[Seagull Press; 2024]
Tr. from the Italian by Luisa Lorenza Corna, Matthew Hyland, and Cristina Viti
I arrived a little late for feminism: after consciousness raising groups had disappeared as feminism’s preferred form, after the academy took up feminism as a set of arguments to be constantly fine-tuned rather than a way to fight and live and love, after feminism had apparently gone up in a brilliant flash of success. There you have it, folks, all over, nothing to see here.
I’ve always had this persistent suspicion, though, that something is not quite right, a suspicion I harbored as a girl observing the very different way boys were treated. That suspicion became knowledge as I progressed through my graduate degree, witnessing everyday sexism and misogyny, which turned me into the very thing I had sought to avoid. I had become a self-sacrificing, quiet kind of woman who would do anything to get my credential and escape. I was also one prone to meltdowns and disabling bouts of anxiety. In non-work relationships, I saw the way my voice was diminished, how the question of my subjectivity was always going to be a battleground.
Though I was alienated, enmeshed in false relationships, I had deep desires that I wanted, above all, to bring to fruition. So while I toted around a deformed sense of self, I also struggled to set that burden down to reach toward what I felt was my potential, as a writer, a thinker, a reader, a feminist. That these two dynamics, the alienated self and the reaching, self-authorized one, can exist simultaneously, is one of the important insights of Italian feminism, especially the feminist writer Carla Lonzi.
Reading Lonzi for the first time was a bit like being struck by lightning: Here was a point of reference for the struggle for a true self, for true forms of writing, that I so desperately needed. The trueness of either self or writing is assessed by a lack of instrumentality, under capitalism or patriarchy. Such instrumental treatment (or domination), in fact, is one of the central pillars Lonzi sought to bring down. She was disgusted by the way we use and are used by others and are not treated as ends in ourselves. The pain caused by this social failure marks all her works, whether as a critic or as a feminist or as a partner. Lonzi’s work reached through history toward me, showing me that feminism resides in our search for new selves and in our interrogation of what feels most difficult and inauthentic in our lives.
While Lonzi’s work focuses on the individual, it is not individualist in its orientation. She understands that we become who we are through others. This is why, in Lonzi’s work, we get the sense of feminism as living and active, a necessary part of everyday life. Her later work, especially, is strengthened by her engagement with the consciousness-raising practices of the small group. In Italian feminism, in particular, the small group was valued as place where women could, together, discover their authentic desires and individual selves. This provides us a different context for evaluating the literary aspect of Lonzi’s work, where the experiments are not for the sake of literature (at which I’m sure Lonzi would roll her eyes) but for the transformation of relationships and, therefore, the world. For, ultimately, we live domination in our everyday lives, even in the relationships where we are supposed to be most cherished. Feminism, through the small group, wanted new kinds of relationships, new practices to orient our lives around.
The writings collected in Feminism in Revolt span from 1962 to 1979. (Lonzi died in 1982.) This was an intense period of development and activism for feminist politics in Italy, but also for leftist politics in general. It can be difficult to understand the cross-pollination and conflict between Marxist and trade union organizing and feminist organizing that marked Lonzi’s era. Given this context of political foment, Lonzi became increasingly dissatisfied by the institutionalized and alienating nature of her work as an art critic. So she left the field entirely, publishing a letter in 1971 that announced her absence. Instead of the cloistered critic, she found an intellectual home among other feminists in Italy, dedicating her life to this new politics. She co-founded the feminist collective Rivolta Femminile along with Carla Accardi and Elvira Bannotti.
The publication of Feminism in Revolt is significant because it makes this feminist commitment available to more readers in English. It contains previously untranslated excerpts from her Shut Up, Rather, Speak (1978), her diary of feminist consciousness-raising, and Now You Can to Go (1980), the recorded conversations with her former partner, Pietro Consagra. These pieces are worth the price alone, as you cannot find them elsewhere in English. They give us a glimpse into Lonzi’s experimentation with form and relationships. The volume is also significant because it helps us see Lonzi as an important intellectual mother for much feminist autobiographical writing today.
