“‘Sensations of Opening’: Carla Lonzi and the Praxis of Interdependency” takes up the subversive relational approaches of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) to contemporary art and radical feminism in postwar Italy, as they illuminate productive interchanges between participatory art, intersectional feminism, queer studies, and the politics of difference. Lonzi’s anti-identitarianism is underscored as the aspect of her endeavors that most pointedly departs from the norms of racial capitalist patriarchy. Lonzi’s practical feminist philosophy urges the emergence and activation of new consciousness in relation to others; rather than prescribing outcomes, it makes space and conjures possibilities. It is a feminism of the present that resonates strongly with contemporary movements in the public humanities oriented towards radical social change and transversal solidarity. In particular, I look to lineages of Black feminist refusal and anti-assimilationist queer theory, to constellate Lonzi’s thought nearby. I traverse and write between Lonzi’s published works, the existing scholarship, works of art and art criticism contemporaneous to Lonzi’s art critical ventures, and 20th and 21st century critical theory and continental philosophy that shed light on her legacy.
Three chapters form the core of the dissertation, rigorously examining and contextualizing Lonzi’s disruptive methodology as applied to art criticism; disidentification as performance art; and queer political philosophy respectively. In Chapter One, “Proxies to Patria: Inventing Art Criticism,” I situate Lonzi’s uncommon art critical practice. I refer to her invented approach as one of “authenticity by proxies,” an apparent paradox that nonetheless conveys the process and potential of art according to Lonzi, reclaims both keywords (authenticity and proxies), and anticipates Lonzi’s feminism. I show how she confronted “patria” in the guises of three giants of modern Italian art criticism, each dedicated to the national interest in distinct ways—Roberto Longhi, Giulio Carlo Argan, and Germano Celant—by staging reciprocal “proxy” relations between herself and a number of artists—I highlight Pinot Gallizio, Enrico Castellani, Giulio Paolini, and Carla Accardi—in which the proxy acts for another while the other acts through the proxy and vice versa. Such an approach violates the terms of possessive individualism, and the law of private property as applied to the self.
In Chapter Two, “The Art of Disidentification,” I read Lonzi as a feminist performance artist who blurred the boundaries between life and art, alongside two key contemporaries: U.S. artists Lee Lozano and Adrian Piper. Extending Lonzi’s “feast” (convivio) metaphor for the making of Autoritratto (Self-portrait) (1969)—a cut-up of her interviews with fourteen artists—I parse this period of Lonzi’s suspension between art and politics, just prior to co-founding the Rivolta Femminile radical feminist writing and publishing collective, in terms of embodied presence. Lonzi’s confrontational, relational experiments bear fruitful comparison to Lozano’s and Piper’s coincident practices across the Atlantic, in which they tested the limits of art audiences and the art establishment as a means to the transformation of the entire apparatus, including themselves.
The third chapter, “‘We Jump at the Beginning’: Differencing Politics with Carla Lonzi and Angela Putino,” traces a lapsed, queer meaning of difference through Lonzi’s thought, pushing back against the gender essentialism that has overshadowed Italian feminism since the 1980s. I recover the thread of Lonzi’s nascent philosophy of difference in the little-acknowledged legacy of the queer, feminist, Neapolitan philosopher and activist Angela Putino (1946–2007). I show how both thinkers understand or come to understand difference as the gaps or voids between subjectivity and identity, through which queer political potentials unfold. In this context, queer means off-script and unexpected, and twice unaccounted for: first by exclusion, and secondly by eluding every inventory. I argue that difference conceived as such denotes immanent social possibilities that are non-assimilable by the capitalist-colonialist patriarchal order.
A coda inquires into Lonzi and Rivolta Femminile’s usage of the term “colonization” to describe women’s oppression. Considering the possibility that theirs is not a figurative usage and thus an appropriation of the name for the dispossession and subjugation of entire populations, but in fact an accurate description of being female-bodied under patriarchy—on the premise that the body, too, is a place—I take the opportunity to reflect on the interlocking, global systems of power that include settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and gender-based oppression, paying particular heed to the legacy of Rivolta member Elvira Banotti, a writer and social activist of Italian-Eritrean descent. The project moves between the specific situation of postwar Italy and the unruly nexus of thinking and doing differently from the position of the socially differentiated, examining whether and how difference can be liberated from the standpoint of the same.