«Donna di troppi colori». Soggetto eccentrico e genere come performance in Niccolai, Graffi, Vicinelli

This essay aims to investigate, on a theoretical level and with some specific textual examples, two crucial elements in defining poetics of three neo-avant-garde female authors, namely Giulia Niccolai, Milli Graffi, and Patrizia Vicinelli. The first element concerns a peculiar interpretation of one of the main principles of poetics proposed by Alfredo Giuliani in the introduction to the anthology I Novissimi. Poesie per gli anni Sessanta (1961), that of the «reduction of the self». In fact, within these writings there is never an a priori elimination of the lyrical subject, but rather its radical transformation into a relational, ambiguous and phantasmatic category, including some strong marks of interactivity between the author and the reader. Starting from these assumptions, it seems appropriate to verify the applicability of two paradigmatic definitions in contemporary feminist theory: the «eccentric subject» (De Lauretis 1999) and the «nomadic subject» (Braidotti 1994). The second element concerns the characteristic role of performativity in their poems, understood in two ways: both in reference to the phonic, sonic and theatrical element of the text as performance, and in reference to the mechanisms of representation of female identity, following Judith Butler's theory of gender as performance (1999).