CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Chiurato, Andrea |
|---|---|
| Title | The Individual and the State: Comparing 1970s and 1980s Feminism in Italy and Yugoslavia Through Two Authors' Re-Readings of Hegel |
| Summary | In this thesis, I analyze the relationship between Carla Lonzi and Blaženka Despot, two feminist theorists active in Italy and Yugoslavia, respectively, between the early 1970s and mid-1980s. My study focuses specifically on the possibilities that their theories open up for a feminist understanding of philosophy, especially in relation to the undoing of notions of ‘Western-ness’ and ‘Eastern-ness’, which often lead to the discounting of perspectives coming from the regions labeled as ‘Eastern’. To do so, I engage in critical discourse analysis to identify themes within their work, focusing specifically on their discussion of ‘male culture’ (or ‘male thought’) and the alternative relationship between the notions of ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ that their work establishes. Their location in both time and space – in countries which, for various reasons, can be considered ‘at the border’ between the two blocs of the Cold War, and in the decades of the 1968 student movement and the 1978 Drug-ca Žena conference, one of the most important moments within Yugoslav feminism – is particularly relevant to my research, owing to the numerous and frequent exchanges occurring between the two countries and the lively cultural environment of the time. I argue that despite their vastly different attitudes towards Hegelian and Marxist philosophy (and, in the latter case, practice), with Despot taking on a position that is generally of praise and Lonzi instead being very critical, some elements of theoretical convergence between them trace a path forward that, with its rejection of patriarchal violence, can easily be applied not just for strictly feminist (in a narrow understanding of the word) purposes, but can also comfortably be extended to a new understanding of issues related to East-West binaries, providing an alternative model to the still-popular Cold War understanding of the division as hinged on the (highly debatable) presence or absence of ‘civil society’. |
| Supervisor | Odak, Petar; Fodor, Éva |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/chiurato_andrea.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2025, Central European University