Italian sea, Italian waves. A critical review on “third wave” feminism

Italian Sea, Italian Waves

A critical review on “third wave” feminism

 

Introduction

 

Involving concepts such as “sameness” and “differences”, the general division of feminist periods remarks differences in struggles and vindication: for equality in rights in the public space and in politics, in the historical and geographical context of the U.S.A and a part of Europe in the first wave, and, in second wave’s theories, for the recognition of the specific condition of every woman and of women’s challenge to the status quo. We can trace thematic between the key issues of the two waves in Europe: “The two waves of feminism were instrumental in achieving agenda status for the suffrage and emancipation acts of the early part of the twentieth century, followed by the equality and anti-discrimination initiatives of the 1970s and the 1980s” (Lovenduski 1986: 246). However, we can find differences between country and country, in particular about historical-social-economic assessments.

In this research I am  going to draw a comparison between the “classical” definitions of waves in Anglophone countries and the experience of a peculiar country, i.e. Italy. In particular I am going to analyze the “third wave” as a concept born in the United States, formed within its specific context in a specific period, in order to clarify similarities and differences with Italian contemporary feminist activism.

 

1. A review of Italian waves

 

The diversity of Italy, in comparison to U.S. and U.K. first-wave movements, can be traced from the period in which the “waves” appeared. In the first countries struggles and writings in support of women’s right to vote and to equality in work and education developed within the 18^thand 19^thcenturies, along the history of socialist-feminism tothe suffragist movement. “The first wave in the United States is often seen as having begun with the Seneca Falls Conference of 1848 and ending with the passage of women suffrage in 1920” (Bailey 1997: 18). However, a first wave in Italy is difficult to define temporally because the debate about women suffrage started in the XIX century within the left-wing parties and movements, then ended only after the World War II. So we can find socialist writers such as Anna Kulishoff, who wrote in 1894 Il monopolio dell’uomo: conferenza tenuta nel circolo filologico milanese¹(Male monopoly: a conference of the philological club in Milan), and in 1910 Il *voto alle donne: polemica in famiglia per la propaganda del suffragio universale in Italia² (The vote for women: family controversy on the universal suffrage propaganda in Italy). In 1899 Unione Donne di Milano was a group of bourgeois women focused on the suffrage issue (Cutrufelli & others 2001: 5). The right to vote, instead, was an achievement of a new “first wave” in 1946, i.e., headed by UDI (Unione Donne Italiane), the most important communist women’s organization founded by women who took part in the “resistance” movement against the fascist dictatorship during the World War II.

De Clementi affirms that a real feminist movement  started in Italy only in the second part of 1900 with the new republican government, after twenty years of silence, caused by the fascist dictatorship (De Clementi 2002: 332). I think that this historical analysis could be considered reductive but it is an example of the epistemological assumption that a “proto-feminism” is different from  conscious feminist activism. Some pages later, the author mentions anarchist women, the “heritage of the Risorgimento in the Mazzini, anti-clerical mould” (De Clementi 2002: 334-335), and CNDI (Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane), founded in 1903³, a branch of the International Council of Women. But until scholars talk about the first part of the 20th century “women” are the subjects.⁴ It’s only with the “second wave” or “neo-feminism” that the word “feminist” is used to define movements and women involved. I am not going deep into the history of the Italian women’s movement, but a short summary can be useful to show different concepts of boundaries between the waves and then to understand the meaning of “second wave” for women who described their feminism within this concept. Moreover the distinction between feminist waves in the U.S.A. is clear because of the temporal development of the two. Bailay (1997: 17-28) writes about the “third wave” in that geographical context, pointing out that it’s not possible to definitely delimit  it from the succeeding movement because the “mothers” are still alive and involved in recent activism (Bailey 1997:18).

What about Italy? The overlapping of waves is more complicated if we consider “first wave” organizations such as U.D.I., and a “second-wave” which lasted until 1995, the year of the last legal achievement (De Clementi 2002: 337), the law on sexual violence. Boundaries are blurred now by the fact that grandmothers, mothers and daughters are all involved in an intergenerational “third wave” of feminism.

