. For example, the ever-closer ties with politics; the ability to foresee and adopt pioneering marketing strategies; the defence of the regulatory and technological status quo; and, finally, the close relationship with public opinion and Italian society.
Sociologists have turned to collective identity to fill gaps in resource mobilization and political process accounts of the emergence, trajectories, and impacts of social movements. Collective identity has been treated as an alternative to struc-turally given interests in accounting for the claims on behalf of which people mobilize, an alternative to selective incentives in understanding why people participate, an al-ternative to instrumental rationality in explaining what tactical choices activists make, and an alternative to institutional reforms in assessing movements' impacts. Collec-tive identity has been treated both too broadly and too narrowly, sometimes applied to too many dynamics, at other times made into a residual category within structuralist, state-centered, and rationalist accounts.
What are the consequences of European integration on social movements? Who are the “winners” and the “losers” of Europe’s organized civil society? This book explores the Europeanization of contention through an in-depth, comparative analysis of French and German pro-asylum movements since the end of the 1990s. Through an examination of their networks, discourses, and collective actions, it shows that the groups composing these movements display different degrees and forms of Europeanization, reflected in different fields of protest. More generally, it shows the multiple strategies implemented by activists to Europeanize their scope of mobilization and by doing so participate in the construction of a European public sphere.
This book explores the increasing imperatives to speak up, to speak out, and to ‘find one’s voice’ in contemporary media culture. It considers how, for women in particular, this seems to constitute a radical break with the historical idealization of silence and demureness. However, the author argues that there is a growing and pernicious gap between the seductive promise of voice, and voice as it actually exists. While brutal instruments such as the ducking stool and scold’s bridle are no longer in use to punish women’s speech, Kay proposes that communicative injustice now operates in much more insidious ways. The wide-ranging chapters explore the mediated ‘voices’ of women such as Monica Lewinsky, Hannah Gadsby, Diane Abbott, and Yassmin Abdel-Magied, as well as the problems and possibilities of gossip, nagging, and the ‘traumatised voice’ in television talk shows. It critiques the optimistic claims about the ‘unleashing’ of women’s voices post-#MeToo and examines the ways that women’s speech continues to be trivialized and devalued. Communicative justice, the author argues, is not about empowering individuals to ‘find their voice’, but about collectively transforming the whole communicative terrain.
The Women’s Movement is usually referred to as if it were a constant, global phenomenon. There are women’s movements in Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, India, Japan and Australia, and many women and men assume that they are regional manifestations of the same thing, and share a common core. Susan Bassnett has lived and been involved in the struggles of the women’s movement in the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom, and has had extensive contacts with feminists in the German Democratic Republic. On the basis of her personal experiences and study of women’s history and literature in these countries she is able to present a striking picture of the variety of feminist aims, tactics and priorities in the four countries, and of the character of the women’s movement in four very different cultures. In Italy, she focuses on the violence of the women’s movement – its intellectualism and energy. In analysing the American women’s movement she dwells on its roots in the past, and its faith in pragmatic solutions. The GDR presents completely different questions, hinging on the relationship between state socialism and feminism. In the UK, Susan Bassnett finds herself returning to that all-pervasive aspect of British life – class, and its importance for feminists. Throughout, the author writes with a double commitment: first, to furthering our understanding of the diversity of aims of women’s movements and their common ground – the no-man’s land of female existence; second, to making her book as accessible as possible to all feminists, through drawing on her own personal experience of countries in which she has lived, worked, travelled, and made friends.
In recent years, feminists have turned to digital technologies and social media platforms to dialogue, network, and organize against contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. The emergence of feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #BeenRapedNeverReported, and Everyday Sexism are part of a growing trend of digital resistances and challenges to sexism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Although recent scholarship has documented the ways digital spaces are often highly creative sites where the public can learn about and intervene in rape culture, little research has explored girls’ and women’s experiences of using digital platforms to challenge misogynistic practices. This is therefore the first book-length study to interrogate how girls and women negotiate rape culture through digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps. Through an analysis of high-profile campaigns such as Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and the everyday activism of Twitter feminists, this book presents findings of over 800 pieces of digital content, and semi-structured interviews with 82 girls, women, and some men around the world, including organizers of various feminist campaigns and those who have contributed to them. As our study shows, digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and a variety of digital platforms are used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes. Furthermore, although it may be technologically easy for many groups to engage in digital feminist activism, there remain emotional, mental, or practical barriers that create different experiences, and legitimate some feminist voices, perspectives, and experiences over others.
