Thirty years ago, women were facing what promised to be a new epoch for feminist politics. By the late 1990s there are many who think that we have entered a post feminist era.

 

            My presentation this evening deals with feminist political theory and practice in Italy. To make my point I will address some themes that were crucial in 1970s and then speak of others that only lately have become crucial in the framework of our understanding. I will interpret these themes within the peculiar historical context of what we experienced and did in "Orlando" a group of Bologna women that took its name from Virginia Woolf's novel.

 

            The early seventies were a time of intense creativity, even if we, the "we" feminists, then knew little about what women had done before us. We were groping for our ancestors and female traditions. Under these conditions the search of feminists of the 1970s led them into a wide range of sources: into literature, history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, biology and disregarded canonical academic divides.

 

            It would be impossible to mention all the women (or men) who, with their thoughts and actions, have had a decisive part in our work, I therefor mention just three authors to whom I am indebted even though I never have met them: Carla Lonzi a leading figure of the second feminist wave in Italy, Hannah Arendt whose texts we encountered in the 1980s and who certainly wasn't a feminist and Gillian Rose who wants to go beyond feminism and offers a fresh phenomenology of what really counts: in personal life as much as in politics. To Lonzi I attribute the decisive shift of attention from the social and external 'female condition' that had been a standing theme in christian and socialist movements to something new: the personal and general problem within each person each women and man that is the historical outcome of the asymmetry of their powers.

 

            At an early stage two themes have dominated the debate: the separation between the public and the private sphere and the narrow definition of politics that restricts it to that which goes on in the public realm. Both these themes were then perceived as entry points to the analysis of women's exclusion from full participation in politics.

 

1.         The separation of spheres was based on two assumptions:

=          First, the tenet that the worlds of work and power was the domain of men, while women were responsible for child care and the like.

=          Finally the prevailing common sense that it was 'natural' that women be confined to the private sphere, a 'certainty' that was supported by philosophy and law.

As long as these tenets were dominant, there was no way to open for women the road to full and equal citizenship.

 

2.         Robin Morgan has successfully put the second theme into a pithy expression: "the personal is political". But we had a hard time to explain what for us was "political" about the "personal":

=          about the difference between sexes,

=          about the value of household labor,

=          about the protection of women from domestic and sexual violence.

And not only the substance of our claim was then difficult to hear, it was equally difficult to gain recognition for our political method. We had to work hard to make it believable that our political style of procedure called for gathering in small groups among ourselves rather than for the participation in established parties, in unions or mass movements.

 

            Yet our method did work: paradoxically, self‑consciousness-raising, that is the face to face acknowledgement of feelings and perspectives that had never before been expressed in a group, turned out to be something contagious. The echo it found, the claims to which it led, gave us the proof that our political method was effective. However, until quite recently, at least in Italy this feminist approach stood in contrast to that of others who stressed the importance of getting women to fully participate in the world of conventional politics. With three brush strokes I can sketch italian feminism,

=          We insisted on the difference between the sexes rather than on their equality.

=          We trusted that the relationship among women is crucial to bring meaningful change to the cultural, social and political context.

=          We relied on the strict connection between theory and practice: to inhabit the words we were using, was our way to avoid ideology as much as possible.

 

Language counted for us. Thus we insisted on the 'difference between the sexes' rather than speaking of 'sexual difference' or of 'gender'. In Italy this way of talking has allowed us to stress equally the bodily experience and the social construction of difference. Neither "gender" nor "sexual difference" could do this. In italian 'gender' still connotes either a grammatical category or a mere social construct, while 'sexual difference' (as opposed to la differenza fra i sessi) is a term overdetermined by french feminist philosophical influences.

 

            In those earlier years 'our differenza as women' meant for us something important and very precise: differenza referred to our symbolic absence, our invisibility, that is due to the lack of words, images and metaphors in which we could grasp ourselves. "Differenza" for us meant that truncated citizenship that we had to overcome. It called for our liberation from the exclusive dominance of male subjectivity. In the meantime we have made it: we now live in a world where women feel and are felt to be subjects and the more overt forms of exclusion have diminished.