The Italian “neo-feminism” or “second wave” develops inside and otside the institutional left-wing parties and the student movements in 1968, trying to affirm a political and personal autonomy from men’s organizations. “The real discovery (…) was that emancipation had not got rid of oppression (…). Achievements in the direction of equality (…) do not necessarily modify the symbolic order” (Bono 2000: 168). The mistrust of the notion of equality led women to a detachment from the student movement of 1968. The statement “the personal is political” spread in all western countries and Italian feminist practices developed starting from that concept. Radical activism was associated with “consciousness raising groups”, which were called groups of “autocoscienza” for the first time by Carla Lonzi in order to give political dignity to women’s experiences, and to indicate a practice (and theory) of awareness within the collective sharing of oppressions in every-day life (Bono 2000: 169). It is in this context of “feminine revolt”⁵that struggles for the legalization of divorce (1974) and abortion (1978) took place, connected with an analysis of sexuality, gender violence, gender roles, and, again, worker vindications and liberation from the normative and patriarchal institution of the family. A specificity of Italy is represented by the role of the catholic church role in society and politics. An anti-clerical issue was important, and peculiar of this wave, in order to affirm the dignity of women’s differences and women’s autonomy, and, as we will see, in the third wave, too. Female students, workers, scholars worked together in collectives, demonstrated in streets, squares, published reviews, founded self-financed cultural centres and refugee houses for women victims of male-violence. Separatism was the widely-spread practice in the name of an autonomous development of women’s consciousness. There is an important difference to mark between the first period of second wave and the struggle movement of 1977 in Italy. Because it is in this period that gay and lesbian emerged as  social identities, vindicating visibility and dignity (Rossi, Barilli, Gianni 1999: 90-98) and it was in 1977 that Mario Mieli’s “Elementi di critica omosessuale”⁶ was published. Lesbian collectives claimed their right to be separated from feminist heterosexual organizations and from male-gay organizations too. The development of a lesbian movement took place during the ’80s and the ’90s, following the north-american examples of authors like Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.
During the 1980’s some authors declared that it was “easy to talk of a crisis of feminism, but also the death of feminism, or stagnation of the movement or the search for a new identity and new forms of collective action” (Calabrò, Grasso 2004: 127). Otherwise in this period  the lesbian movement arose, separating from the feminist movement to find a specific collective identity. Is this a “third wave” or a “lesbian wave”?

 

1.2 Which boundaries for waves?

Which are the boundaries: which are the concepts involved?

In Italy some feminists define a period of “transition” in the ’90s and the first years of ‘2000. Several articles appeared asking about “feminism’s death” or the state of art as “widespread feminism”.⁷ I’m pointing out that a “silent” transition from struggles to a “silent feminism” has never existed or feminism never died, thanks to women’s and lesbian struggles and achievement in those years till now. A “queer” historiography could, I think, clarify many doubts about the context of the waves, the see in which they appear.

 

I was part of a movement whose aim was to change the structure of the patriarchal system through sexuality. Nevertheless, the paradox was that within the women’s movement, the same protagonists of liberation tended to reproduce the same patriarchal structure as in the past. How? For instance, by perpetuating the oppression of lesbianism and discrimination against lesbians. The acceptance that we lesbians found in the women’s movement was the same that we would have found in the outside world, if we had tried to be accepted there. (Fiocchetto 1990: 18)

 

As long as the lesbian movement belongs to the feminist “sea”, feminism during the ’80s and ’90s in Italy was very effervescent. Common objectives with the women’s movement were shared and the practice of separatism typical of feminist groups was the main political centre to define struggles and strategy from (Fiocchetto 1990: 20).

The northamerican radical feminist and lesbian literature and experiences influenced the rise of  lesbian separatism in Italy. The concept of political lesbianism (Gonda 1998: 117), or “lesbian continuum” (Rich 1980: 650) influenced the lesbian emergence in the public space as an autonomous social, political and personal identity. For example, meetings and demonstration during ’80s and ’90s were organized by lesbian new associations and collectives in Italy.

It is useful to understand the existence of a “feminist continuum”, a metaphorical sea, made of several waves. Maybe the same women or lesbians belonged to several and different waves. However, we do find differences between periodical movements and feminist theories during  history, even the recent one, such as differences between collectives and groups, and aims and strategies.

