Fifth Floor Special Sharing Session｜5.13 The body as a language of shouting and writing: the failure and resistance of the matrix in the era of totalitarianism

Lecture Introduction:

"She is a free woman, even if she doesn't know it. "

Why do women always find themselves in constructed gender inequality without knowing it? This is a topic that many feminist scholars have been exploring throughout their lives.

Beauvoir said that women's experience of the body stems from their "perception of their body as an object - a fragile object; an object that must be forced, motivated to function; that exists to be admired and manipulated."

Chizuko Ueno interprets the institutional sources of this self-objectification: men's control over women's sexual and reproductive functions is the root cause and result of patriarchy.

This May , the Fifth Floor Knowledge Sharing will introduce you to three Italian female writers who, during the fascist period when patriarchy was most respected, used their descriptions of the body to rebel, emphasizing women's right to self-determination of their bodies and challenging outdated gender constructions.

Together with Yuan Rui, an Italian PhD student in literature at the Sorbonne University, we talk with female writers in history who have broken the shame, get rid of the "weight of the body" and "gender troubles", slowly break through the inherent limitations, and get along well with our bodies.

 

About the speaker:

 

Yuan Rui is a PhD candidate in Italian literature at the Sorbonne University. Her main research interests are women’s literature, gender construction and discourse in fascism, and the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis.

 

Lecture information:

 

Fifth Floor Bookstore, 43 boulevard Haussmann, 75009 Paris

2023.5.13 (Saturday) 15:00-17:00

Price: 12 Euros per person (including drinks)

 

Lecture Outline:

 

This paper briefly discusses how fascism and its ideological source, Futurism, construct a gender order centered on "masculinity", and interprets how the female body, as the "language of the other", responds to the discipline of power and the new historical process by reading the descriptions of the female body in the works of Enif Robert , Paula Masno , and Elsa Morante .