Carla Lonzi

Works

• 1970Let’s Spit on Hegel

  Rejects the dialectic of master and slave and the Marxist promise of liberation as foreign to women’s experience and calls for a separate path of women’s self-consciousness.

Position

Lonzi stands on the map as the initiator of Italian difference feminism. “Let’s Spit on Hegel” argues that the great theories of emancipation in modernity were written from a male standpoint: Hegel assigns women to the family, outside history, and Marxism promises women’s liberation as a by-product of the class struggle. Equality, in this view, means assimilation to a male model; what women need is not admission to a culture made by men but the discovery of their own difference. Lonzi saw the women’s movement as an “unexpected subject” that breaks the dialectic of master and slave. The matching practice was autocoscienza: small groups in which women spoke about their own experience, without men and without leaders. “The Clitoridean Woman and the Vaginal Woman” turned the same critique against Freud and the norm of the vaginal orgasm. Her texts circulated in small editions and were long known mainly within the movement; the Libreria delle donne di Milano and Luisa Muraro took up her starting point, and new editions, translations and art-historical studies of her break with criticism have renewed interest since the 2010s. Feminists committed to equality and legal reform objected that her separatism and her distance from political organisation offered little for changing laws and institutions; this disagreement runs through the history of Italian feminism.

Life & context

Carla Lonzi was born on 6 March 1931 in Florence. She studied at the University of Florence, where Roberto Longhi taught art history, and graduated in 1956 with a thesis on the relations between the stage and the visual arts. For more than a decade she worked as an art critic for journals and galleries, among them in Turin; from 1961 the sculptor Pietro Consagra was her partner. Her book “Self-Portrait” (Autoritratto, 1969), assembled from recorded conversations with fourteen artists, among them Carla Accardi, Lucio Fontana and Jannis Kounellis, broke with the conventions of criticism, and afterwards she left the field. In 1970 she founded the group Rivolta Femminile with Accardi and Elvira Banotti; its manifesto was posted on the walls of Rome in July 1970. Through the group’s own imprint, Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, she published “Let’s Spit on Hegel” (1970), “The Clitoridean Woman and the Vaginal Woman” (1971), the diary “Be Quiet, or Rather Speak” (1978) and the dialogue with Consagra “Go Ahead” (1980). She died of cancer in Milan on 2 August 1982.

Further main works

• Self-Portrait (Autoritratto, 1969)
• The Clitoridean Woman and the Vaginal Woman (La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale, 1971)
• Be Quiet, or Rather Speak. Diary of a Feminist (Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista, 1978)
• Go Ahead. Dialogue with Pietro Consagra (Vai pure. Dialogo con Pietro Consagra, 1980)