The Personal is Political. Self-enunciation Strategies in Italian Second-wave Feminism

This article examines the self-writing strategies used by the feminist movement in Italy in the 1970s. Taking Italian feminism as a case study, it analyses the various methods of self-enunciation employed in the wake of the discovery that 'the personal is political'. Through an analysis of the body of texts produced by the Italian women's movement - diaries, journals, personal notebooks, etc. - I identify three autobiographical discursive strategies: paranoid discourse of the self; schizophrenic discourse of the self; and, as a limiting form, catatonic discourse of the self. These represent various methods through which women seek to express themselves politically, stretching the autobiographical mechanism - built on the affinity among author, narrator and character - to breaking point. This radical experiment in self-writing is pushed to the limits of discovery so that, perhaps, it is the impersonal, rather than the personal, that is truly political.