Rethinking the Change: Italian Feminism Between Crisis and Critique of Politics

Abstract

I think of the kinds of questions that I’ve heard female researchers and students ask of Italian feminism in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland. I think of a certain ease of dialogue between men and feminists that is less suspicious than what we’re used to in Italy. There is an openness to the other and to otherness, which might derive from Australia being a multicultural society. The relativisation of Europe, and even more so of Italy, happens spontaneously when looked at from Australia with Asia in between. All this adds up to an ‘Australian Effect’ that has profoundly changed me and that in turn changes my way of talking about the ‘Italian Effect’. I am therefore writing from within a relationship to this context that already marks me, questions me and dislocates me, and my intention is to yield not so much a thought as a practice of thought, born and bred in close proximity to a political practice.