Poetry That Bites: Stefania Antonelli’s Fragments of a Maternal Becoming 

Perrone, 2025, 978-8860047724

Review and Translation
Stefania Antonelli and Veronica Frigeni, PhD
¹Independent Scholar
²Visiting Researcher, Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (ZtG), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

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“Motherhood is the last frontier of female writing”: this bold claim opens Alice Braun’s recent study on maternal authorship, framing motherhood not as a topic among others, but as a profound challenge to traditional understandings of selfhood and literary creation (p. 2). In the last two decades, as Braun (2025) observes, literature, particularly life writing and poetry, has seen a significant rise in narratives that center the maternal not only as a theme but as a form and process. These texts not only portray mothers; they attempt to become maternal in their very structure: fragmentary, interrupted, relational. Motherhood meaningfully destabilizes the liberal ideal of the self-contained individual. The maternal self is defined through relation: fluid, incomplete, and shaped by others’ needs. This relational identity often clashes with dominant models of artistic authorship that prize detachment, autonomy, and control. It’s in this tension that maternal writing gains its force: it becomes a space where the “impossible subject” of the mother can begin to speak in her own terms (Braun, 2025). Rather than presenting a coherent narrative arc, many of these texts – memoirs, journals, hybrid essays, poems – embrace fragmentation, repetition, and interruption as structural principles, reflecting the lived realities of care and constraint.

As Braun (2025) observes, when women become mothers, their relationship to time and space is fundamentally altered, along with their place in the world and their connections to others (p. 133). Maternal life introduces temporal ruptures, emotional intensities, and shifting priorities that complicate linear or unified narratives. In this sense, writing motherhood often demands new forms: discontinuous, intimate, and hybrid. Poetry becomes a privileged space for this exploration: a genre that accommodates fragmentation, brevity, and embodied rhythms. Philosopher Lisa Baraitser (2008) offers a powerful account of how maternity disrupts conventional narrative logic. She describes the maternal subject as “a subject of interruption” (p. 74), whose time is perpetually fractured by the child’s needs. This disruption challenges the very conditions of literary production, particularly for mother-writers, who must contend with a genre, a narrative, that presupposes continuity. For Baraitser, “motherhood lends itself to anecdote rather than the grand narrative of ‘mother-writing’ due to the constant attack on narrative that the child performs” (p. 15). Writing becomes an act negotiated in the interstices of care, shaped by delay, pause, and return.

Literary critic Sarah Blackwood (2018) expands this reflection by suggesting that motherhood should be considered not merely a subject, but a genre, a material practice that shapes writing itself. In this view, motherhood is not something a writer chooses to address or not, but an embodied condition that restructures writing from within. As she puts it, writers such as Maggie Nelson and Jenny Offill exemplify how the formal fragmentation of their texts mirrors the discontinuous rhythms of maternal time: “motherhood is nothing but a collection of short bursts of focus set inside the oceanic nothingness of time passing.” The genre of motherhood, then, is marked by narrative interruption, temporal compression, and structural openness.

In life writing, this formal innovation aligns with a feminist shift from daughter-centric narratives to matrifocal ones. Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O’Reilly (2010) argue that contemporary maternal texts work to reclaim the mother’s voice and subjectivity. These writings reject idealized or culturally imposed images of the selfless, ever-giving mother in favor of honest, at times ambivalent, representations of care, exhaustion, and resistance. As Podnieks and O’Reilly explain, such matrifocal texts allow women to resist the symbolic erasure of motherhood and gain narrative control over their lived realities (p. 7). In this process, they seek to tear off what Susan Maushart (1999) has famously called “the mask of motherhood.”

