Possible New Women. The Question of the Futurist Woman from History to Utopia

Résumé En

Italian Futurism is often perceived as a misogynistic avant-garde movement. This is true to a certain extent, as European society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was largely patriarchal. However, while Marinetti instrumentalized the female figure, he also actively encouraged female participation.Starting in the 1910s, the reflection on the “new woman” occupied a significant part of Futurist discourse. This is the context in which Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifesto della donna futurista (1912) and the feminist utopias of Rosa Rosà’s Una donna con tre anime (1918) and Enif Robert’s Un ventre di donna (1919) can be situated. In my contribution, I would like to focus on these texts, as well as some other reflections more coherent with the principles of the movement, such as the “donna d’acciaio” of Eva Khun Amendola and the “donna fabbrica” of Maria Ginanni, to the “instancabili donne-motrici” of Marinetti. Located at the intersection of allegory, social critique and science fiction, these representations are important for two reasons: they serve as testimony to the complex and contradictory attempts to form a new idea of womanhood, and they can be re-interpreted in light of Posthuman theory, because of some similarities with the critical visions of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti.It was not uncommon for more conservative Futurists to label as “mostri” women who tried to transcend their role as mothers, sexual objects, or reproductive machines. Often, in the utopias of early Futurism, women were erased, removed, or replaced (Mafarka il futurista). Instead, by exalting the hybridization between flesh and machine, femininity and masculinity, in the texts that I will focus on, there is an attempt to transcend differences between the sexes, to demystify motherhood or dissociate it from women’s bodies, and to achieve a series of interesting “metamorfosi liberatrici” (Rosà), leading to the realm of the cyborg and the “post-Donna” of Braidotti, or at least what Rosà referred to as the “donne del posdomani”.