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

In the Italian feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, avantgarde uses of mechanical reproduction were deployed practically in the emergence of an anti-colonial body politics in which aesthetic and democratic representation – and the visual regimes of national culture altogether – were inherently refused. In the heterogenous opposition to the post-fascist law against abortion, this project proposes, the feminist refunctioning of aesthetic techniques of recording and transcription also transformed the dialectics of mechanical and social reproduction. As will be shown in a number case-studies, this transformation in turn forced a change in the role of sexuality and desire within dissident social critique.

Emphasizing the ‘oral histories’ of sexual liberation as it was called for by cultural figures such as art historian and separatist feminist Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) and poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), the project centers on the technical means and sonorous materiality of cultural and sexual autonomy in the period and context. By departing from the erotic body as central to automated textual subjectivation enabled by mechanical reproduction of aesthetic thinking undertaken by Lonzi, Pasolini, and others, the project attends to the ‘reversed’ function of art and aesthetic representation ‘after authenticity’ as refounded as a practice of politics. For these figures, the project shows, such practice was actualized in the political subjectivity that emerged amid the technical refunctioning of intellectual individuality as a plural, oral, and auto-erotic practice.