Taken together, these perspectives invite us to think of maternal poetry, and specifically of Stefania Antonelli’s poems, not as a niche category, but as a vibrant and evolving form of life writing that grapples with the constraints and affordances of mothering as both experience and practice. Her poetry does not reflect on motherhood from a distance; it is written within it, amid fatigue, love, repetition, rupture, and intimacy. It is poetry shaped by time “borrowed” from care work, marked by the laboring maternal body and the unfinished rhythms of daily life. In this sense, maternal writing is not only personal and political: it is formally radical. This fragmentary poetics is central to the work of Italian poet Antonelli, who begins from the premise that “the fragment is the form of experience itself… as if only through the fragment could the chaotic truth of motherhood be told.” For Antonelli, poetry does not speak about motherhood from a distance, but emerges within it, rooted in the everyday fatigue of the body that nurses, yields, gets dirty and cleans, resists. From this deeply embodied and immersive position, her maternal poetics disrupt conventional notions of voice, authorship, and form.

A second defining feature of Antonelli’s work is her marked use of corporeal language, through which the maternal body is not deployed as metaphor, but asserted as a site of lived tension, affect, and subjectivity. This aligns with Julia Kristeva’s reflections in Stabat Mater (1985), where motherhood is framed as an ambivalent space, suspended between the symbolic and the semiotic, between cultural construction and visceral materiality. In resonance with this framework, Antonelli rejects sentimentalized, symbolic, or abstract portrayals of maternity, opting instead for a sophisticated realism that foregrounds the raw physical and psychic textures of mothering. Her verses evoke skin, blood, fatigue, and touch to construct a maternal subjectivity that actively contests binary oppositions such as mind/body, reason/emotion, and purity/abjection. In this way, Antonelli’s poetic self-inquiry into – and through – the transition to motherhood articulates a persistent “dialectic between embodied autonomy versus embodied disempowerment” (Bennett & Koelsh, 2022, p. 740), which becomes a defining narrative thread across her collection.

Moreover, in many of Antonelli’s poems, the act of writing itself becomes a central theme, foregrounded not only as a form of emotional catharsis in the context of postpartum depression, but as a vital, embodied practice through which a new maternal subjectivity is constituted. Writing is not merely therapeutic; it is ontological. It functions as a “transcorporeal” medium (Alaimo, 2010), enabling the porous movement, the intricacy and the interconnectedness between the self, her daughters, her emerging maternal identity, and the surrounding non-human world. Through language, the postpartum subject negotiates her reconfigured relationship to time, embodiment, and domestic space. Poetry, in this context, becomes both the record and the enactment of a shifting being-in-the-world. It is through the rhythms, silences, and tactile textures of language that the maternal self comes into relation with others and with herself anew. The necessity to write, insistently thematized in the poetry, thus marks more than a psychological need: it becomes a mode of relational dwelling, a way of inhabiting the everyday from within a fractured yet fertile subject-position. Language is not outside the body, but deeply imbricated in its transformation; the poetic form becomes a site of transcorporeal intimacy and emergence.

Following these interpretive contextualizations, three poems from Antonelli’s 2025 collection Attenti che morde – Poesie sul diventare madre (Careful, It Bites – Poems on Becoming a Mother) are presented. These poems offer a vivid and compelling glimpse into the lived and written reality of becoming a mother, characterized by its raw, fragmented, intimate, corporeal, and politically resonant nature.

Bone

Noted:
cumin stench all through the house
(it’s the Thai rice I burned in the pan)
dirty hair clumped in strands
crumbs nesting in the corners
cream-slick fingers
at the center of the screen
and then: the compost bag spilling over
as does my urge
 to scrub myself
with turpentine, kerosene
and bleach
until nothing remains of me
but a single bone
translucent
tinged with pine
laundry hung and lemon
— but:
it clings to me
the smell of milk
diapers and sweat.
it’s a sign that screams #postpartum
BEWARE: it bites.

Breast     

10:27
Note
Quickly open the note on the phone 
write without spaces without punctuation breast still out of the
stretched tank top from all the times you latch her on
and she leaves saliva like glue stick like the back of an envelope 
to be sealed with a swipe of tongue. I write or rather type
a poem climbing stairs, and with the other hand
I hold your bald head your round skull the ears
crumpled against me period.

