Articles for DWF
Books reviewed by DWF
Articles for DWF
The practice of sexual difference and the feminist thought in Italy, 1991,
n. 15, pp. 37-56
Teresa de Lauretis has translated the book Non credere di avere dei diritti by the Milan Women's Bookstore Group (Theory of Social Symbolic Practice, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana Univ. Press, 1991, pp. 110) with an introductory essay which presents to the American scholars a work which "is not only a major theoretical text of Italian feminism but one which, in elaborating a critical theory of culture based on the practice of sexual difference, also reconstructs a history of feminism in Italy from the particular location, the social and political situatedness, of its authors".
De Lauretis outlines a framework of reference which allows to place the experience of the authors in the context - more complex and articulated - of Italian feminism as well as in the philosophical tradition of the '900, focusing at the same time on the epistemological break intentionally produced by their theory and political practice of feminine freedom. "A freedom that, paradoxically - comments de Lauretis - demands no indication of the rights of women, no equal rights under the law, but only a full, political and personal, accountability to women, is as startlingly radical a notion as any that has emerged in Western thought".
Special emphasis, in the essay of de Lauretis, is put on the question of the place and meaning of lesbianism in the Italian tradition and in the political thought of the authors: a letter (never published before) by Luisa Muraro - one of the Bookstore women - brings to the debate a new interpretative contribution.
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Prodigal daughters, 1996, n. 30-31, pp. 80-90
La figlia prodiga ("The prodigal daughter") is the title of a novel by Alice Ceresa, published by Einaudi in 1967; but she is also the subject of the novel and as such - since it this an experimental metanarrative novel - the prodigal daughter is a semantic neologism, both as a character and as trope, built on the paradox that "not all that is known is also understood".
De Lauretis contextualizes the novel within the cultural and critical debate of the late Sixties (when Ceresa won the Viareggio Opera Prima prize); but she also underlines the "political" contemporary meaning of this text: as the story of this character is a story against the grain, a negative story, "the story of what in a positive narration could not be represented, because the codes of representation developed by the dominant culture do not include, do not accept - and therefore cannot positively represent - the peculiar prodigality of a prodigal daughter".
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Books reviewed by DWF
DE LAURETIS Teresa, The practice of love. Lesbian sexuality and perverse
desire, Indiana University Press, 1994
rev. by Simonetta Spinelli, 1994, n. 24, pp. 130-131
DE LAURETIS Teresa, Sui generis. Scritti di teoria femminista, Milano, Feltrinelli,
1996
rev. by Simonetta Spinelli, 1996, n. 29, pp. 88-91