DWF
donnawomanfemme
Roma, Editrice coop. UTOPIA, 1986-

Homilies by women, 1996, n. 30-31

EDITORIAL, Homilies by women, pp. 2-3

In the present issue the editorial board has questioned directly some women who live a religious experience inside the Christian tradition with the intent to enquire their understanding of some of the crucial issues connected to the feminist practice, such as the relationship between/among women, the question of authority, of freedom etc.; the concern was to value the shifts occurred in these years in their selfperception, on one side, and on the other, in the way culture and society perceive their experience and role, beyond all stereotyping.

PERRONI Marinella, The Spirit and the World, pp. 4-14

The author teaches theology in the Pontificio Ateneo Sant'Anselmo in Rome; drawing upon her personal experience, she looks at the itinerary of Catholic women theologians in the cultural and political context of the last decades. "I borrowed in particular from the North American and the Mitteleuropean tradition - she writes - the professional tools necessary to interpret theology from a feminist point of view. Thus I was able to decode the human, cultural and religious complexities I was experiencing as a women living in the context of a Church which was inexorably male oriented".

BONAFEDE Maria, The space of the word, pp. 15-22

"Thirty years have gone by since the Synod's decision to admit women as minister in the Waldensian church; they are the years of the flourishing and formidable development of women's thought. The interaction and mutual influence between these two realities cannot be doubted", argues Bonafede, Waldensian minister in Rome. She analyses this process and the changes it has brought about. "The relationship between/among women has been for many of us a space of knowledge, the space of the word: where a new female subject could be born, one who dares think for herself, and faces the adventure of a new thought, in theology as well".

STELLA Rosetta, The eye and the foot, pp. 23-31

Nuns today are "women outside those stereotypes which still linger in the imaginary about them": Stella gives examples, referring to a number of nuns who "have taken advantage of the changes authorised by the Concilio Vaticano in order to go somehow further". In the second part of her paper, the author discusses the concept of "authority", and "the relationship between authority and obedience, in a Church which is still imbued of a hierarchical culture".

COLOMBO suor Maria, She doesn't like frontiers, pp. 32-36

"More and more, the missionary woman walks with people, and she has got the capacity for it". She has also got a professional and cultural background, as demonstrated by sister Maria Colombo, missionary "ad gentes" and now a teacher of other missionaries to be. Rather than asking for power in the ecclesiastical structures, the author thinks that women "should 'provoke' male authority into taking radical decision listening to the language of life and experience".

FORCINA Marisa (edited by), To control, to obey, to free, pp. 37-51

A dialogue of the author with three women in orders: a nun, an abbess, an enclosed nun - three women who have chosen different ways of living their vocation in different communities. The author's aim is to mediate between the language of rationality and politics and the language of faith.

VEGETTI Rosangela, Saint and blessed women, pp. 52-57

Patrizia Cacioli, of the "DWF" editorial board, interviews Rosangela Vegetti, on the criteria and procedures of beatification and canonisation of saint and blessed women. Drawing upon historical and present day examples, Vegetti argues that "as the social context and the attitudes towards women change, the idea of female saintliness also undergoes a modification; new criteria become possible", a different conception of a woman's 'exemplary life' opens up. "Now the focus is not on heroic motherhood or ascetical virginity, but rather on the integrity, consistency and maturity of one's way of living according to the Gospel".

BELLENZIER Maria Teresa, A providential chance, pp. 58-72

The author retraces the historical and cultural stages of the meeting, in Italy, between lay Catholic activist women and the feminist movement. Overcoming prejudices and misunderstandings, thanks to the action of some Catholic women's groups - such as "Progetto Donna" - "a different view of the feminist movement became possible", and feminism came to be seen "as a providential chance to provoke and encourage a reflection, in the Catholic world, about a most peculiar challenge of our times".

PUTINO Angela, Discourse, truth, government, pp. 73-79

The author looks at two different but related problems: the relationship between discourse and truth, and that between discourse and government. Firstly, she argues that positioning female difference against the background of its interpretations in modernity or postmodernity is today, for a woman, the taste of a discourse of truth - that is to say a critical discourse: a critical analysis which involves both the possibility of understanding our gender and the diagnosis of the world we live in. Secondly, she highlights the subtle awareness of the threads which linked the practises of governing with the strategies of knowledge, with the communicative and symbolic processes: a passionate, specific work undertaken by women, in a reinterpretation of Foucault's thought.

DE LAURETIS Teresa, Prodigal daughters, 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".