 

            However, once women had became publicly present in the world of men, they were faced by a fundamental choice: they could either insist simultaneously on both 'duality and'alterity' or they had to enter the game of symmetrical identity politics. From the very beginning we, in 'Orlando', choose the non symmetrical dialogue and/or the conflict with men.

 

            The first thing that 'Orlando' put on the map was the Women's Research, Documentation and Initiative Center of Bologna. It is today the main women place in Italy. It is a public institution funded principally by municipal and regional government, but created and run by a private association of women. To put it ironically, we had to be clever in inventing something which in Italy, at the time we formed Orlando, did not exist.

 

Here a few characteristics of "Orlando":

=          its autonomy in the choice and orientation of its research

=          it ability to offer space to citizens;

=          its provision of a specialized library and of a place for learned conversation without academic straigtjackets.

=          an Internet tea room,

=          the 'Hannah Arendt's European School of Politics'.

=          the civic presence of women in initiatives taken by the city;

=          a significant range of regular encounters and conversations;

=          conferences with  local and sometimes global participation;

=          the preparation and execution of projects to strengthen the subsistence and coexistence of different cultures within our city;

=          Bologna's presence beyond Italy's borders, about which I will say something later.

 

Before the Center could become a model of organization for others initiatives, ‑‑ for example for the shelter for battered women, ‑‑ we had not only to negotiate with the local governments but also convince other women's groups that such negotiations for space and resources did not necessarily entail a loss of autonomy. Doing so was possible for us because we could count on the traditions still alive in Bologna, a city whose democratic history goes back into the middle ages.

 

Now, before I go on to tell about some of our activities I want to mention three notions, three fundamental directives that have guided throughout.

 

FIRST.

PLURALITA' IRRAPRESENTABILE, is a very italian idea. Translated word for word it means 'not‑representable plurality'. It is our synthetic way to name the political conception that we have tried to stress within the City. What vision does this expression imply?

=          Winning the equal right to vote was obviously  not enough to make women a real presence in the public sphere.

=          Equally, experience had convinced us that a female civic presence had always been linked more with social movements and revolutionary moments than with institutional politics.

What we sought to demonstrate in Bologna was the feasibility of  a publicly visible combination of both individuality and plurality. Individuality and plurality are notions that refer to each other. They are both rooted in the human condition, that Hannah Arendt calls "the condition of  natality". For each women and each man to be born means that she or he has come into the world, has appeared to others. And therefore, my coming into existence implies not only my individuality but simultaneously also plurality: my birth brought me into existence and at the very same time made me exist as one of many. Plurality is "originary": the primordial act, the initium, the 'initiative' of each woman and each man that birth has set into motion is a discourse and an action which unfolds itself in being with, being among, others.

=          For this reason no one could possibly politically represent the singularity of the other.

=          Equally, it just is not possible to represent plurality which always implies duality, the alterity that is expressed by the italian 'noi‑altre', the spanish 'nosotras'; these are words for the grammatical first person plural that are both more pregnant and more precise than the simple 'we' available to english speakers. When noialtre (pleas hear my Italian, not noialtrI but noialtrE, women) address a policy, which is a something, we can neglect this; however,  when we speak of someone, of a person, inevitably the tension between duality and irrepresentability looms large.

 

In other words: From its beginnings 'Orlando' was committed  to enable each woman to take her own initiative. And indeed, we saw to this, within the boundaries of our power and capacity.

 

            We choose to insist on the singularity of women as a leit‑motiv because  antifemminism had traditionally denied an ego, the 'I' to women. As an example let me cite a book that had an incredible and lasting success in Europe, it went through more than twenty editions in Italian alone. Otto Weininger was a brilliant author, a Viennese who killed himself at the age of 23 early in the 20th century. He wrote Sex and Character during  the first feminist wave, at the same time Ibsen was writing his plays. Unlike other authors of his time, he didn't say anything about our supposed 'mental inferiority'. For him sexuality is that which makes women what they are, while character is the distinctive feature of men. What this means is clear: women could never be ethical subjects. With our 'pluralita' irrappresentabile' we directly subverted this powerful assumption.

