Travelling Theories: Intersectionality in The Italian Feminist Movement

This paper aims to study the application of the concept of intersectionality in the contemporary Italian feminist movement. In the last years, a new wave of feminist demonstrations has been taking place across the world: from the Argentinian movement Ni Una Menos, to the US #MeToo, from the referendum on abortion in Ireland to the protests of female workers in India. In the contest of southern Europe, even Italian feminism has experienced a new renaissance with the movement “Non Una Di Meno” (Nudm), marking a radical gap with the historical Italian feminism, which focused for a long time on sexual difference theory and on the neutral "woman" subject. Faced with the neoliberal restructuring of work and the advancing of right-wing parties at a global level, the combined reading of gender, race and class as interconnected categories - building and enforcing each other - seemed far-sighted and necessary. While social movements have long focused only on the class issue, Western white feminism has been criticized by Black, Chicana, decolonial and postcolonial feminists of focusing only on the gender dimension. Differently, Nudm is claiming struggles’ intersectionality as one of the fundamental components of its activism, pointing out the structural dimension of gender-based violence. This paper aims to understand how the concept of intersectionality has entered the vocabulary and imaginary of Italian feminists. This paper hypothesis is that Nudm has created a discourse that has gone far beyond the network itself. Indeed, we believe that the interesting aspect to investigate is not the adherence of Nudm to the immutable concept of intersectionality: rather, through the lens of Intersectional Feminism and Postcolonial Critique, we would like to understand how intersectionality has spread in the feminist movement in general and how its meaning has changed in the Italian context. Starting from our positioning, we questioned ourselves on how to conduct a research on a movement which we are part of. At this regard, we figured out to organize the fieldwork as a particular form of focus group: self-inquiry. This method takes its origins from feminist and operaist movements and it’s still used in contemporary queer and feminist groups. Indeed, our aim is also to deconstruct the paradigma based on the inclusion of marginalized subjectivities, to avoid the risk of the fetishization of marginality. Self-inquiry also allows a circularity of the knowledge produced, interrupting the unidirectional act of academic research that only takes information from the subjects, transferring their value outside the life context of the subject themselves. Self-inquiry and self-learning aim instead to give back a part of the value to the examined subjects. In the light of the criticisms of the so-called "white feminism", how does the Italian feminist movement theorize its belonging to a transnational movement without falling into the false myth of "universal sisterhood"? Considering the cooptation of political concepts once they enter the mainstream discourse, how is it possible to avoid the risk of an individualized reading of intersectionality, ignoring the more radical aspects at the root of intersectional criticism?