Recording Emancipation and Escaping Integration. Oral Histories and the Critique of Visual Regimes in the Italian Sexual Liberation of the 1960s and 1970s

While radical histories of gender and sexual liberation have been widely studied, scholars have not considered the significance of the fact that they occurred alongside a revolution in recording technologies, such as the introduction of the cheap and portable Philips magnetophone, which gave individuals and social movements the technical capacity to document and transmit everyday experiences at a new scale. This project is the first to study the conjuncture of these two revolutions in embodied desire and its technical registration on an international scale. In so doing, it will demonstrate how these flexible and accessible recording technologies were crucial to the emancipatory horizon of a disalienated existence shared by feminist, queer, and anti-colonial movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

The project examines how the aesthetics of transcribed recordings of oral histories embodied the sexual autonomy striven for and otherwise repressed in this political context and conjuncture. It departs from the hypothesis that the new use of these techniques allowed for the disalienation of sexuality within Italian dissident social critique. This, in turn, the project suggests, transformed the political representation of dissident sexual subjects. I will study three case studies as crucial examples of the encounter between gay and feminist consciousness-raising and new editing techniques in film and critical writing underway in the 1960s and 1970s: poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), art historian and separatist feminist Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) and her feminist collective Rivolta Femminile (1970–1980), and the separatist feminist radio station Radio Donna (1976-1979). By foregrounding the erotic body, the project suggests, Pasolini, Lonzi, Rivolta Femminile and Radio Donna technically refunctioned intellectual individuality as a plural, oral, and auto-erotic, disalienating practice.