Visualising In/Equalities through Contemporary Documentary Cinema. A Diffractive Reading of Feminist Practices in Spanish and Italian Non-Fiction Films

This thesis brings together feminist documentary film theory and feminist new materialism(s) to describe how feminist material-discursive practices in a sample of Spanish and Italian documentary cinema made between 2013-2018 (can) visualise gender in/equalities. The accomplished objectives have been: 1. Building a bridge between feminist documentary film theory and Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology by approaching non-fiction cinema that deals with social inequalities as a diffraction apparatus. 2. Developing a feminist toolbox for a response-able gaze by gathering different insights from feminist film theory. 3. Identifying feminist material-discursive practices in a sample of documentary films produced in Spain and Italy over the last six years (2013-2018). 4. Analysing the effects that these feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema have, particularly in terms of visualising gender in/equalities on both sides of the camera and on both sides of the screen. 5. Revealing patterns between the ten case studies by reading through one another (i.e. diffractively) insights raised in each one of them. In ten documentary films/case studies, I identify patterns of continuities and differences concerning feminist material-discursive practices at four levels: content, form, production and reception. In terms of contents, I detect two patterns in which feminist material-discursive practices may operate: enacting the right to appear or enacting the right to look back and/or against the grain. As for the forms, I exemplify how feminism politicises Bill Nichols’s six modes of representation. My analysis of production practices is elaborated along the filmmakers’ self-positions/situatedness, tensions/obstructions, and effects/affects/emotions regarding four key concepts: documentary cinema, equality, gender and feminism(s). And in the case of reception practices, I identify patterns of affective identification and/or intellectual reflections.

Feminist environmental humanities: intertwining theory and speculative fiction

This dissertation explores the entanglement between the visionary capacity of feminist theory to shape sustainable futures and the active contribution of feminist speculative fiction to the conceptual debate about the climate crisis. Over the last few years, increasing critical attention has been paid to ecofeminist perspectives on climate change, that see as a core cause of the climate crisis the patriarchal domination of nature, considered to go hand in hand with the oppression of women. What remains to be thoroughly scrutinised is the linkage between ecofeminist theories and other ethical stances capable of countering colonising epistemologies of mastery and dominion over nature. This dissertation intervenes in the debate about the master narrative of the Anthropocene, and about the one-dimensional perspective that often characterises its literary representations, from a feminist perspective that also aims at decolonising the imagination; it looks at literary texts that consider patriarchal domination of nature in its intersections with other injustices that play out within the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on race, colonialism, and capitalism. After an overview of the linkages between gender and climate change and between feminism and environmental humanities, it introduces the genre of climate fiction examining its main tropes. In an attempt to find alternatives to the mainstream narrative of the Anthropocene (namely to its gender-neutrality, colour-blindness, and anthropocentrism), it focuses on contemporary works of speculative fiction by four Anglophone women authors that particularly address the inequitable impacts of climate change experienced not only by women, but also by sexualised, racialised, and naturalised Others. These texts were chosen because of their specific engagement with the relationship between climate change, global capitalism, and a flat trust in techno-fixes on the one hand, and structural inequalities generated by patriarchy, racism, and intersecting systems of oppression on the other.

Immagi-nazione e post-nazione in tre scrittrici scozzesi contemporanee: Jackie Kay, A. L. Kennedy, Ali Smith

Il presente studio affronta la complessa relazione esistente tra i concetti di donna, identità e nazione nell’ambito del rinnovato progetto politico scozzese avviato dalla devolution. La letteratura femminile e la cultura scozzese contemporanea vengono dunque esaminate in un’ottica postcoloniale, coordinando una prospettiva storico-sociale a un’analisi discorsiva della nazione, comportando inoltre continui riferimenti alle più recenti teorie femministe e di genere. La produzione letteraria di Jackie Kay, A. L. Kennedy e Ali Smith infatti sembra rendere possibile un’apertura della nozione di Scottishness, consentendo un approfondimento dei temi della differenza sessuale e culturale, immaginando propriamente la Scozia in senso post-nazionale.