I am going to describe a process which led in Italy to a so called third wave, or, more exactly, to a united movement made of several waves: from lesbians, to academics, precarious, students, immigrants and “sommosse”.⁸

 

 

2. Precarious Wave(s)

 

If it is important for some feminists to hold on to the name “third wave”, it might be most productive to do so in a context that acknowledges and utilizes the conceptual tools of older feminists, a context that explicitly recognizes the continuities as well as the discontinuities with earlier feminisms. In an interesting way, the wave metaphor captures the notion of continuity as well as discontinuity; waves are different from one another but are similar, too. By identifying themselves as the third wave, younger feminists can also be read as aligning themselves with feminism broadly construed, placing themselves in the grander context of the women  movement, a movement not only of their mothers but also of their great-grandmothers (Bailey 1997: 27).

 

In an important meeting in Italy, scholars and academics asked: “is feminism dead or is this a third wave?” The meeting took place in October 2007, in Rome’s Faculty of Humanities of La Sapienza University.⁹ The discussion was about contemporary women’s, specifically young women’s, conditions, and about the necessity to create “nets” between women’s organizations. Another important institutional meeting on 10^th October 2009, with big visibility in the mass media, was organized by feminist professors and philosophers such as Maria Luisa Boccia, Ida Dominijanni, Tamar Pitch, Bianca Pomeranzi, Grazia Zuffa, about “Sex and Politics in the post-patriarchate”¹⁰ denouncing prime minister Berlusconi’s vision and politics about women, and affirming that male power is a “naked power” and post-patriarchal because of its lack of authority.

Meanwhile, as I described, the lesbian movement was active since more than a decade denouncing patriarchal society as the “fulcrum” of gender based violence, and other struggles were spreading since the first years of ‘2000s.

It is useful now to analyze contemporary feminism in Italy in the context of intersectionality between waves, gender and class. What is the difference between the second wave historical economic and social context and contemporary young women condition? How does this shift influence feminist activism? One key word is “precarity” or “precariousness” as a “lack of future prospects for a generation”. Another issue is the strategy of new connections with the labour movement, in spite of ’70s statements about autonomy and separatism (Fantone 2007: 5-6). There are similarities and differences between this economic/social context and the north-american one, concerning the analysis of thethird-wave. In the U.S.A. for example labour issues are defined by young feminists of the “third wave” within the concept of “globalization” (Heywood, Drake 2007: 118-119), while in Italy the main category taken into account is neo-liberalism. This is an important difference, because it shows which, how and if the economic assessment is criticized and challenged by movements. “Third wave feminism attempts to navigate the fact that there are few alternatives for the construction of subjectivity outside the production/consumption cycle of global commodification” (Heywood, Drake 2007: 120), and it “became part of (…) global struggle for human rights that incorporate women’s and gender issues” (Heywood, Drake 2007: 122). Italian third wave feminists, as far as some groups self-define in this area, try to challenge the neo-liberal system and recognize a new social subject as “precarious” (Fantone 2007: 9). This new subject includes symbolically flexible-contracts-workers and migrants, sexual and gender identities and the fluid varieties of lives. They point out that the “family value” is connected with a state of “minority” in which women, natives and migrants are kept and is the privileged institutional form of discrimination for different sexual identities. In “The body, sexuality and precarity” (Giuliani 2007: 115) we read:
precarity becomes a synonym for a common condition, the horizon in which people’s lives are continually defined and redrawn: a horizon, however, very rarely becomes ‘an enlightening experience’ and ‘project’ because it is, in the words of Porpora Marcasciano: ‘like the eyelashed which are so close to the eyes that we can’t see them. They’ve been with us forever, which is why we don’t experience them as an objective condition (Giuliani 2007:115).

