French and Italian Feminist Exchanges in the 1970s: Queer Embraces in Queer Time.

Abstract

This dissertation offers a queer feminist investigation of some literary and theoretical works that constituted the body politics of French and Italian feminist and gay movements of the 1970s. Through comparative analyses of Luce Irigaray’s Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, Dacia Maraini’s Donna in guerra, Annie Ernaux’s L’événement, Carla Lonzi’s Taci anzi parla and Sputiamo su Hegel, Guy Hocquenghem’s Le désir homosexuel, Mario Mieli’s Elementi di critica omosessuale, Monique Wittig’s Le corps lesbien and Les guérillères, and Hélène Cixous’s Le rire de la Méduse, I argue that these works articulate a queer discourse of sexuality and gender that predates 1990s queer theory. My work is situated within the cultural and historical background of 1970s French and Italian feminist movements, and it consists of multiple comparisons—which I call queer embraces—that bring together French and Italian feminists, feminists and gays, 1970s feminism and 1990s queer theory. These comparisons allow for a queer critique of feminism and a feminist critique of gay theory. In chapter one I show that Dacia Maraini’s and Annie Ernaux’s novels deconstruct the notion of traditional motherhood and destabilize a hetero-normative construction of narrative and discourse through what I call queer abortions. In chapter two I look at Lonzi’s construction of the donna clitoridea through the allegory of the clitoris. I maintain that the clitoris signifies both the complexity of female homosociality in radical feminism and the discovery of female sexual autonomy as a form of queer female subjectivity. In chapter three I analyze the feminist theories of desire by Irigaray and Lonzi along with the gay theories of Hocquenghem and Mieli. I argue for a queer feminist resistance to phallic discourse, which inscribes female queerness through the modes of male queerness and of gayness through feminism. In chapter four I propose a queer reading of écriture féminine as écriture butch by examining the simultaneous emergence of the categories of woman and lesbian in Cixous’s and Wittig’s texts. Furthermore, the comparisons within each chapter work through a notion of queer temporality, which disturbs the linear cause-and-effect narrative and redefine the 1970s as queer time.