Feminist encounters through photography: Italy and beyond

For scholars engaging with feminism in the Italian context, reckoning with its distinctive intellectual lineage remains crucial, particularly with regard to its sustained dialogue with the philosophy of difference. This trajectory gained momentum in the early 1970s through the work of Carla Lonzi (1931-1982), whose thought proved foundational to the plural and polyphonic development of Italian radical feminism. At its core lies a critical emphasis on sexual difference, understood as neither reducible to biological “sex” nor to the cultural construction of “gender,” but rather «as the inscription of both of these in the symbolic dimension» (Bono, Kemp, 1991, p.16). In Italy, this conceptualisation became particularly influential from the emergence of the feminist movement through the 1980s, shaping not only theoretical discourse but also political and artistic practices, most notably those rooted in autocoscienza (con sciousness-raising practices). In this sense, it offered a distinctive frame through which women’s experience could be articulated beyond dominant heteronormative systems of representation, while also informing aesthetic strategies that sought to reimagine visu ality and language as spaces of autonomy, self-definition, and critical intervention. Yet at the same time, this emphasis on sexual difference has also contributed to a certain distance between Italian feminism and other feminist traditions – most notably British and American strands – which have often foregrounded equality-based paradigms or, at times, have critiqued difference theory for its perceived proximity to essentialism.