This article investigates the relationship between space appropriation and women’s writing and publishing activities, in the context of second-wave feminism in Milan. From the early 1970s onwards, Milan’s feminist movement – which arose from the conjunction between transnational, national and local factors – engaged in a variety of translating, writing and publishing projects. In fact, Milan was one of the first Italian cities to publish translations of foreign feminist texts. More importantly, it was the site of the earliest feminist theoretical production in Italy. The article argues that, at different points of the decade, the empowering act of writing, publishing and circulating feminist knowledge reflected a search for a more profound consciousness of the female self which was intricately connected to the (symbolical and material) appropriation of women-only spaces in the city. In particular, it discusses three different expressions of this interaction between physical and discursive space: the feminist publishing house Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, the Libreria delle donne di Milano and the 150 hours monographic courses in the Affori neighbourhood.
European anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements form part of a global wave of protests following the global financial crisis. Despite continuity of actors and a double critique of global capitalism and democratic deficits from the previous Global Justice Movement, the centrality of the nation as target and focus of mobilization is a significant difference in this wave. The economic impact of the crisis and austerity policies is insufficient to explain variation in mobilization across countries hardest hit. In order to transform economic/material grievances into collective resistance, grievances need to be channelled against specific targets, and interpretive frameworks of meaning tied to a collective identity need to be mobilized. In Europe, anti-austerity protests were initiated by two sets of actors, Institutional Left and autonomous actors. Autonomous actors linked anti-austerity claims to interpretive system of meanings framed around the crisis of legitimacy of representative democracy; targeted primarily national political and economic oligarchies; and mobilized newcomers through an inclusive collective identity constructed around the ‘ordinary citizen’ as political subject. Democratic regeneration emerges as a significant demand, but is uneven in its resonance. It finds its clearest and most emblematic expression in the ‘movements of the squares’. To the extent that the ‘twin’ crises (financial/democratic) are framed synergistically, they can be seen as counter-hegemonic, as they seek to rupture the consensus of the ‘post-political’. The presence or absence of a strong pro-democracy narrative that connects actors across sectorial and organizational differences could help explain variation between cases. Transnational diffusion processes have been crucial but have not (yet) led to a transnational movement. Given the significant role of the Troika in the bail-outs, debt renegotiations and austerity policies of those countries hardest hit, the low visibility of ‘Europe’ in the mobilizations is surprising.
This book is an attempt to save “the sexual” from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem, from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, and from all of these thinkers back to Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. At the end, through readings of Bruce LaBruce’s movies on gay zombies, the elitism of antisocial queer theory is brought into contact with popular culture. The living dead come to represent a dispossessed form of subjectivity, whose monstrous drives are counterposed to predatory desires of liberal individuals. The reader is thus lead into the interstitial spaces of the Queer Apocalypses, where the past and the future collapse onto the present, and sexual minorities resurrect to the chance of a non-heroic political agency.
The Italian women’s movement of the 1970s was one of the largest and most diverse in Europe. However, after the movement's decline in the late 1970s, scholarly interest in women studies and in the history of second-wave feminism has primarily been upheld through the creation and promotion of women's archives, documentary centres and libraries. More recently, new generations of women have engaged in battles for women's rights, debates about gender issues and feminist scholarship, relying increasingly on new media technologies and social media. It is tempting to conclude that the generation gap that so often marks the relationship between different feminist generations is enhanced by such a technological divide. This article, instead, challenges this assumption by studying the case of an information-based organization that was created in the early 1980s by a group of local feminists in the Italian city of Bologna, and which adopted a strongly digital approach to historical scholarship in the early 1990s. What is the impact of a similar, digital approach to women's history on the nature of historical scholarship and the shape of the archive? Can the digital break through academic hierarchies and institutional barriers, and give a voice to those who have long remained outside of official historiography?
This essay examines the struggle of Italian feminism for transforming long rooted beliefs and gender roles in Italy since the late nineteenth century. I specifically focus on the legal, political and symbolic levels. First, I describe the historical formation of Italian feminism and its relation with literature and politics. Next, I examine the emergence of new feminist groups, and their involvement with the late 1960s protests. I then briefly explore the issues of divorce, labor and family laws during the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, I summarize the progress of the lesbian and queer movements in their struggle for recognition and freedom.
In this introductory essay, we begin by discussing the attraction and limits of the ‘wave’ metaphor in feminist history and politics, before moving into a wider discussion of feminist subjectivity and agency. We then summarize the key issues, themes and objects/sites for contemporary feminists, before ending with some reflections on the changing character of feminist strategy. We argue that while the wave metaphor has been popular among feminists in many parts of Europe, it does not travel easily across national and regional borders, and should best be understood as a way of framing feminist practice, rather than referring to discreet cohorts of feminists. We can also discern a broader trend whereby preoccupations around the precise character of the feminist subject have given way to more diverse conceptions of feminist subjectivity in which the role of historically excluded constituencies within feminism – queers, lesibian, gay, bisexual and trans* women, black and minority ethnic women and indeed men – are, in some contexts, more visible. This is reflected in the practices of contemporary feminisms, in which the dominant approach is what we might call, following Bice Maiguashca, a ‘principled pragmatism’, characterized by a steadfast opposition to gender inequality alongside a degree of fluidity and flexibility in terms of the strategies and tactics used.