 

Groups involved in the discussion about Italian feminism in Feminist Reviewn.87 about Italian Feminisms, as Sexyshock, A/Matrix, Sconvegno and Precaria, were involved before, together with “second wave” feminists, in struggles and campaigns against Law 40 (2004) which

prohibits cryopreservation of embryos, limiting to three the number of embryos that can be implanted in each single cycle; it forbids assisted reproduction using a third party in any way, as well as access to reproductive technology for couples who carry genetic diseases with risk of transmission. Moreover, the law prohibits scientific research on embryos (Fineschi, Neri, Turillazzi 2005: 536)

 

During the mobilization against Law 40, reproductive rights were defended by an intergenerational “net” of feminists. Reproductive rights and abortion seem to be again an issue, and so a a third wave issue which involves different generations of women, in a country, Italy, in which the catholic power influences government politics. It was 2003/04, a period of several attacks on Law 194 on Abortion from parliamentarians and so-called pro-life movements in order to revisit the law because of the indirect new rights of the embryo defined in Law 40. Thousands of women and the labour left-wing organization (CGIL) marched in Milan on 14 January 2006, and thousands organized the big demonstration against gender-based violence on 25  November 2006.¹¹ A wave of feminist activism active in several decades was rising and the key word was intergenerational: self-determination.

Separatism came to the debate soon. While labour parties denounced a “silence” of women in the public sphere, through articles and appeals in newpaper and Internet, hundreds of “women and lesbians”¹² were meeting in several national “assemblies” in order to organize a national demonstration in Rome against male violence and against the instrumental use of racism in government politics justified by a mystification of gender based violence and defining as criminals, illegal foreign people without passports, migrants. “Pacchetto sicurezza” was the name of the Law discussed in Parliament in 2007, in which penalties for immigrants were associated with “women’s security and protection”. And mass media acted in line with this rhetorical trick. The National Demonstration against Male’s Violence took place on 24 November 2007, 250.000 women from different generations walked through the streets of Rome with antiracist slogans, screaming about domestic violence and homophobia, involving women “migrants”,¹³ confirming an intersectional analysis of patriarchal violence. The demonstration was defined as “separatist” by women and the debate about the organization and the legitimacy of feminist separatism was controversial during many debates which took place in the form of assemblies. Queer groups, left-wing feminists of the first and the second wave were divided in the debate, definitely the new alliance between lesbian and young feminists, i.e. feminist student collectives obtained a final compromise:  to start the demonstration with separatist groups, and to let men join a few parts of the demonstration’s line end. The importance of  “symbolic” separatism was recognized by most of the women and lesbians.

The concept of “male violence” was the lens through Italian sociality, policies and economy were discussed during a two days (23/24 February 2008) meeting in Rome, named FLAT (Femministe e Lesbiche ai Tavoli), organized by a new national network: “Sommosse”.¹⁴ It was one of the most important moments of discussion for Italian feminist movements in recent history. The themes discussed around “tables” are interesting to delineate a sight on third wave (as an addition and intersection of waves) or contemporary Italian feminism. We can find in this sort of agenda intersections between generations, analysis, concepts, strategies which form the “sea” that a wave always represents. Here is a summary of key words and issues:

