Suchergebnisse

The Italian Communist Party's peak of popularity in the mid-1970s, during its so-called 'Eurocommunist' turn, coincided with a surge of feminist struggles in Italy. While scholarship has treated Communist Party politics and feminism as unrelated historical phenomena, this article provides evidence for their multi-layered 'interweaving'. The term was employed by PCI women themselves to conceptualise how struggles against social and gender inequalities interlock, but also to stress that overcoming women's oppression in Italian society (and beyond) presupposed a reckoning with male dominance – and the peripheral role of the 'women's question' – within their party. The ensuing intra-party debate, reconstructed through sources from the turning-point year of 1976, is a revealing instance of PCI activists' reception of 1970s feminism.

"On Not Narrating the History of Feminism and Film" poses two questions: What happened to women in the early silent film industries, and why don't we know about them? While the author and others have addressed the first question elsewhere at recent international conferences and in publication, the second remains largely unanswered and is taken up here. It is specific to the field of feminism and film and media studies, where in the 1970s moment of feminist film theory, the powerful paradigm of "no women" or woman as "absent" could be taken as either theoretical or empirical. The question arises as to how to write a narrative account given earlier prohibitions against narrative and empirical work, even when that very kind of work has discovered evidence of women working in significant roles in early film industries worldwide.