Gendering Commitment

Gendering Commitment Gendering Commitment: Re-thinking Social and Ethical Engagement in Modern Italian Culture Edited by Alex Standen Gendering Commitment: Re-thinking Social and Ethical Engagement in Modern Italian Culture Edited by Alex Standen This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Alex Standen and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7640-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7640-7 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9 Discussing Women’s Social Role through Paradoxical Behaviours: Starvation and Self-empowerment in Neera’s Teresa (1886) and L’indomani (1889) Francesca Calamita Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Gendering the Air: An Alternative Perspective on Futurist Aeropainting Jennifer Griffiths Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 45 “Appartenevo ad un uomo, dunque?” Reading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early 20th-Century Italian Women’s Narrative Alex Standen Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 63 Sandro Penna, Queer Intellettuale Impegnato John Champagne Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 93 “Senza cacciarsi dentro un destino da etichetta”: The Body Politics of Dacia Maraini Maria Morelli Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 119 Re-Mapping Impegno in Postcolonial Italy: Gender, Race, Class, and the Question of Commitment Barbara De Vivo Contributors ............................................................................................. 139 Index ........................................................................................................ 141 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book began life in 2012 following a conference at the University of Birmingham, generously supported by the Association for the Study of Modern Italy. Since then, I have been greatly appreciative of the ongoing support and interest in this work from previous colleagues at the Universities of Birmingham and Auckland. I would like to acknowledge the support of Francesca Calamita, Sarah La Pietra, Maria Morelli, Claire Peters, Charlotte Ross and Jessica Wood for their patient reading and thoughtful comments. Finally, particular thanks to Clare Watters, co- organiser of the conference and long-time friend and collaborator, without whom this book would not have come into being. INTRODUCTION Notions of commitment, engagement and impegno continue to provoke debate in the Italian Studies arena. However, a closer look at such discussions suggests that gendered perspectives are often conspicuously absent; be it by accident or by a more conscious selection, critical work has tended to posit impegno as a predominantly male and, often, heteronormative domain. This volume aims to challenge this assumption and to analyse more closely the fluid and fragmented nature of commitment, and the work of Italian intellectuals and cultural practitioners associated with it. The texts under analysis have not typically been associated with terms such as engagement and commitment, and yet, as the following chapters go on to argue, all insist on the need to question, interrogate and denounce contemporary social norms and realities. Impegno is a term that is deeply entrenched in Italian culture and academia. Defined variously as commitment, engagement, undertaking, obligation and responsibility, it might appear to correspond to the French engagement and yet its specific associations make it more difficult to delineate. In the post-war period, it became associated with a distinctly communist agenda and, as Jennifer Burns would have it, “a rather oppressive type of political literature, associated with neorealism and Soviet ‘social realism’” (2001: 4). Already in 1964, it was being consigned to a specific historical moment, with Calvino and Pasolini declaring it unfashionable. Italian artists and writers moved away from realism to experimentation, and critics professed that since 1975, writers had failed to offer a sustained engagement with society (Wren-Owens 2007: 2-13). This shift in Italian thought paralleled wider cultural and theoretical shifts towards post-structuralism and post-modernism, which, it was assumed, were at odds with the kind of socio-political engagement previously vaunted. However, the concept has once again become the subject of special academic attention in recent years, with works by Jennifer Burns (2001) and Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug (2009) provoking reflection and debate. Seeking to liberate the notion of commitment from its historically restrictive boundaries, these and other studies have begun to open up new spaces and possibilities for a broader theorization of impegno. In Burns’ influential work, for instance, she rejects the typically 2 Introduction “monolithic notion of commitment to a usually communist agenda in writing” (2001: 1), instead conceptualizing of contemporary impegno as, “a break-up of the commitment to a single, overarching social agenda into a fragmentary attention to specific issues” (ibid: 1). Following Burns, Antonello and Mussgnug call for the “diversification” of impegno (2009: 2), refuting the persistent academic tendency to associate it with figures such as Sartre and Pasolini, and favouring its re-description, “simply, as an ethical or political position channelled through specific cultural and artistic activities, against any restrictive ideological brace” (2009: 11). For a number of critics, then, it remains a useful and important term, rather than one that constrains our thinking or harks back nostalgically to a particular cultural moment. Discussions about the role of the intellectual in Italian society have similarly emerged as areas of critical interest within Italian cultural studies (Ward 2001; Barwig and Stauder 2007; Bolongaro et al. 2009). The scope of these works evidently differs: where impegno refers to individuals whose commitment to society is manifested through their art, the intellettuale is more typically a public figure offering societal observation and comment. That said, for the purposes of this study, we are interested in diverse instances of commitment, be they through literature, art, criticism or journalism. We interchange impegno freely with terms such as commitment, engagement and ethics, so as to avoid it conditioning our thinking in ways that it may previously be seen to have done. As academic debate has long sought to determine the function of the intellectual in society, the key characteristics demarcating this – and some of the ways in which it has been challenged – are useful to our discussion. It has been argued, for example, that the ability to offer perspectives on a broad range of contemporary concerns, coupled with an immediacy of response, is fundamental to the role of the societal commentator (Edgeworth 1999). This is a view which clearly conflicts with recent debate about impegno, as defined above, in which an expanded definition was sought, including recognition that individual attention to specific issues must also define the role (Burns 2001: 1). Additionally, it has been proposed that individuals should be autonomous, acting without political allegiance and outside of state institutions (Said 2002); as Umberto Eco would have it, “sarebbe sbagliato per l’intellettuale entrare nella politica professionale e tentare di occupare in questa un posto di responsabilità; gli conviene meglio preservare la sua indipendenza” (cited in Barwig and Stauder 2007: 16). Free from any suspicion of vote chasing or career building, the intellectual becomes more credible than his or her political counterparts, and his or her views are more respected and valued (ibid: Gendering Commitment 3 18). However, such impartiality can also be problematized when, more typically, impegno has been seen to be implicitly associated with left-wing concerns. Perhaps more relevant, then, would be to talk about individuals who question and interrogate social realities, and who use their art (in whatever form that takes) as a tool for acting in and understanding the contemporary world. In terming the individual thus, we do not wish to imply that there is a responsibility to comment, or that the artist’s supposedly privileged position should require him or her to act as an agent for change or renewal in society; rather, it becomes clear that individual responsibility, critical awareness and the instigation of a dialogue with society are some of the central tenets of the kind of roles we are exploring. Ethical commitments such as these in turn presuppose a relationship between the

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