1. Violence: women and lesbians denounce a “rape culture” which develops from institutional gender-based violence. The family is considered as the main site of male violence. The control over women’s reproduction by the church and science, attacking the Italian law which legalizes abortion. Relationship between women and lesbians is the main strategy to avoid gender based violence and subordination.
2. Self-determination: on defending abortion and reproductive women’s rights and against Law 40 about assisted procreation, which postpones  foetus rights to women’s rights.
3. Communication: “Media, languages, imaginaries”. Cyber-feminism as hacker-activism. The importance of independent and open source technologies and webhosting. Mailing Lists as useful platforms to discuss and share knowledge. Digital divide and a right use of communication technologies. Internet and mass-media are fulfilled with sexist contents and no solution was found to solve the issue about relationship with mainstream mass-media.
4. Precariousness and work: “precariousness” refers to the feminization of work, which asks for flexibility in time and space of one’s life and relational skills. it enables a process of “inverse equality” with men becoming equal to women in the lower positions. But discrimination against women and lesbians has to be recognized as  double oppression. Institutional violence is represented in the state of vulnerability and oppression in which women workers are kept, in particular any kind of institutional help is needed, but to think of new forms of sociality and economy.
5. Sexism: What are the chances for a non-sexist culture?
   Relationships within the school system are marked by authoritarianism.
   The body is the great absent from the Italian school. By “absent body” we mean: a disembodied knowledge which avoids intersectional analysis; absence of feminist thought and history from schools. Presence in schools has to be one of the most important aims of the movement.
6. Practices and Perspectives: in the nascent feminist movement lesbians and feminists appear together within a mechanism of mutual naming.
   Starting from Monique Wittig statement “Lesbians are not women. It is more of a woman who is not related to dependence on a man”, even heterosexual women defected the “woman” self-nomination for “feminist” a term that more represent the identity as political project, transformation.
   Rejection of victimhood: we have chosen together to reverse the victim and talk about strengths, energies to be released of women and lesbians.
   Critique of the family as the foundation of patriarchy and violence against women, kept as the key actor of society for economic reasons and the lack of welfare policies of the neo-liberal system. LGBT movement has helped to reinforce the rhetoric of family as well as parallel policies of equal opportunity, accepted by a the most of the women’s movement, which have undermined the radical feminist discourse.
   Connection between family and compulsory heterosexuality: society needs a fluid concept of sexual choices. Compulsory maternity and attention to risk control over women’s bodies and lesbians through biotechnology: against the Law 40 and attacks to Law 194.
   Practices of relations between feminists and lesbians are resistance and survival practices, emphasizing the need to build communities of differents, and to create spaces for lesbian feminist. Culture of rape as an instrument of control of hetero-patriarchy, a form of appropriation of the body.
7. Feminism and public space: the feminist critique of policies. What feminists need is the practice of self-organization to bring shifts to the public space, criticized for its “neutrality” aims. Instead of public space it has to be built collective space in practicing strategies of resistance.
   The ability to build a strong feminist and lesbian subjectivity seems more concrete after the demonstration on November 24, which marked a resumption of themes and practices of the 70s: the awareness of a conflict between men and women, and then the practices of this conflict. The body and sexuality have to be considered a stake in a broader political and cultural conflict and especially for women and lesbian, gay and transgender.
8. Racism: the anti-institutional, anti-family, anti-security and anti-racist movement of the 24 November is appreciated, rejecting again the racist political agenda of government. .
   The term race has no biological connotation, but that is the result rather than a cultural construction that intersect stratifications of power relations, recognizing racism on immigration as a social, political and economic exploitation and domination of one group over another. Acknowledging that racism is not born with the migration of recent years (Italy has a colonial past as a nation) and not only migrants, but is internal to each power relations. The language of a racist act unconsciously, using expressions such as and we / they. Recognizing the performativity of language, we criticize the Eurocentric culture that characterizes the rhetorical about the emancipation of women. The Black studies and postcolonial studies remind us of the implosion of the unitary subject of feminism: women. Where the subject of feminism is self-centered white on their specific condition (white woman, middle class, heterosexual) condition that tends to universalize, the black studies remind us of our own internal limit that ignores other axes of differentiation: “whiteness is a social and economic privilege”.
   Immigrant women are denied because they’re access to citizenship rights access is denied. A concept of citizenship is exclusionary because it represents the space within which and only within which a human can be recognized as a subject of rights. Self-determination can not be separated from a context that does not recognize the legal existence (possession of documents, medical records etc) to some women, and imposes a state of precarious socio-economic blackmail.
   The work of care is increasingly outsourced to immigrant women and poses a question that we as women and feminists. Against any form of nationalism. The intersectionality of “race” and lesbianism should become the central themes of feminist thought on which we can not stop questioning.
   To build a relationship equal and enriching, we thought that the only way is to find similarities, common features in order to respect individual differences, meet and exchange knowledge and experiences.
   (www.FLAT.noblogs.com)

 

 

Conclusion:

 

Along feminist contemporary history in Italy, we find a feminist “sea” which contains simultaneously different generations of women and lesbians.

I ended my summary with the political agenda written in 2007. What happened then? Is separatism in the last years still a useful practice?