Lonzi’s writing experiments with form and content as a result of her close connections with feminist politics. Her commitment to a thinking, feeling “I” was an intervention in both literature and politics, though she is not typically considered within literary history. The development of her “I” over the course of her writing is compelling. Her first published work, Self Portrait (1969), collages interview answers from various artists that Lonzi knew. Lonzi occasionally interjects, but her absence is the most striking aspect of the text. The text (tediously) draws attention to and enacts the woman’s presence from discourse in the service of “art.” By leaving behind art, Lonzi is able to produce the utterly compelling Now You Can Go, another dialogue where Lonzi is much more present. She argues with her partner, Pietro Consagra, about the way she feels neglected and misunderstood within their relationship. By turning an ancient literary form (the dialogue descended from Socrates) to the personal realm, Lonzi innovates on literary history. Within the everyday and personal, Lonzi finds philosophy in play as alienation, desire, and love are sought within lived experience, not through abstract characters.
These “living forms” that Lonzi creates make living the center of a project. This is not, though, simply an aestheticization of life, but a direct commitment to feminist principles. Her diary, Shut Up, Or Rather, Speak, records her consciousness-raising and enacts it, by tracing the changes that unfold in her life as a result of the event of feminism. This change is historical and personal at once: Through Lonzi’s personal experience, we witness a common experience of the era. Documenting her day-to-day life in the feminist movement, Lonzi uses the diary specifically for feminist purposes, to speak out and transform silence into a more generative way of living beyond patriarchy. It also can provide an example of what a feminist life looks like—something I wish we had more of. As with the dialogues above, Lonzi radicalizes the diary form. Women, historically, have adopted the form to refuse patriarchal dictates of silence about women’s lives, even as the form enforces obscurity and isolation (as a feminized, less respected genre that is rarely published). She writes that “the public self-exposure entailed in writing freely about oneself—and involving everyone else who had any part in one’s personal trajectory—has discouraged and ultimately silenced women who privately found in the diary the form of expression best suited to their search for themselves.” By publishing the diary and the dialogues from her life—which otherwise would remain private and therefore silent—Lonzi seeks to transform the consciousness of the reader. But notice, too, that the diary is not just a record of the self but also all of one’s relationships. This is what makes the diary dangerous: It puts others on notice.
The figure of the reader is a powerful one for feminism because it reveals that writing is always a relationship. Lonzi’s work, in particular, gives us an alternative paradigm to understand the relationship between writer and reader, speaker and audience. Lonzi describes how consciousness raising transformed her relationship to writing:
The process accomplished through consciousness raising is of such primary importance to human beings as to allow them to restore meaning to gestures that have become institutionalized and worn down. Writing, for instance, becomes a necessary tool precisely in its original function: to capture thoughts, to offer the chance of formulating them clearly and coordinating them, making them communicable to other women as they unfold. It is no longer writing linked to exceptional needs or talent: all women need it and all will feel it within their reach.
Lonzi’s account here flies in the face of most accounts of writing and language from academic and critical voices of our time. Her description refuses the hierarchies set up by critical traditions that treat some writing as inherently superior, some writers as “talented” (when we sometimes mean wealthy), and where writing is ultimately barred to ordinary people. Further, in a capitalist society, the point of writing is to generate profit which limits our social imagination: We cannot see the myriad uses to which writing might be put—as healing, as community, as wonder, as solace, as self-discovery. In fact, Lonzi gives us a totally alternative definition of literature here: Writing, from a feminist perspective, is women communicating their thoughts and lives to one another. Crucially, the basis of this relationship is freedom from utility and obligation.