Focusing on the street AIDS activist movement ACT UP, this article explores the question of social movement sustainability. Emotions figure centrally in two ways. First, I argue that the emotion work of movements, largely ignored by scholars, is vital to their ability to develop and thrive over time. I investigate the ways AIDS activists nourished and extended an "emotional common sense" that was amenable to their brand of street activism, exploring, for example, the ways in which ACT UP marshaled grief and tethered it to anger; reoriented the object of gay pride away from community stoicism and toward gay sexual difference and militant activism; transformed the subject and object of shame from gay shame about homosexuality to government shame about its negligent response to AIDS; and gave birth to a new "queer" identity that joined the new emotional common sense, militant politics, and sexradicalism into a compelling package that helped to sustain the movement. Second, I investigate the emotions generated in the heat of the action that also helped the street AIDS activist movement flourish into the early 1990s.
This article seeks to intervene in what I perceive to be a problematic opposition in feminist theory between ontological and epistemological accounts of existence and politics, by proposing an approach that weaves together Elspeth Probyn’s conceptualisation of ‘feminist reflexivity’ with a re-reading of feminist standpoint through affect. In so doing, I develop the concept of affective solidarity as necessary for sustainable feminist politics of transformation. This approach is proposed as a way of moving away from rooting feminist transformation in the politics of identity and towards modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance experience can produce. Moving beyond empathy as a privileged way of connecting with others, I argue that the difference between ‘womanhood’ and ‘feminism’ is critical for a universal yet non-essential understanding of what motivates gendered change.
In this paper, I argue that we are currently witnessing the emergence of neoliberal feminism in the USA, which is most clearly articulated in two highly publicized and widely read ‘feminist manifestos’: Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (a New York Times best-seller) and Anne-Marie Slaughter's ‘Why Women Still Can't Have It All’ (the most widely read piece in the history of the Atlantic). Concentrating on the shifting discursive registers in Lean In, I propose that the book can give us insight into the ways in which the husk of liberalism is being mobilized to spawn a neoliberal feminism as well as a new feminist subject. This feminist subject accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care, which is increasingly predicated on crafting a felicitous work–family balance based on a cost-benefit calculus. I further pose the question of why neoliberalism has spawned a feminist rather than a female subject. Why, in other words, is there any need for the production of a neoliberal feminism, which draws attention to a specific kind of inequality and engenders a particularly feminist subject? While this new form of feminism can certainly be understood as yet another domain neoliberalism has colonized by producing its own variant, I suggest that it simultaneously serves a particular cultural purpose: it hollows out the potential of mainstream liberal feminism to underscore the constitutive contradictions of liberal democracy, and in this way further entrenches neoliberal rationality and an imperialist logic. Indeed, neoliberal feminism may be the latest discursive modality to (re)produce the USA as the bastion of progressive liberal democracy. Rather than deflecting internal criticism by shining the spotlight of oppressive practices onto other countries while overtly showcasing its enlightened superiority, this discursive formation actually generates its own internal critique of the USA. Yet, it simultaneously inscribes and circumscribes the permissible parameters of that very same critique.
Over the last twenty years significant changes have taken place in the nature and role of Italian civil society. In this article, I first offer a definition of modern civil society and then trace its historical development in Italy, especially during the republican period. I then move on to discuss why civil society has flourished so markedly over the past two decades. I concentrate in particular on the structural transformations of the middle classes, outlining their dominant position in Italian society and their increased cultural capital. I suggest that a new reflexive middle class has provided the backbone for civil-society protests, especially those in defence of the Constitution and against Silvio Berlusconi's manipulations of the media and of the law. These protests have been impressively large, but should not be allowed to mask the many shortcomings of contemporary civil society, which render it more vulnerable than at first appears. I end the article with an appeal for new forms of politics which combine both civil and political society, representative and participatory democracy.
This article explores the transnational, national and local origins and contexts of the Wages for Housework campaign in 1970s Italy and the Padua-based group Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) which coordinated it. The significance of the campaign and its legacy in Italian and transnational feminism are critically assessed. The origins of the campaign as it emerged in early-1970s Italy are traced by looking at the transnational activist trajectories of its two protagonists, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Further, the reasons why the campaign found relatively more support in Italy than elsewhere are explained by looking at the lack of women's financial independence due to rising unemployment and relatively low wages. The local context is placed at the centre of attention, as the ideological origins of Wages for Housework are traced in operaismo (workerism) and autonomist thought and practice, which were influential in radical-left and feminist milieux in the industrial area of Porto Margera and Padua around 1970. The article demonstrates the need for an understanding of 1970s feminisms that is fully cognisant of the interplay between transnational transfers and local recontextualisation, and presents an approach for doing so.
