Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy

Sharon Hecker is an Independent Art Historian and Curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art. Her publications include A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (2017), Postwar Italian Art History: Untying ‘The Knot’ (2018), and Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today (2022). She is Editor of the Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts Series for Bloomsbury Visual Arts.Catherine Ramsey-Portolano is Associate Professor and Director of the Italian Studies Program at The American University of Rome, Italy. Her publications include Nineteenth-Century Italian Women Writers and the Woman Question (2020), Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (2017), The Future of Italian Teaching: Media, New Technologies and Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives (2015), and The Italianist special issue Rethinking Neera (2010), co-edited with Katharine Mitchell.

• 1 New Perspectives on the Roles of Women in Italy’s Modern Intellectual History.- Part I Modeling Female Labor.- 2 Fading Away: Women Disappearing from Literature Textbooks.- 3 Futurist Women Artists and the (Pro)Creative Metaphor.- 4 Elena Ferrante’s Women Intellectuals: Writing and the Paradoxical Relationship to the Mother.- 5 Learning from the 1970s: Women’s Work Inside and Outside the Home.- Part II Performance as Strategy.- 6 From Art History to Life Writing: Anna Banti’s Feminist Resonance.-7 The Body and the Asemantic Writing in the Performance of Tomaso Binga.-8 The Hard Work of Being Women in 1960s Italy: Cecilia Mangini and the Documentary.-9 Marcella Campagnano and the Invention of Femininity.-Part III Questions of Female Authority.-10 Jolanda, Angiolo Orvieto and Cosimo Giorgieri-Contri: Asymmetric Mentoring Relationships.-11 Alda Merini: Stigma and the Struggle for Authority as a Woman Writer.-12 Strike a Pose: Italian Women Artists’ Self-Representation in Photographic Portraits in the 1960s and 1970s.-13 Materializing Difference: Visions of Subjectivity in the Intermedia Works of Ketty La Rocca.-Part IV Collaborations, Networks and Support Systems.-14 Reimagining Art Practice, Recasting Myths: The Story of Two Groups of Feminist Artists in Southern Italy in the Late 1970s.-15 Contradictions and the Re-Invention of One’s Own Role: The Publishing House Scritti di Rivolta Femminile in the Life/Work of Carla Lonzi .-16 Building a Different Memory Together: The Politics of Feminist Archives in Italy.-Part V Foreigners in Italy.-17 Reconstructing Edmonia Lewis’s Roman Life: An Exploration of Her Presence in the Eternal City.-18 Ombra Felice? Jessie Boswell and Daphne Maugham in Felice Casorati’s Shadow.-19 Russian Women Artists in Italy Between the Two Wars: Careers, Social Policies, and Intercultural Relations Between Revolution and Fascism.-20 Gender Codes in Art and Industry: Beverly Pepper, an American in Postwar Italy.-Part VI Cultural Exchanges.-21 Mario and Edita Broglio: The Dynamics of an Artist Couple in Fascist Italy.-22 Weaving Connections Between Rome and New York: The Role of Gabriella Drudi.-23 Editors’ Conversation with German Art Historians Oona Lochner and Isabel Mehl: Writing Like a Feminist—In Dialogue with Carla Lonzi.-Part VII Questioning Boundaries.-24 Pinks, Purples and Shades of Porpora: The Life of Porpora Marcasciano and the Work of Trans Activism.-25 Editors’ Conversation with Italian-Dominican Filmmaker Laila Petrone: Visualizing Multicultural Italian Women.-26 Editors’ Conversation with Algerian-Italian Author and Translator Amal Bouchareb: Arab Women’s Cultural Production in Italy—Struggling Against Stereotypical Representations or Fitting into Neo-Orientalist/White Feminist Paradigms?