Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto ...

nomic expansion and trade, agricultural productivity, artistic creativ-
ity, power of giving life and power of giving death. Conversely, the
multiplied analogy reverberates its violent masculine connotations
on the procreative act. The reproductive power is thus appropriated,
made male, and ultimately turned into its opposite: a power of de-
struction.
The perpetrator of this violence can only be a "mechanized" man
who, having jettisoned sentiments and lust for woman, is engaged in
a genital sexuality which aims solely at mechanical relief or reproduc-
tion:
L'immenso amore romantic0 e ridotto cosi unicamente alla conserva-
zione della specie, e l'attrito delle epidermidi e finalmente liberato da
ogni mistero stuzzicante, da ogni pepe appetitoso e da ogni vanita don-
giovannesca: semplice funzione corporale, come il bere e il mangiare.
L' uomo moltiplicato che noi sogniamo, non conoscera la tragedia
della vecchiaia! [TIF, 301)
The genesis of the multiplied man involves the introjection of the
empowering qualities of the machine-energy, precision, discipline
-and the expulsion (projection on to the other) of weakening human
qualities-sensibility, sensualism, scepticism, pessimism. This logic
of exclusion culminates in the concept of the all-male creation: Mari-
netti's manifesto-preface to the novel Mafarka il futurista predicates
the birth of this Futurist superuomo upon the exclusion of woman
from the (prolcreative act. Having incited his "Futurist brothers" to
free themselves from the condition of "figli e schiavi miserevoli della
vulva" (TIF, 2551, the poet makes the following prophecy:
In nome delllOrgoglio umano che adoriamo, io vi annuncio prossima
l'ora in cui gli uomini dalle tempie larghe e dal mento d'acciaio figlie-
ranno prodigiosamente solo con uno sforzo della loro volonta esorbi-
tata, dei giganti dai gesti infallibili . . . Io vi annuncio che lo spirito del-
l'uomo e un'ovaia inesercitata . . . E noi lo fecondiamo per la prima
volta! [TIF, 255)
Thus, the Futurist discourse of destruction and creation foregrounds
gender only to exclude woman as subject in the act of male (prolcre-
ation: the expenditure of the female principle serves the goal of mas-
culinization of creative economy, and the erotic imagery conveys the
sense of excitement and pleasure projected in these fantasies of male
progress and mastery over nature.
It is important to keep in mind that Marinetti's metaphor of sexual
violence is the radical version of a very old phallic fantasy: to expose
or unveil and penetrate the secrets of nature. In her work on gender
and science, Evelyn Fox Keller has shown how the genderization of