 

SECOND:

the model of our Center is illustrated by a covenant into which we are moving. This covenant was established in 1983 between the Mayor of Bologna and 'Orlando' and has since been renewed every three years. It gave birth to a mixed private/public place whose peculiarity consists in the fact that the Municipality renounces to a part of its sovereignty, even if it is only a little part, and assigns directly to a 'Orlando' to govern certain public spaces.

(by the verb "to govern" I mean kybernein, the greek for to 'steer' and to hold in hand)

And, even more importantly, by this covenant we are allowed to take public initiatives in the city on our own authority. In exchange we provide cultural and social services for women in particular and citizens in general.

 

THIRD:

Our center is meant to be a public space '. What we intend with this word is an urbanistic feature, the opening of a perspective, a stance, a necessary condition that makes it possible to stay‑together, to be‑with each other (cum‑esse) and to offer this chance to anyone who wants to do the same. But also the urban location of the spaces that have been opened by our Center makes sense. After a lot of  bargaining, the Women Center is today located in two central palaces of the city so that we have been able to separate the library as the place for study in the baroque Palazzo Montanari, from the place of  political presence in the Palazzo dei Notai. This medieval building is situated in the heart of the Piazza Maggiore, stands between the gothic Cathedral that was built as a sign of civic government, and at this moment evokes the power of the church, and City Hall, the seat of secular power. This symbolism is very important for women

 

            This double location within the City is working well, faithful to our motto  that links 'the monastery and the agora', calling for our existence between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. We choose our motto before something happened which for me remains a surprise. In 1992 we found a beautiful old monastery Santa Cristina that lay vacant and was a property of the Municipality. It is being restored and in 2001 we are supposed to move there. Since the Middle Ages Santa Cristina had been the seat of well known singing nuns, of women who in the 17s century resisted for sixty years the Council of Trent that prohibited them to sing in public. In 1998 the central italian Government and the Munipality of Bologna signed a written agreement to put our library in that monastery and to transform it into the 'Italian Library of Women'. The move will make us more visible, more vulnerable perhaps, but we have decided to do what we can, not to disappear like the singing nuns and the initiative of many women, now dead.

            Even now a short trailer shot by Harlene Stein is on our web‑site. She is a film maker from Los Angeles, and now plans a movie about those resilient dead singers and the crazy feminists who will inhabit their cells.

 

To give you a closer idea of our active engagements I pick three very disparate subjects:

 

As in every political group so also in 'Orlando', the relationships among us who are its constituents, define how we live our mutual recognition, reciprocity and freedom. At the beginning we were eleven, today we are about two hundred and fifty.You become one of us in a period of sharing with us the memories of those early days, and the style in which we work together. We have become a group of women with widely divergent passions, competences, views and options. And we have learned to  recognize, respect and even enjoy the disparate voices and the different degrees of authority with which each one of us speaks. Of course, sometimes we have to face doubts, fears  rage and conflicts. What do we do? We are women, so we sit together and talk and with time an accepted set of habits, styles and even rules came into being that guide our weekly collegial gatherings.

 

Of course in more then twenty years we  have changed and so did the City, la Cittá di Bologna.  However, some fundamental approaches have remained constant for us: we ask: what is it that forges bonds? What is it that would allow each of us women to enter a common world and do so in her own way?

 

In a first time and for quite a while we were concerned with the vision and practice that is peculiar to women. Only with time the concern for a city of men and women came to the fore and what we call a politica della connessione was given priority. This term is difficult to translate, a political policy of connection among citizens would be a clumsy attempt. Practical examples might help towards its understanding: Most of the time the main auditorium at our Center in the Palace of the Notaries on the Piazza Maggiore is not used for our initiatives emanating from our Center, but for events initiated and run by several dozens of different cultural and social groups. By making ourselves available we hope to foster new forms of mutual trust and intimacy even though, as you well can imagine, in many such instances I have been disappointed by having supported not connessione but competition and management.

