Pride and Prejudice
Lesbians in Italy in 2010: politics, history, theory, imaginary
by Lidia Cirillo, Fabiola Correale, Paola Gouache, Claudia Lopresti, Eva Mamin, Anna Muraro
Alegre Edizioni, Roma 2010
€ 5
Approximately fifteen years is the first series of Quaderni Viola published its fourth issue, and the last close the door on the theme of political lesbian. The book was greeted with curiosity and interest, was widely disseminated and some important reviews, it was commented at length by Teresa de Lauretis in her book Subjects eccentric (Feltrinelli 1999) . We worked together for much of 1995 preparing the Viola and the Laboratory Notebooks Lesbian Criticism, a small group that would later played an important role in the founding of ArciLesbica.
The first question we asked in evoking the old number was as follows: what has changed since 1995 when we debated passionately that the relationship between feminism and lesbian politics? You can answer that first of all, many things have changed in two opposite directions exactly with the end result of an apparent immobility.
There was above all a clear shift in feminism. For the first time in Italian history, a sweeping motion, like the one that showed violence against women in November 2007, was called to feminist and lesbian, openly acknowledging the existence within it of a component of women who love women. There was then a change in the political scene on which he broke the Pride, which takes place every once in tens of thousands of people forced to take the political position and the press to break the silence. In addition, the time that fourth book of the old series, a television series like The L Word would have been unthinkable and there were no parliamentary openly gay, lesbian or trans.
Other phenomena rather go in the opposite direction. Italy is still one of the few countries in the world north-west where the movement is not got nothing on terms of rights and action against homophobia, while lesbian, gay and trans are much more exposed today than yesterday to homophobic violence.
Pride and Prejudice, Notebook Viola third of the new post-2000 series, try to take stock of the situation of lesbians in Italy, both politically and from the historical, theoretical and imaginary, without ambition wrong on providing the "line" of the movement or to close a complex world into a comprehensive framework captiously, but also without fear of expressing an interpretation of reality and to draw a political perspective.
The editors who worked on Pride and Prejudice consists Lidia Cirillo, Fabiola Correale, Paola Gouache, Claudia Lopresti, Eva and Anna Muraro Mamin. There are also contributions by Paola Biondi, Laura Corradi, Daniela Danna, Rosanna Fiocchetto, MFLA Radio Onda Rossa and Daniela Santoro. You can also read interviews with three members of the lesbian movement: Elena Biagini, Cristina Gramolini and Luki Massa.
