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sex forerunners may liberate them from the sensation that 'everything has already
been written,' the form imposed upon them by the male-authored text presents other
challenges.
Most feminist critics are interested in establishing what happens when a
woman becomes the writing subject, as opposed to its object - when a female reader
decides to become a female writer. Reading informs and forms the work of every
writer, but many critics, like Elizabeth Bronfen, believe that in the case of the female
writer the bonds between reading and writing are tighter: 'Because the historically
real woman writer cannot articulate herself entirely devoid of cultural fictions of
femininity, writing as a woman transpires into an act of reading cultural texts [...]
critically, so as to enact the implied contradiction." This act of critical reading was a
necessary step towards writing and away from the nineteenth century image of the
woman reader whose relationship to the text is one of such passivity that it can
constitute a corruptive danger. Does this still hold true towards the end of the
twentieth century?
This is not so much a quest to trace a 'female' quality in writing, but rather, as
Maria Rosa Cutrufelli suggests, a questioning of how 's'incama nella scrittura
l'esperienza del singolo corpo di chi scrive e, allo stesso tempo, l'esperienza storica
del 'genere sessuale' a cui chi scrive appartiene." It is this general emphasis on
tracing the experience of women as subjects in the present, as opposed to striving
towards a utopian future or idealised past notions of an essential female, which has
found a particularly favourable reception with some Italian theorists. The leading light
of this movement is Adriana Cavarero, for whom 'the female subject can emerge
when she decides to be her own subject, to think about her own subject taking herself
as a starting point, here and now.,6 It is this subject, frequently riddled with
contradictions, who, as a writer, also finds herself increasingly aware of her dialogue
2).
4 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Mancherster:
Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 404.
5 Maria Rosa Cutrufelli cit. by Carol Lazzaro-Weis in From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and
Fictional Modes in Italian Women's Writing, 1968-1990 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1993), p.17. CutrufeIIi writes: 'non si tratta deIl'eterno quesito se esista 0 meno 'una qualita
femminile' 0 'una qualita maschile' della scrittura. Quesito che, cosi posto, risulta ambiguo e forse
d'impossibile soluzione (a meno che non si voglia banalizzare il tutto, come pure spesso si fa,
rroclamando la neutralita della scrittura e l'androginia dello scrittore).'
Adriana Cavarero, 'The Need for a Sexed Thought' originally given in 1986 at the first nationwide
conference of Women's Cultural Centres, held in Siena and published in Italian Feminist Thought: A
Reader, ed. by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 181-185 (p.185).
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