Carla Lonzi

Carla Lonzi (Florence, 6 March 1931 – Milan, 2 August 1982) was an Italian art critic and feminist activist, who is best known as the cofounder of Rivolta Femminile (Feminine Revolt), an Italian feminist collective formed in 1970.

Lonzi's most significant works include Autoritratto ("Self-Portrait", 1969); "Writings on Art" (1970); Manifesto di Rivolta femminile ("Manifesto of the Feminine Revolt", 1970); Sputiamo su Hegel, La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti ("Let's Spit on Hegel, The Clitoridian Woman and the Vaginal Woman, and Other Writings", 1974); and "Diary of a Feminist" (1977).

Personal life Carla Lonzi was born in Florence, Italy, on 6 March 1931 to a middle-class family. Her father owned a small industrial company and her mother dedicated her life to the nurture and education of Lonzi and her four siblings. Her sister Marta Lonzi (1938–2008), an architect, was also a feminist activist.

In her early twenties, Lonzi became greatly interested in film and theatre, both as a spectator and creator. This lead her to performance art, a practice she liked for its ability to stage real life experiences and revealing truths. Lonzi did her final dissertation on theatre and graduated from the University of Florence. by deploying a style of writing revolving around subjectivity and discussion. Through her recorded interviews Lonzi was seeking to capture the processes art that she argued was often lost in art's exhibitions.

The artists featured in Autorittrato were: Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Luciano Fabro, Pino Pascali, Giulio Paolini, Mimmo Rotella, Carla Accardi (the only female artist), Getulio Alviani, Enrico Castellani, Mario Nigro, Salvatore Scarpitta, Giulio Turcato, Cy Twombly and Pietro Consagra.

Lonzi's art criticism went largely unnoticed and was barely mentioned within academic circles. There are several proposed explanations for this, including that Lonzi's art historical work was widely interpreted as an extension of her work as a feminist activist and that it did not adopt the traditional approach to the promotion of Italian art used in the 1970s and 80s.

Scholars have described Autorittrato as Lonzi's farewell to the art world. Although she viewed art as incompatible with the objectives of radical feminism, she continued writing about art or "creativity as a mode of self-emancipation." Lonzi's following book, Writings on Art is a diaristic text written between 1955 and 1970. Because it spans over a 15-year period, its ideas are in constant evolution. Most of the ideas expressed in the book are gathered from information collected from periodicals, exhibition catalogues, conference papers, and newspaper essays.

Feminist activism

Turn to activism In the early 1970s, Lonzi adopted a feminist stance in relation to art. Lonzi became disillusioned and went as far as dismissing art criticism as a "phoney profession". The politics of Rivolta Femminile were largely grounded in "autocoscienza" theory and practices. "Autocoscienza", meaning a heightened sense of self-consciousness or self-awareness, was a collective exercise of feminist "consciousness-raising."

Writing Lonzi was the author of some of Italian Feminism's most important documents. Her numerous provocative texts and manifestos pushed the boundaries of the traditional understanding of conversationalism and the manifesto format. This was accomplished through continuous experimentation with writing and knowledge production.

Let's Spit on Hegel (1970) is considered one of the seminal texts of Italian feminism. It questioned women's claim for equality by stressing the patriarchal character of Hegel's dialectic and 'theory of recognition'. It was published in 1970 and deconstructs what Lonzi argues as the patriarchal nature of Hegel's theories. The book was initially serialised between 1970 and 1972 and then collected in a unique volume in 1974. Each section reveals one stage of Lonzi's personal consciousness raising.

In The Clitoridian Woman and the Vaginal Woman (1971), through the analysis of Freud and Reich's psychoanalysis, Desmond Morris' paleoanthropology and the Kama Sutra, Lonzi claims that the myth of the vaginal orgasm serves the patriarchal model of the complementarity of women to men. If this complementarity between man and woman is permitted during procreation, it is not allowed during sexuality. Published at a time when women's sexuality and self-liberation were at the forefront of feminist discussion, the book significantly contributed to these debates.

Death Lonzi died on 2 August 1982, in Milan, at the age of 51.