Abstract
In 1974, Marcella Campagnano decided to leave the field of painting and begin working on a photographic series. She asked her husband to take their child and leave the house for the afternoon; she needed the creative and intellectual freedom of solitude to focus on her art. By slipping into different female role models, she demonstrated that a woman’s social standing and gender role are encoded in her dress. The resulting series entitled, L’Invenzione del Femminile: RUOLI reveals unmistakably that the societal image of women is artificial. This chapter elucidates in which ways Campagnano’s working process reflects the importance of claiming “a room of one’s own” and how her practice correlates with the international and Italian feminist (art) movement of the 1970s.
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Notes
- 1.
All translations are made by the author unless otherwise noted English translation of essay: Christine Schöffler & Peter Blakeney.
- 2.
There were many psychoanalytical groups in the Milan feminist movement that also maintained active exchanges with French feminist groups and theoreticians on the topic of psychoanalysis, among others the French Psychanalyse et Politique collective. “Milan took the lead in this new phase, which was characterized by a gradual movement away from the practice of autocoscienza and towards the application of psychoanalytical tools of analysis, first introduced by Psych et Po, in the search for a more authentic way of being among women” (Hajek, 2017, 87–88).
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Hahn, D. (2023). Marcella Campagnano and the Invention of Femininity. In: Hecker, S., Ramsey-Portolano, C. (eds) Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14816-3_9
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