Place

I wake and wonder: where am I?
I’m in the place
where mothers dwell.

Works Cited
Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: science, environment, and the material self. Indiana University Press
Antonelli, S. (2025). Attenti che morde – Poesie sul diventare madre. Giulio Perrone Editore.
Baraitser, L. (2008). Maternal encounters: The ethics of interruption. Routledge.
Bennett, E. A., & Koelsch, L. E. (2022). “I needed to become a mother”: Poetic representations of maternal embodiment, autonomy, and birth trauma. The Qualitative Report 27 (3), 731-743.
Blackwood, S. (2018). Is motherhood a genre? BLARB. https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/motherhood-genre/.
Braun, A. (2025). Motherhood and creativity in contemporary self-life writing: Writers and mothers. Routledge.
Kristeva, J. (1985). Stabat Mater. Poetics Today, 6 (1-2), 133-152.
Podnieks, E., & O’Reilly, A. (Eds.). (2010). Textual mothers, maternal texts: Motherhood in contemporary women’s literatures. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Maushart, S. (1999). The Mask of motherhood: How becoming a mother changes everything and why we pretend it doesn’t. The New Press.

Le sorelle di Lisistrata (2025) and a Conversation with Federico Baccomo

Review and Interview by
Veronica Frigeni, PhD
Visiting Researcher, Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (ZtG), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.  

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In a special issue devoted to representations of motherhood, it may seem paradoxical to include the review of a novel that centers on the defense of the freedom not to become a mother. Yet it is precisely in this refusal that some of the most urgent, complex, and politically charged questions about motherhood today are revealed. What if the right to become a mother meant nothing without the freedom not to? In contemporary Italy, where motherhood is increasingly framed by state-driven narratives as “women’s best choice” (Frigeni, 2024), and mobilized as a site of moral surveillance, nationalist nostalgia, and political control, this question is far from abstract. It is urgent, material, and deeply contested.

Feminist and reproductive justice thinkers have long insisted on the crucial distinction between motherhood and mothering (Rich, 1976). Motherhood denotes an institutionalized set of norms and expectations imposed on women by the state, religion, and heteronormative family structures. Mothering, by contrast, is an embodied, relational practice: flexible, self-determined, and potentially subversive. Within the reproductive justice framework developed by Black feminist scholars and activists, especially the SisterSong collective, reproductive freedom entails more than the binary of pro-choice or pro-life: it encompasses the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to raise children in conditions of dignity and safety (Ross & Solinger, 2017). Seen in this light, abortion is not an isolated or morally exceptional act, but part of a broader political demand for autonomy, justice, and care. Defending the right to abortion is not in contradiction with mothering; on the contrary, it is what makes chosen, meaningful mothering possible (Frigeni, 2025).

Over the past thirty years, Italian politics has increasingly operated under what Hanafin (2007) describes as a regime of “vitapolitics,” a mode of governance not aimed at empowerment, but rather at confining women within a constructed “natural” order that privileges pro-natalist, pro-family agendas. Within this framework, abortion is tolerated only as an exception, not affirmed as a right. Although the passing of Law 194 in 1978 represented a landmark achievement, many Italian feminists have long critiqued its limitations. The law emerged from a fraught compromise among diverse actors – feminist movements, leftist parties, and the Catholic Church – and, crucially, it failed to spark the deeper cultural transformation around gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy that many had hoped for. As a result, legal access to abortion has coexisted with enduring stigma, moral judgment, and institutional resistance. This is why contemporary feminist campaigns often insist on going “much more than 194” (Frigeni, 2025), calling for a reproductive justice approach that can address the broader intersection of legal, social, and cultural forces shaping women’s reproductive lives. In the Italian context, material obstacles to reproductive care are entangled with dominant discourses that frame motherhood as a woman’s natural destiny and abortion as an inherently violent, traumatic act, thus reinforcing a biopolitical system in which female bodies are governed through moralization rather than freedom.