Experimentation, for feminist concerns, then, is never only about form but also inextricably linked to the content of our lives. Lonzi as a diarist, and recorder of dialogues, seeks to reach us in our context. It is only by appealing to a reader’s freedom that a text can even work. Through her works, Lonzi seeks herself in authentic connection with others—that includes the reader who may recognize something in Lonzi’s situation. But the point here is not identification. There is no one else like us, we often say in saccharine terms, but Lonzi asks us to turn this into a political point. There is no one else like us but we act as if we were roles, cookie cutter people. This also diminishes other people. Literature’s value, as Lonzi describes it here, is in whether we can express ourselves and shatter these constraints, burn through the flimsy cardboard cutouts of identity to which we’ve been expected to adhere. Lonzi’s work is so vital for precisely this reason—for how she helps us shatter constraints, both of ourselves and what we think literature can do. We can connect her implied literary politics to the specific political formulation of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective: We owe other women our freedom.
Juxtaposed with the exploratory approach to her “I,” Lonzi’s relationships with other feminists makes up the other part of Lonzi’s radical literary politics. As I mentioned, the diary documents her experience of the small group, in all its emotional complexity. While Feminism in Revolt only reproduces a small, utterly precious part of it, the diary is valuable both as a historical document of consciousness raising and the small group form as well as an experimental work in its own right. Far too few recordings of such groups are available, and so Lonzi’s diary provides us with insight into these experiments in women’s lives. She describes consciousness raising as “a step—but of a political nature” that allows the women involved to get outside of patriarchal culture, in which they are defined as a use value in the home or in the workplace. (Or, in the art world, as consumers.) Further, the group form allowed Lonzi and her feminist peers “to understand what it means to be together by empowering one to be oneself rather than betray oneself, it allowed us to live through a sense of completeness of which, as perennially secondary creatures, we had historically been deprived.” It is women’s reach for completeness, the tracing of self-betrayal that gives us the stakes of dismantling domination. We care about capitalism and patriarchy for the damage it does to living people and the constraints it puts on who we can be, understood not as a career trajectory but as a thinking, feeling creature. We also have a startling redefinition of feminism: “empowering one to be oneself,” a project historically denied to women who must be something for others at all times.
When I finally took a survey of my life, after the alienation I mentioned above, I saw that I could not keep going as I was. Like Lonzi, I left my respective professional fields after alienating and miserable experiences, turning toward feminist writers and friends to put the pieces back together again. I shed relationships. I refused to internalize discomfort anymore. My autobiographical writing, I realized, as I read Lonzi, may not be new, but it was taking part in an important historical tradition. The feminist struggle for self is never new, though it is always new to the individual struggling for it. While the struggle may originate within us and transform us, that struggle for self never happens in isolation: It requires others. I found in Lonzi’s work confirmation of a feminist commitment to autobiography and writing as a mode of struggle against the constraints that women face in their daily lives. I found the other I needed to draw me out of my old self.
Lonzi, by orienting writing toward living and toward readers, provides a surprising response to modernism, at least literary modernism. Literary modernism was about the pressures put on traditional literary forms by daily life and the subjects who lived it. Unfortunately, it was coopted by an academic apparatus that was happy to lionize writers and their genius at the expense of readers. Lonzi’s work pushes the critiques of modernism forward while also shifting the emphasis. She poses a feminist politics of experimental writing that is not about valuing the text but about the feeling subject who writes it. Further, she argues that a given text’s validity is not in its market value but in the help or inspiration a writer’s self-expression can provide to other women readers. The help or inspiration is not about political consensus: This would absolutely abridge the autonomy of the work, as it is judged by opinions constrained by the market. Instead, the writing’s value is whether or not it helps another woman live her life or bring herself to expression. These are projects typically denied to women, yes, but within authoritarian cultures in which democracy is flouted, these projects become all the more valuable for feeding the hungry parts of us that are refused by domination.
