DWF
donnawomanfemme
Roma, Editrice coop. UTOPIA, 1986-

Rethinking the events, 1993, n. 18-19

EDITORIAL, Rethinking the events, pp. 2-6

An essential feature of women's politics is the interpretation of the world, which is part of its transformation. We need to reflect more on the processes which produce a new interpretation, on the consequences it entails, on how interpretation take the form of political action. This issue wants to contribute to such reflection, also stressing the need to "govern" the interpretation, to maintain the link with the political practice which made it possible, especially with regard to the images of women proposed by the media.

BUFFO Gloria, What was needed was politics, pp. 7-10

May 25th, 1993, Palermo's cathedral church: funerals of judges Giovanni Falcone and Francesca Morvillo (his wife) and of their police escort - all killed by the mafia. Rosaria Costa, widowed wife of one of the agents (Vito Schifano), tries to read an appeal prepared to address the authors of the massacre. Seeing her live on TV, everybody perceived her impossibility to read that text, the taking over in her features and in her voice of a different truth. Reflecting on this episode, Gloria Buffo remembers how - through which political experiences - she has come to understand the strength of southern women, going beyond the cultural stereotypes still current (even in the left); how she came to see and appreciate the value of Rosaria Costa's gesture of freedom.

MIZZAU Marina, Ironical seduction, pp. 11-14

With examples taken from the language of the media and advertising, Mizzau means to show how the emphasis on women's seductiveness, now as ever, reveals a devaluation of women and their reification. Pretending that there is a new ironical slant in the use of seduction is simply a way to try and give it a patina of modernity, without really modifying the culturally created images of women.

GIORGI Stefania, Making the news, pp. 15-19

A journalist who works in a daily newspaper looks at her criteria for selecting scraps of reality and turning them into "news", analysing how her conception and her experience of female freedom inform her choices and what conflicts this generates in her work place.

VEGETTI FINZI Silvia, Being alone and with other women, pp. 20-27

The author looks back on her experience as child analyst with little girls, and to the process which allowed her to identify and conceptualise "the baby of the night", that phantasmatic baby which is so often present in the fantasies of little girls, pre-existing the experience of pregnancy and generation. Her focus is on the importance of a political context, of a feminist culture which helped her to develop and to enrich her hypothesis. "What matters - she writes - is my awareness that a gendered knowledge, which I had found in my clinical work with little girls, would never have become a shared theory (which also means the possibility to disagree) without the women's movement, their capacity to listen, to re-think and elaborate, to communicate".

BUTTAFUOCO Annarita - MATTESINI Luana, Writing about oneself: a critical overview on women's autobiography, pp. 28-47

In this section of the journal feminist scholars of some standing introduce younger scholars whose work they want to be known and appreciated; here Annarita Buttafuoco (historian) introduce Luana Mattesini. A rich and well researched overview of the methodological problems addressed by those scholars who in recent years have tried to valorise - also developing a theoretical stance - the manifold aspects and forms of female representation of the self.

BORGHI Liana - CAPELLI Simona, Gertrude Stein's narrations of the self, pp. 48-68

Liana Borghi, literary critic and theorist, introduces Simona Capelli. The author analyses Stein's ways of questioning the established conception of autobiography, continually deferring, dislocating and eluding the promises put forth in the titles of her writings (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Everybody's Autobiography). In Stein's case, one ought perhaps talk of "autographs" - to use Stanton's term; they neither narrate a life nor tell a story, but focus on specific features of the subject of representation, through a mode of writing which proceeds by repetition and accumulation.

ROSSOLINI Roberta, The political thought of Hannah Arendt and the philosophy of sexual difference, pp. 69-84

The author analyses the categories of Arendt's political theory which have been re-elaborated and re-utilised by philosophers engaged in the signification of sexual difference. In order to examine the strengths and limitations of such re-elaboration, Rossolini focuses particularly on the categories of "birth" and "plurality", and on Arendt's redefinition of fundamental concepts of western thought, such as the idea of public and private, and that of political action.