Archives of Lotta Femminista with Leopoldina Fortunati and Arlen Austin

Описание: This co-presentation by Leopoldina Fortunati and Arlen Austin was based on the archives of Lotta Femminista, the primary feminist movement to emerge within the workerist culture of the Triveneto region of northeastern Italy in the 1970s and a basis for the international Wages for Housework movement.

This event was held online & in-person at the MayDay Rooms Archive on June 1st 2022.

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Leopoldina Fortunati's works occupy a central position in the development of Marxist feminism, feminsit sociology and media theory. Throughout feminist struggles of the 1970s, she deeply engaged with the tradition of operaismo and other currents of the Italian extra-parliamentary left, interrogating the implications of their neglect of issues considered marginal to the core contradictions of labor and capital: the gendered division of labor and status of women as both ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ workers, in particular. As she developed this theoretical intervention, Fortunati simultaneously composed, in collaboration with Silvia Federici, Il Grande Calibano, an analysis of “so-called primitive accumulation” in its relation to the exploitation of women in post-war Italy. Both texts fundamentally questioned an orthodox Marxian historicism that focused on the industrial revolution as the primal scene of capitalist accumulation. Her subsequent works as a media theorist and have broadly examined practices of collective feminist craft and media usage.

Arlen Austin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University whose research addresses the relation between post-war social movements and mass media. In 2016 he co-edited a collection with Silvia Federici of materials from the Wages for Housework movement in the United States and is currently working in collaboration with Sara Colontuono on a project to translate Leopoldina Fortunati's L'arcano della riproduzione. Casalinghe, prostitute, operai e capitale, perhaps the most extensive theoretical articulation of the Italian feminist project to emerge in dialog with the extraparliamentary left of the 1970s. Throughout 2019, Arlen worked with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and her close associates to catalog and record Dalla Costa's immense collection of movement ephemera housed in the Biblioteca civica di Padova. His work has appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Viewpoint, GLQ. A journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, TDR: Drama Review, and Radical History Review

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Explore the archive here: https://www.bibliotechecivichepadova....