DWF
donnawomanfemme
Roma, Editrice coop. UTOPIA, 1986-

If every woman, 1991, n. 15

EDITORIAL, If every woman, pp. 5-8

The first part retraces the review's political reasoning from the first issue of the present series onwards. This issue's title is motivated by the will to advance the limits of comunication among women, in order to "deprofessionalize" politics and reflect on the here and now of an organized presence, on female authoritativeness, and on the problem of speaking a language women's desires and experiences might recognize. All this is the collective sense of female subjectivity.

BAERI Emma, The didactic, the mother and Venus, pp. 9-16

The author probes into a query which originates from her scientific and didactic experience - she is a historian, a researcher of Modem History at the Political Science Department of the University of Catania - as well as from her own personal and political background: how to transfer knowledge and meaning, how to construct political relationship, in a situation which is asymmetric; asymmetry of knowledge and power, and in a context which is no longer the feminism of the 70's. Baeri identifies in the consciousness of self in real motherhood - as opposed to the plain biological fact on the one hand as well as to a quick leaf into symbolic motherhood on the other hand - the event which consents to elaborate possible answers. Admission of the other, recognition of oneself, se-duction qualify the maternal body as a place of birth of the first borderline between two subjects. The glance of Venus - the squint look which identifies at the same time the same and the different, which sexualises relationships, which prompts at responsibility towards the self and at the world, is (according to the author) what allow to be "freely and respectfully seductive".

GUARNERI Marisa - LOTTI Maria Rosa, A bet: A rape crisis center in Milan, pp. 17-25

The authors analyze the political route which has lead them to the experience of the "Rape crisis center" starting from the Union of Italian Women of Milan "seat and prestigious centre firstly of emancipation and secondly of the undertakings of women". It tells the choices and the problems which have been faced and solved; it brings to a focus the linguistic modalities of relations through which political relations are established with each woman who - owing to her problems - turns to the house. "The organization and running of one's own and others lives - write the authors - are a burden and an opportunity which have not yet found their own symbolic statute other than in the panegyric of the family and in the importance of women in the social. We know the territory which we move in is a symbolic frontier and a daily risk. Moreover we know that our gaze is still of investigation in addition to experience".

SPINELLI Simonetta, Taken as a whole and in details, pp. 26-29

The lesbian women who have operated and still operate inside women's movement seem to have kept the capability of a bifocal sight. A sight able to cacht the wholeness of a female thought intended to be dominant in the world, and the material detail of the relations and bonds representing the molecular structure of the political genre. A capability highly political that can be left unused - as Simonetta Spinelli asserts - until lesbian women fail to "make clear, beyond reticence and mimetism - through which they deny women's freedom - what change of practice and what necessity are involved by the investment of their lives towards a woman. What female freedom dimension it creates, what it reveals and, finally, what authoritativeness it establishes".

SPINELLI Fiamma, Shadows of stubborn existences, p. 30-35

The author of the three plates explains her will to follow this itinerary among "arboreous existences", fascinated by their ability to fight for survival; "regardless of concrete and asphalt, they stubbornly find ground for their roots, sun and footholds to spread their leaves, recreating the wealth of play of a thousand shadows, witnesses to their existence".

DE LAURETIS Teresa, The practice of sexual difference and the feminist thought in Italy, 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.