Percorsi di gender performance: fotografia tra arte e moda dagli anni Novanta ad oggi

My project explores and compares different forms of gender performance in contemporary art and visual culture according to a perspective centered on photography. Thanks to its attesting power this medium can work as a ready-made. In fact during the 20th century it played a key role in the cultural emancipation of the body which (using a Michel Foucault’s expression) has now become «the zero point of the world». Through performance the body proves to be a living material of expression and communication while photography ensures the recording of any ephemeral event that happens in time and space. My questioning approach considers the gender constructed imagery from the 1990s to the present in order to investigate how photography’s strong aura of realism promotes and allows fantasies of transformation. The contemporary fascination with gender (especially for art and fashion) represents a crucial issue in the global context of postmodernity and is manifested in a variety of visual media, from photography to video and film. Moreover the internet along with its digital transmission of images has deeply affected our world (from culture to everyday life) leading to a postmodern preference for performativity over the more traditional and linear forms of narrativity. As a consequence individual borders get redefined by the skin itself which (dissected through instant vision) turns into a ductile material of mutation and hybridation in the service of identity. My critical assumptions are taken from the most relevant changes occurred in philosophy during the last two decades as a result of the contributions by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze who developed a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach to interpret the crisis of modernity. They have profoundly influenced feminist studies so that the category of gender has been reassessed in contrast with sex (as a biological connotation) and in relation to history, culture, society. The ideal starting point of my research is the year 1990. I chose it as the approximate historical moment when the intersection of race, class and gender were placed at the forefront of international artistic production concerned with identity, diversity and globalization. Such issues had been explored throughout the 1970s but it was only from the mid-1980s onward that they began to be articulated more consistently. Published in 1990, the book "Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity" by Judith Butler marked an important breakthrough by linking gender to performance as well as investigating the intricate connections between theory and practice, embodiment and representation. It inspired subsequent research in a variety of disciplines, art history included. In the same year Teresa de Lauretis launched the definition of queer theory to challenge the academic perspective in gay and lesbian studies. In the meantime the rise of Third Wave Feminism in the US introduced a racially and sexually inclusive vision over the global situation in order to reflect on subjectivity, new technologies and popular culture in connection with gender representation. These conceptual tools have enabled prolific readings of contemporary cultural production whether fine arts or mass media. After discussing the appropriate framework of my project and taking into account the postmodern globalization of the visual, I have turned to photography to map gender representation both in art and in fashion. Therefore I have been creating an archive of images around specific topics. I decided to include fashion photography because in the 1990s this genre moved away from the paradigm of an idealized and classical beauty toward a new vernacular allied with lifestyles, art practices, pop and youth culture; as one might expect the dominant narrative modes in fashion photography are now mainly influenced by cinema and snapshot. These strategies originate story lines and interrupted narratives using models’ performance to convey a particular imagery where identity issues emerge as an essential part of fashion spectacle. Focusing on the intersections of gender identities with socially and culturally produced identities, my approach intends to underline how the fashion world has turned to current trends in art photography and in some case turned to the artists themselves. The growing fluidity of the categories that distinguish art from fashion photography represents a particularly fruitful moment of visual exchange. Varying over time the dialogue between these two fields has always been vital; nowadays it can be studied as a result of this close relationship between contemporary art world and consumer culture. Due to the saturation of postmodern imagery the feedback between art and fashion has become much more immediate and then increasingly significant for anyone who wants to investigate the construction of gender identity through performance. In addition to that a lot of magazines founded in the 1990s bridged the worlds of art and fashion because some of their designers and even editors were art-school graduates encouraging innovation. The inclusion of art within such magazines aimed at validating them as a form of art in themselves supporting a dynamic intersection for music, fashion, design and youth culture: an intersection that also contributed to create and spread different gender stereotypes. This general interest in fashion produced many exhibitions of and about fashion itself at major international venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then this celebrated success of fashion has been regarded as a typical element of postmodern culture. Owing to that I have also based my analysis on some important exhibitions dealing with gender performance like "Féminin-Masculin" at the Centre Pompidou of Paris (1995), "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose. Gender performance in photography" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York (1997), "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), "Female Trouble" at the Pinakothek der Moderne in München together with the workshops dedicated to "Performance: gender and identity" in June 2005 at the Tate Modern of London. Since 2003 in Italy we have had Gender Bender - an international festival held annually in Bologna - to explore the gender imagery stemming from contemporary culture. In few days this festival offers a series of events ranging from visual arts, performance, cinema, literature to conferences and music. Being aware that any method of research is neither race nor gender neutral I have traced these critical paths to question gender identity in a multicultural perspective taking account of the political implications too. In fact, if visibility may be equated with exposure, we can also read these images as points of intersection of visibility with social power. Since gender assignations rely so heavily on the visual, the postmodern dismantling of gender certainty through performance has wide-ranging effects that need to be analyzed. In some sense this practice can even contest the dominance of visual within postmodernism. My visual map in contemporary art and fashion photography includes artists like Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Hellen van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, Ed Templeton, Ryan McGinley, Anne Daems, Miwa Yanagi, Tracey Moffat, Catherine Opie, Tomoko Sawada, Vanessa Beecroft, Yasumasa Morimura, Collier Schorr among others.