I cannot stress enough how radical Lonzi’s formulation is, considering that her work and convictions fly in the face of dominant understandings of autonomy that we get through Marxism. For example, Nicholas Brown’s recent Autonomy essentially argues that any recourse to the reader in criticism reduces art to a commodity because consumption is the only possible relation to an artwork, literary or otherwise. To assume this, however, simply reiterates the same modernist tropes that Andreas Huyssen diagnosed, a sexist distinction between the besieged (male) artist threatened by the consuming (female) mob. Brown is right that explicit political content in a work can infringe on an artwork’s autonomy by turning it into something you agree or disagree with, rather than something you are transformed by. To the first argument, Lonzi demonstrates that feminism grounds an entirely different situation for reading, one that sets aside the question of the market and value in favor of human relationships. In so doing, it displaces male anxieties about form, history, and autonomy, rewriting the complex completely. To the second, the political content of Lonzi’s art is precisely subjectivity and its transformation, hers and her readers. The political content of her work, then, is enclosed within its form: the “I” and the seeking self and her freedom. Autonomy for literature, in a feminist context, is to be gauged by the work’s ability to render an individual woman’s voice, despite all the obstacles in her way, and to connect to the history of feminism in some way. Further, that autonomy rests on a fellow woman reader who can produce herself in and beyond a text. Lonzi’s work, in other words, makes critics of us all, if critics of a different kind.
While I am deeply grateful to the editors who have given us Feminism in Revolt, the volume does lack a certain historicizing of Lonzi’s work. What history is provided in the two introductory essays situates Lonzi as either an art critic (giving an overview of the Italian art world at the time) or as someone who turns to an intense politics of the personal. There is no information about what other historical circumstances made Lonzi possible—she was, after all, writing in the wake of war, fascism and 1968 in Italy. Italy also has its own particular history of radical politics that could have been helpful for the editors to explain, perhaps connecting Lonzi’s attention to the individual to more anarchist currents of the time rather than being only a feminist gesture. For example, the turn away from the state and a certain kind of organizational politics was absolutely a response to patriarchal control over political spaces as well as the aftereffects of fascism. Feminism was an attempt to dig out a new kind of politics from the situation of women in relation to other movements. Finally, I wish there had been some effort to connect Lonzi to feminism beyond Italy. This kind of comparative and historical look would have enriched our understanding of Lonzi so we could fully appreciate the unique voice of Lonzi and Italian feminism, which really is quite unlike any other kind of feminist tradition I have encountered.
I’m going to mention one final gap, which I have been trying to fill in this essay. That gap is her position within literature, a contextualization of her writing experiments and her response within the history of women’s writing. Lonzi’s position as an art critic and a feminist means she is rarely placed within literary history or within debates about writing, reading, and form. But her work is valuable both as a historical precursor and as a tool for thinking through some of our critical impasses, as feminists and readers. We tend to think of writers like Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and Annie Ernaux as producing innovations in literary form, ex nihilo. And while these authors may have never read Lonzi, her body of work demonstrates that their work is not a sudden innovation in history but the continuation of important feminist experiments in form. A reiteration of battles, so to speak. After all, she was working in the diary form prior to Heti and Ernaux. She also interrogated and formalized the absenting of (white, middle class) women from discourse, through dialogue, prior to Cusk’s novels. What makes her work unique, by comparison to these writers, is its explicit grounding in feminist politics which are nowhere to be found in these contemporary authors’ works.
Lonzi takes literary forms such as the diary, the essay, and the dialogue and turns them toward feminist projects, both a development of herself and a raising of our collective consciousness.
Pietro Consagra, Lonzi’s former partner, describes Lonzi’s work this way: “You put flesh to the flame on every page.” On the one hand, we can read this as a rebuke of the revelation of the personal, a patriarchal move that shames the woman for stepping outside of the bounds of moral purity. On the other, it is an apt description of Lonzi’s method, a summoning of the “flesh that burns,” the flesh of the writer, the real woman in context with her particular concerns and needs for self-expression. Each book is an attempt to leave behind selves that no longer serve her. She feels no compulsion to be a single thing, an alienating demand from a world that needs women to be, above all, self-sacrificing, self-effacing, caring and always morally good. Lonzi’s value for our moment is her total refusal of this position. Lonzi asks us to treat ourselves, together, as the goal of our politics and to watch as new and wondrous worlds emerge.
Kaelie Giffel is a writer and educator living in Helena, MT. She is the author of University for a Good Woman: Reflections on Gender, Labor, and Class in American Higher Education (Lived Places Publishing, 2024). You can find her at her website (kaeliegiffel.com).
This post may contain affiliate links.