To resist paternalistically imposed motherhood, then, is to create space for reproductive agency in all its forms. And it is precisely this space that Le sorelle di Lisistrata (Lysistrata’s Sisters), Federico Baccomo’s bold and unsettling novel, seeks to imagine and defend. Set in a disturbingly plausible near-future Italy, the novel begins with a moment of political manipulation: Piergiuliano Berton, the newly appointed Minister for the Family in a right-wing government, publicly recounts the heartbreak of a long-past abortion experience: an anecdote that later proves to be a fabrication. Yet its emotional weight is enough to ignite media frenzy and prepare public opinion for what soon follows: the repeal of Law 194 and the approval of the “Law of the Good Life,” which criminalizes abortion in all forms, at any stage, and for any reason. Enter Gaia Zavattini: 27 years old, newly elected in the ranks of a weakened center-left coalition, and a scholar of classical antiquity. Shocked by the new law and disillusioned by the inertia of traditional political channels, Gaia impulsively posts a reference to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata on Instagram, suggesting that women today, like their ancient Greek counterparts, might use a sex strike to resist patriarchal violence. The idea, half-serious and half-desperate, catches fire. Under the viral hashtag #lesorelledilisistrata (#lysistratassisters), women across the country begin to share their stories, frustrations, and support, transforming Gaia’s isolated protest into a national movement.

Baccomo’s novel deftly combines speculative fiction and biting political satire with contemporary themes, making it both timely and prophetic. At its core, the novel interrogates the weaponization of pro-life and pro-family rhetoric, a central axis of current far-right discourse, not as neutral values, but as tools for dismantling women’s autonomy (D’Elia & Serughetti, 2021). The new legislation is portrayed not only as a regression in women’s rights, but as an outright reconfiguration of “reproductive citizenship” (Shaw, 2022), wherein the value of female bodies is strictly determined by their maternal potential. The novel also explores the layered dynamics of contemporary feminist activism, online and offline (Salvatori, 2023). Gaia’s accidental leadership illustrates the unpredictability of digital resistance, where a post can spark collective mobilization as easily as it can provoke backlash, trolling, and character assassination. As the novel progresses, Gaia becomes the target of relentless public scrutiny and a process of systematic stigmatization and “monsterization” (Compagna & Steinhart, 2020), which speaks to abortion as a still “societal taboo” in today’s Italy and to the (non)reproductive body as the implosion of a system of order and rightness (p. x). Cast as the archetype of the “unruly woman” and reduced to what O’Reilly-Collin and O’Reilly (2025) have termed a “feral body,” she is vilified in increasingly violent and gendered ways. This demonization reaches its peak when she is scapegoated for the deaths of several women during a street protest, an event she neither incited nor controlled. Her credibility is dismantled, her intentions distorted, and her femininity subjected to constant surveillance and correction. Through this portrayal, Baccomo incisively captures the ways in which contemporary feminist dissent is often reframed as a “war of the sexes” (McRobbie, 2009), a depoliticizing narrative that turns structural critique into personal antagonism, and erases the political stakes of reproductive resistance. The sex strike, in this context, becomes a deliberately provocative feminist tactic, not merely a symbol of sexual power, but a refusal of the very terms on which heteronormative, patriarchal intimacy is built.

