Women's History at the Cutting Edge by Autori Vari Teresa Bertilotti

Author:Autori Vari, Teresa Bertilotti [Autori Vari, Teresa Bertilotti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788833131412
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Viella - libreria editrice
Published: 2020-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Catia Papa

Studies on Colonialism and Racialisation: Itineraries in Women’s and Gender History in Italy

In the Italian historiographical context, there has often been talk of a particular hybridisation between the history of women and the history of gender that supposedly constituted the distinguishing mark of research, especially in comparison with the Anglophone contexts. Angela Groppi and Giulia Calvi were among the first to propose this thesis, recently taken up by Ida Fazio in her reflection on the way the category of gender is used in Italy twenty-five years after the publication of the well-known essay by Joan Scott.136 A certain propensity to pragmatism – that is, a tendency to avoid the theoretical bottlenecks of feminist studies – together with a strong tendency toward social history is said to have favoured a blending of approaches and methodologies, a combined attention to female experiences and to the representations of sexual difference, to the agency of women and to social imaginaries. This interpretation undoubtedly reflects the experience of an intellectual generation of women historians and the value of a wide and articulated body of research. In my opinion, however, it betrays a tendency to marginalise some of the causes of conflict and does not account for a certain delay in the opening up of new research horizons.

My reflection, in fact, focuses on the studies on colonialism and racialisation in contemporary Italy that have been undertaken in the new millennium. This is a field of research that has not taken impulse from women’s and gender history in the “Italian style”. In particular, postcolonial studies on contemporary Italy, which investigate the processes of racialisation and gendering inherited from colonialism, seem to be in radical discontinuity with respect to that history. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, in their introduction to the 2014 volume L’Italia postcoloniale (Postcolonial Italy), expressed a rather negative assessment of gender studies in Italy, which in some respects reverses the opening statement of this essay. The two scholars argued that Italian gender studies has been profoundly influenced by the feminist theory of the 70s and 80s and still bears traces of a certain essentialism that does not challenge the male/female dichotomy.137 This feature of Italian studies therefore seems to explain the delay and the relatively scarce relevance, acquired upon its adoption in Italy, of the notion of intersectionality as a method by which to address the different categories of social differentiation: class, gender, race, sexuality. This methodology has contributed elsewhere to give rise to a profound reconsideration of the spatial and temporal dimensions of colonialism.

I have chosen to combine these two assessments of the research carried out in Italy because it seems to me that they re-present, via indirect dialogue, the traditional contrast between the approach to gender in the social sciences and women’s history and the more fully poststructuralist, or deconstructionist, perspective offered by cultural studies. In part, this contrast also acquires spatial connotations, as it is articulated along the axis of Italian studies/Anglophone studies on Italy. Cultural studies on Italian colonialism, on

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