 

            From the beginning we tried to extend hospitality in the spirit of connessione beyond the city limits. We began by seeking exchanges with women of other countries. We cultivated hospitality to like minded activists and scholars. It was our solidarity with exiles and immigrants that called us led us into war. After the recent transformation of the Mediterranean into a war zone, we started with a program of Visiting difficult Places such as Israel and Palestine. A good example of what we have called, ironically, "acting glocally" has to do with the enslavement of women into prostitution. The hop across the Adriatic, (from Albania and former Yugoslavia to Italy) is less than a night's sail. Most of the white White Slaves are brought in by that route. We couldn't do anything about this awful traffic without going ourselves into the Balkans.

 

            The main turning point came for us with the Gulf War: this was the event which made "being at war" into a condition that is accepted as normal. When war had become the routine, the everyday condition on the other side of the Adriatic: in Bosnia, Croatia, Kossovo, Serbia we began to build Womens bridges beyond frontiers.  We engaged in what we called transversal politics, an attempt by women to reach beyond divisions recently exasperated by violence. Women can meet in situations that make impossible the encounter by their men, but only by respect for the dissymetry of power, hunger and humiliation prevalent in their group. You can well imagine how often we failed in our attempts. But our engagement in these attempts has open the eyes of Bologenese women for things few people want to face.

            By now you will have noticed how I feel about my city, Bologna. What we were able to do, we could do because it happened in Bologna. For any historian "Bologna" evokes the beginning of republican life in the middle Ages. "Orlando" came on the map when this tradition still survived with some vigor. During my whole life the city government was socialist. In Europe the Bologna is known by two names, as "la dotta", "the learned one" because it is the seat of the oldest european University and as "la rossa", because of its uninterrupted left government. Now the end of this strong tradition is in sight. A new type of expert and neutral management of the city's populations is unwilling to share sovereignty with citizens who are conscious of and value their differences. The belief spreads that citizens are equal regardless the diversity of their sex, race, class, provenance. For the first time in my life the right has won the local elections. A Women's national library without "Orlando" has become a real possibility, since "women issues" represent, for a neutral government, a sectarian point of view. We might be forced to leave the Center if staying endangered our autonomy.

 

            What is happening forces us to face ever deeper issues, because this is not only an epoch of political and managerial neutrality but one of intense disembodiment. This loss of the body affects all, but women in a most intensive way. The transformation of the hope for child, hidden beneath the mother's heart into a fetus observable on the ultrasound screen by the woman as much as the physician is just one instance for what I mean. Women learn early to attribute to themselves hormone levels that call for control, risk factors that must be managed, genetic determinants that must be accepted. If I have to mention one book that shapes the analytic concepts to understand this loss of flesh and blood I refer to the historical study of my friend Barbara Duden who teaches in Hannover who speaks of women's body today as a public domain that medicine visualizes as a symbol of invasion and control.

 

On the other hand, if I had to chose only one event in the wars we had to witness it is the rape of women in Bosnia and in Croatia. Between 1992 and 1993 first in Zagreb and then in Zenica, Tuzla in Bosnia I had to listen to raped women who approached me out of their need to speak. When I was back in Bologna, for months on end I could not speak, I would not repeat what these women had told me. When I finally found the voice to tell their stories, I knew that I had to speak about the unspeakabl; that I had to face the postmodern image of the female body that has led to the creation of concentration camps for women with the purpose of raping women with the intent of fertilizing them. It would be preposterous to interpret this monstrous form of po pulation politics as an old form of ethnic violence in 20th century dress. However our entire commitment to the presence of women in the city would be vacuous talk if we were not to resist the manyfold which we are exposed to the loss of the body for which many of us are willing to pay a high price.

 

            There is an extraordinary Figure in the greek tragedy: Antigone. When Antigone's brother is condemned by the tyrant to death and he orders that his body be left to rot, she rebels, buries him and mourns. For this obedience to her own compassionate norm, her resistance to the tyrant's command, she is condemned to live henceforth outside the City walls. For most interpreters, including those who are feminist, Antigone cannot fit into the city. In "Orlando" we have tried to imagine how Antigone, in spite of her compassionate wisdom, could find her place within our cities. Our task to mourn and to love lies before us.