Stylistically, Le sorelle di Lisistrata positions itself as a “prophetic” novel, although not in the sense of a distant, dystopian fantasy, but as an unsettlingly plausible extrapolation of contemporary Italy. Baccomo appropriates the conventions of speculative fiction not to escape the political present, but to expose its underlying logics and trajectories. His narrative traces the slow erosion of reproductive rights, the convergence of authoritarian populism and religious conservatism, and the affective manipulation of trauma in public discourse. In this sense, the novel functions both as speculative fiction, defined by Oziewicz (2017) as fiction that departs from “consensus reality” to mirror the present through its logical, if alarming, consequences, and as part of the longer feminist dystopian tradition (Norledge, 2022), which uses imagined futures to critique gendered power structures. Yet Baccomo’s work also departs from this lineage: rather than constructing a radically unfamiliar dystopia, Le sorelle di Lisistrata operates as a form of counterfactual realism, a speculative scenario that remains deeply tethered to the affective climate and political logics of contemporary Italy. What makes the novel particularly powerful is its capacity to expose, resist, and imagine alternatives to what Micciché (2025) has termed “patriarchal realism”: the narrative regime through which gendered oppression is rendered natural, inevitable, and thus unquestionable. Drawing inspiration from Fisher’s (2009) notion of “capitalist realism” – the idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism – Micciché suggests that patriarchal realism functions similarly, conditioning our perception of gender norms as immutable facts rather than socio-political constructs. Baccomo’s novel unsettles this narrative closure, insisting instead on the possibility of rupture, refusal, and reinvention. Nonetheless, these very cracks in the system, while gesturing toward alternative futures, also expose bodies and lives to renewed forms of risk. In Le sorelle di Lisistrata, resistance is neither safe nor romanticized: it entails a politics of exposure, where stepping outside the normative frame – whether through dissent, solidarity, or refusal – often invites surveillance, backlash, and violence. The novel thus confronts us with a double bind: it illuminates the urgent need for alternative imaginaries, while refusing to conceal the material cost of sustaining them

This is why I argue that, in a world increasingly governed through biopolitical regimes, where power is exercised through the regulation of life itself, Baccomo’s novel turns to what Foucault, in a rare note, described (2017) as “biopoetics”: a mode of resisting normalization through aesthetico-ethical self-fashioning. To move beyond biopolitics, Foucault argues, the regime of truth that underpins it must be exposed, its contingency made visible, its fractures situated within both individual subjects and the knowledge-power matrices that govern them. In this regard, Le sorelle di Lisistrata opens up a “future anterior” horizon (Higgins & Leps, 2022), which is less a prediction than a provocation: what might we yet become if we refuse the present’s reproductive imperatives? The novel, then, functions as a “heterotopias” in the Foucauldian sense (1986), not merely a fictional setting, but a counter-site that reveals the artifice of dominant norms around gender, family, and political agency. Through three interwoven processes, “disposition, distraction, and dislocation” (Higgins & Leps, 2022), Baccomo disorients the reader to create critical distance. It disposes us to transpose: by staging a familiar-yet-altered Italy where abortion has been criminalized, it forces us to reconsider the precariousness of reproductive rights in our own reality. It distracts in the etymological sense of pulling away, allowing for transactions between disparate systems of meaning: classical mythology, feminist genealogy, social media activism, mass media and the machinery of the state. And it dislocates, exposing the constructedness of so-called truths, such as the sanctity of family, the inevitability of motherhood, the neutrality of law. This is not merely narrative dislocation, but ontological: the novel enacts biopoetics as a way of imagining and inhabiting alternative forms of life.

Gaia Zavattini, the novel’s protagonist, enacts this counter-practice through a form of “parrhesia,” which is Foucault’s term (1983) for courageous, risk-laden truth-telling. Her initial social media post is neither strategic nor calculated; it is an impassioned, unfiltered response that catalyzes collective resistance. Gaia’s speech defies institutional decorum; it is direct, affective, and politically dangerous. Her trajectory, from idealistic scholar to activist to victim of state and sexual violence, illustrates the cost of parrhesia in a system that disciplines women not only through law but through the moralized expectations of maternal sacrifice. Her rape and subsequent pregnancy signal the violent backlash against women who transgress the normative reproductive script. Yet Gaia’s ultimate withdrawal from public life, even after the law is repealed, should not be misread as defeat. Rather, it affirms her refusal to be co-opted, whether as a symbol of resistance or a martyr of the cause. In choosing exile over appropriation, Gaia asserts a quieter but no less radical form of agency: the refusal to play the role assigned by power, even when that role is one of triumphant dissent. It is precisely this refusal that embodies the ethical force of parrhesia, not as heroic display, but as the insistence on truth-telling at the price of belonging.