The approaches and practices are still evolving. LGBTQI organizations collaborate in developing a strong anti-clerical movement (Facciamo Breccia)¹⁵ since years, which is now an essential part of the anti-fascist Italian movement, together with students, “precarious” and migrants. The gender issue is now pervasive in most of the activist movements, but women, lesbians, transsexuals, intersexuals, queer people are still fighting for their visibility in society and inside movements. Because waves fills the sea, it means that every subjectivity is a potential storm. Precariousness of identities is not a way to “neutralize” differences but to construct an “independent” public space in which a reciprocity of naming (and self-naming) comes to existence.

References:

 

Cathryn Bailey Source “Making Waves and Drawing Lines: The Politics of Defining the Vicissitudes of FeminismAuthor(s)” in Hypatia, Vol. 12, No. 3,Issue Third Wave Feminisms, Blackwell Publishing, 1997, pp. 17-28.

 

Paola Bono “Looking at Italian Feminism/s” in Anna Bull, Hanna Diamond, Rosalind Marsh Feminisms and Women’s Movements in Contemporary Europe, London: Macmillian Press LTD, 2000, pp.166-179.

 

Anna Rita Calabrò, Laura Grasso Dal movimento femminista al femminismo diffuso: storie e percorsi a Milano dagli anni ’60 agli anni ’80 Roma: FrancoAngeli, 2004.

Maria Rosa Cutrufelli Il Novecento delle italiane. Una storia ancora da raccontare, Milano: Editori Riuniti, 2001, from 1900 to 1910 chapters.

Andreina De Clementi “The Feminist Movement in Italy” in Gabriele Griffin, Rosi Braidotti Thinking Differently. A reader in European Women’s Studies, London: Zed Books, 2002, pp. 332-340.

 

Laura Fantone “precarious changes: gender and generational politics in contemporary Italy” in Feminist Review No. 87 Issue 1 Italian Feminisms, New York: Palgrave Macmillan Journals, 2007, pp. 5-19.

 

V. Fineschi, M. Neri, E. Turillazzi “The New Italian Law on Assisted Reproduction Technology (Law 40/2004)” in Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 31, No. 9, London: JME, 2005, pp. 536-539.

 

Rosanna Fiocchetto and Carmela Turchiarelli “Italy”in >Feminist Review, No. 34, Perverse Politics: Lesbian Issues Palgrave Macmillan Journals, 1990, pp. 18-22.

 

Gaia Giuliani “the body, sexuality and precarity” in Feminist Review No. 87 Issue 1 Italian Feminisms, New York: Palgrave Macmillan Journals, 2007, pp. 113-121.

 

Caroline Gonda “Lesbian Theory” in Stevi Jackson and Jackie Jones Contemporary Feminist Theories, Edinbourgh: Edinbourgh University Press, 1998, pp. 113-130.

 

Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake “It’s All About the Benjamins. Economic Determinants of Third Wave Feminism in the United States” in Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford Third Wave Feminism. A Critical Exploration, New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2004, pp. 46-58.

 

Giovanna Miceli Jeffries Feminine feminists: cultural practices in Italy, University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

 

Joni Lovenduski >Women and European Politics,Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,1986.
Adrienne Rich “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, in Signs Vol.5, No. 4 (Summer 1980), pp. 631-660.

Gianni Rossi Barilli Il movimento gay in Italia, Roma: Feltrinelli Editore, 1999.

 

 

Internet Sources:

 

Invitation paper for the feminist academics and journalists meeting in Rome called “Sex and Politics in the post-patriarchate”: http://www.casainternazionaledelledonne.org/pdf/Sesso_epolitica.pdf

 

Consiglio Nazionale Donne Italiane:
http://www.cndi.it/
Invitation paper for the meeting in Rome about “death or third wave?” feminism:

http://www.womenews.net/spip3/spip.php?article1118

Coordinamento Migranti:

http://www.coordinamentomigranti.it

 

Usciamo dal Silenzio:

http://www.usciamodalsilenzio.org

 

 

http://flat.noblogs.org

Facciamo Breccia:

http://www.facciamobreccia.it

Footnotes:

Italian sea, Italian waves A critical review on “third wave” feminism by Barbara Mazzotti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione – Non commerciale – Non opere derivate 3.0 Unported License.