Bioetica femminista ed etica della cura: un approccio alle questioni di fine vita

Scopo di tale lavoro è indagare la valenza dell'etica femminista e dell'etica della cura all'interno del campo della bioetica, in particolar modo rispetto ai dilemmi morali attinenti alle questioni di fine vita. Nell'intento di far emergere l'importanza dell'approccio femminista alla bioetica, ci occuperemo inizialmente dell'analisi dell'etica femminista, individuando i tratti caratteristici e le peculiarità proprie di tale pensiero. Secondariamente illustreremo la nascita dell'etica della cura e tratteremo delle differenti correnti che la costituiscono, al fine di mettere in evidenza le caratteristiche principali ascrivibili al pensiero della cura di tipo femminista. Dopo aver preso in considerazione l'etica femminista e l'etica della cura, esamineremo in che termini il concetto di autonomia possa essere interpretato dalla riflessione femminista nel suo complesso, cominciando a riflettere intorno al ruolo che l'etica della cura e l'etica femminista possono avere all'interno del campo della bioetica. In tal senso, prenderemo in esame le caratteristiche e gli obiettivi della bioetica femminista, soffermandoci ad indagare l'apporto che l'approccio femminista può fornire alla discussione intorno alle questioni di fine vita. Al riguardo, esamineremo in che modo l'etica femminista e l'etica della cura possano espandere il discorso bioetico intorno al fine vita, vagliando i timori e le preoccupazioni espresse dalla riflessione femminista e considerando i nuovi scenari e le nuove prospettive tracciate dall'etica della cura.

Building Peace and/or Gender Equality. Changing Attitudes around Peace, Development and Security in International Cooperation in Rwanda.

The times following international or civil conflicts but also violent revolutions often come with unequal share of the peace dividend for men and women. Delusions for women who gained freedom of movement and of roles during conflict but had to step back during reconstruction and peace have been recorded in all regions of the world. The emergence of peacebuilding as a modality for the international community to ensure peace and security has slowly incorporated gender sensitivity at the level of legal and policy instruments. Focusing on Rwanda, a country that has obtained significant gender advancement in the years after the genocide while also obtaining to not relapse into conflict, this research explores to what extent the international community has contributed to this transformation. From a review of evaluations, findings are that many of the interventions did not purse gender equality, and overall the majority understood gender and designed actions is a quite superficial way which would hardly account for the significative advancement in combating gender discrimination that the Government, for its inner political will, is conducting. Then, after a critique from a feminist standpoint to the concept of human security, departing from the assumption (sustained by the Governemnt of Rwanda as well) that domestic violence is a variable influencing level of security relevant at the national level, a review of available secondary data on GBV is conducted an trends over the years analysed. The emerging trends signal a steep increase in prevalence of GBV and in domestic violence in particular. Although no conclusive interpretation can be formulated on these data, there are elements suggesting the increase might be due to augmented reporting. The research concludes outlining possible further research pathways to better understand the link in Rwanda between the changing gender norms and the GBV.

Il dilemma femminista dell'uso politico della violenza in Italia negli anni Settanta e Ottanta: tra pensiero politico e caso storico

Degli anni Settanta si parla, ormai quasi canonicamente, come gli anni della crisi, una crisi che compare quasi simultaneamente fuori e dentro i confini nazionali, e si configura come vera e propria crisi di sistema. Considerando il turning point rappresentato dai Seventies, è diffusa l'interpretazione nel contesto italiano del paradigma politologico secondo il quale è nella mancanza e nelle assenze del sistema politico-istituzionale alle domande di modernizzazione democratica provenienti dalle soggettività che emergono in quella che è stata definita la “stagione dei movimenti” che andrebbero individuate le radici prima della scelta della violenza come strumento di lotta politica e poi del cosiddetto “riflusso”. Questo studio cerca di analizzare le dinamiche e gli sviluppi nella relazione tra movimento femminista e violenza politica in Italia tra anni settanta e anni ottanta. Per comprendere ed analizzare le dinamiche di tale sviluppo è stato necessario prima ricostruire la genealogia del concetto di violenza politica elaborato dalla filosofia politica nel XX secolo e poi confrontarlo con il concetto di violenza proposto dal pensiero femminista nello stesso arco temporale. Allo stesso tempo si è considerato il fenomeno della violenza politicamente motivata agita nel decennio settanta, analizzando le specificità del femminismo stesso, ma anche, la possibilità di individuare lo scarto – politico, ideologico e esistenziale – tra le definizioni date dalla pratica femminista alla categoria di violenza e le peculiarità degli altri movimenti che si muovevano nella scena politica e sociale tra anni settanta e anni ottanta