This article examines the relationship between migration and identity by complicating our notion of what ‘home’ means, both for the narrative of ‘being at home’ and for the narrative of ‘leaving home’. It offers, not a migrant ontology, but a consideration of the historical determination of patterns of estrangement in which the living and yet mediated relation between being, home and world is partially reconfigured from the perspective of those who have left home. This reconfiguration does not take place through the heroic act of an individual (the migrant), but through the forming of communities that create multiple identifications through collective acts of remembering in the absence of a shared knowledge or a familiar terrain. The article interweaves a variety of different texts: short stories by Asian women in Britain, autobiographical reflection, theoretical constructions of migrancy and literature from two very different nomadic or migrant communities, the Global Nomads International and the Asian Women’s Writing Collective. The article provides a critique of recent theories of migrancy - and nomadism - as inherently transgressive, or as an ontological condition (where what we have in common is the loss of a home). The author argues that it is through an uncommon estrangement that the possibility of migrant communities comes to be lived. That is, it is the uncommon estrangement of migration that allows migrant subjects to remake what it is they might yet have in common.
This paper traces the connections between Antonio Gramsci's ideas and developments in Western gender and women's history. The revival of women's history in the West in the 1970s brought the discovery or reacquaintance with Gramsci's writings, and this essay looks at examples of recent scholarship in gender and women's history that employs Gramscian theory. Equally important will be a consideration of Gramsci himself as an actor on the stage of women's history in the years before World War II. The last third of the paper places Gramsci in Italian family life, Communist Party politics and men's and women's prison experiences in the first half of the twentieth century. This discussion benefits from the growth of secondary literature on gender and women's history in Italy for this era, and rests on the many primary accounts left by women who lived and worked with Gramsci.
If the concept of repression is to be useful when the state is not the primary target of social movement action, it needs to conceptualize how changes in values, perspectives, culture, norms, expectations and behavior in the public at large are contested through political interaction in civil society. Although non-state actors can sometimes use violence, their typical forms of repression of social movements are non-violent or “soft.” I suggest three forms of action – ridicule, stigma and silencing – that are commonly employed by non-state actors to repress challengers. Because women’s movements include challenges to non-state authorities, they have long been targets of soft repression. Examples of the use of power against challengers to the gender status quo are used to illustrate all three forms of soft repression.
This article explores Cold War assumptions that have shaped the western historiography of inter/transnational women’s organisations, in particular the International Council of Women (ICW), the International Alliance of Women (IAW), and the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). A number of assumptions are discussed—that the western organisations were ‘politically neutral’, with their feminist identity or agenda taken for granted; secondly, that the ICW and IAW were located ‘in the West’ and the WIDF ‘behind the Iron Curtain’, without any interaction between them; and thirdly, that the Congress of American Women (CAW) and its international umbrella organisation, the Women’s International Democratic Federation, were deeply politicised, i.e. ‘Communist’ but not ‘feminist’. It is argued that these assumptions have contributed to a one‐sided emphasis on western international women’s organisations and to a state of ‘not knowing’ about the WIDF. In the second part of the article, the WIDF is briefly discussed, with a focus on its early life in war‐ravaged Europe.
Digital feminism in Italy: The Se non ora quando social movement
- M Ardizzoni
- Ardizzoni M.
Prefiguring a feminist academia: A multivocal autoethnography on the creation of a feminist space in a neoliberal university in society and business review
- C Deschner
- L Dorion
- L Salvatori
- Deschner C.
Feminist international. How to change everything
- V Gago
- L Mason-Deese
- Gago V.
Feminism for the 99%. Verso
- C Arruzza
- T Bhattacharya
- N Fraser
- Arruzza C.
Il moto ondoso dei femminismi: abbiamo avvistato la quarta ondata
- S Magaraggia
- Magaraggia S.
Restoring the natural order”: The religious extremists’ vision to mobilize European societies against human rights on sexuality and reproduction
- N Datta
- Datta N.
How does change happen?
- A Davis
Wages against housework. Power of Women Collective and the Falling Wall Press
- S Federici
- Federici S.
Feminist media studies
- A Harvey
- Harvey A.
Anti-gender movements on the rise? Strategising for gender equality in central and Eastern Europe
- E Korolczuk
- Korolczuk E.
Io, partigiana. La mia Resistenza
- L Menapace
- Menapace L.