Feminismo e fotografia italiana: Notas sobre a herança das novas gerações dos anos 1970

Abstract

Assuming the current perspectives offered by international gender and feminist studies, this paper aims to read the history of Italian photography, focusing on the period from the Seventies to today, investigating the sources from a different viewpoint and starting from new questions, which consider events and authoresses identifying their contribution to feminist photography practices in Italy. The paper also aims to respond to the many still open questions regarding the space of visibility of women in Italian photography, their possibility to access exhibitions and critical debate, especially for what concerns the new generation of Italian women photographers. How the new generation of Italian women photographers relate to the Italian feminist heritage? Is it possible to trace in their work a shared poetics that characterize their belonging to a common theoretical and
practical dimension that can be defined as feminist? Or they reject cultural labels and heritages to which they feel alienated? This aim is also to contribute to the cultural formation and debate of a nation, Italy, in which the issues of gender, female emancipation, feminist inheritance and women’s art are still not sufficiently considered part of the heritage of civil society, nor a fundamental and necessary topic in the educational processes of schools and universities. For art historians, this means working within the methodological and scientific framework of their own sector, however necessarily adopting cross-disciplinary approaches that must be compared with the historical and philosophical dimension, with aesthetics, as well as using the analytical instruments offered by recent gender and feminist studies.