Similarly, the sex strike at the heart of Le sorelle di Lisistrata can be understood not merely as a symbolic gesture of protest, but as a collective act of parrhesia, of truth-telling through embodied refusal. Foucault emphasizes that the decisive trait of the parrhesiast lies not in birth, class, or rhetorical mastery, but in the coherence between one’s speech and one’s way of life. In this sense, Gaia and the women who join her do not simply speak against the “Law of the Good Life”; they perform their dissent through the radical interruption of the intimate and reproductive labor the state assumes to be theirs. The strike functions as a materialization of “logos-bios” alignment (Higgins & Leps, 2022): the women’s bodies become the medium through which truth is articulated, not just stated. In withholding sexual and emotional availability, they render visible the invisible infrastructures of power that condition women’s social roles under the guise of naturalized femininity. This embodied refusal does not require institutional authority to be legible as political; rather, it draws its force precisely from the ethical risk of standing apart from what is expected, proper, or safe. In Foucauldian terms, this form of protest is parrhesiastic because it exposes the vulnerable body to scrutiny and retaliation, while remaining faithful to a truth that exceeds personal interest. The strike thus becomes a site of truth-practice, where speech, risk, and life converge into a shared act of political becoming.

In this light, Le sorelle di Lisistrata contributes meaningfully to contemporary feminist and reproductive justice debates by insisting that the right not to mother is inseparable from the ability to mother freely and meaningfully. The novel does not position abortion as a tragic exception to maternal desire, but as part of a wider continuum of reproductive agency. By foregrounding the affective, bodily, and political dimensions of refusal, Baccomo’s novel helps reframe reproductive rights not as narrow legal entitlements, but as relational, embodied, and ethically fraught forms of world-making. In doing so, it challenges readers to recognize reproductive freedom as not just a private choice, but a public, collective stake, a terrain where the intersectional struggle for justice, dignity, and alternative futures is continuously unfolding.

A Conversation with Federico Baccomo

In light of the preceding discussion, I had the opportunity to speak with Federico Baccomo, whose novel Le sorelle di Lisistrata offers a bold and unsettling fictional intervention into the ongoing discourse on reproductive politics in Italy. The following questions aim to explore how Baccomo understands the political stakes of his work, its mythopoetic dimensions, and its engagement with the epistemic and affective landscape of the present.

1. VF: Your novel unfolds as a narrative work that, while fictional, deeply engages with the socio-political anxieties of contemporary Italy, touching on issues such as gender, reproductive rights, and the often porous boundaries of political and institutional power. As Foucault (1977) observed, a book cannot be reduced to the subjective truth of its author; rather, it constitutes a fiction that reflects the broader epistemic configuration of its era. To what extent do you see Le sorelle di Lisistrata as shaped by the “regimes of truth” of our present, particularly in relation to the restriction of reproductive citizenship, the politicization of women’s bodies, and the sexualization and punishment of dissent? Do you view the novel as a potential “epistemological document” of the present, or rather as a speculative narrative aimed at destabilizing the now through projection into the future? Finally, what role does your own authorial positionality play in this tension between chronicling and foretelling?

FB: Before answering such a complex question, I need to preface my response by clarifying what novels are to me, at least at the moment they are conceived. They are stories. Nothing more, nothing less. They are not reflections, nor philosophical elaborations, nor vehicles for a message. They are – if I may simplify – a character who wants something and, in order to obtain it, must overcome a series of obstacles. Odysseus wants to return home despite the will of the gods. Edmond Dantès wants revenge against a long list of enemies. Renzo and Lucia want to get married in spite of the opposition of a powerful tyrant. Novels are born from these narrative sparks with which writers attempt to kindle a fire, that is, to develop a compelling plot (whatever meaning we wish to assign to “compelling”: a Patricia Highsmith thriller can be as compelling as a Virginia Woolf novel). The plot – a word that nowadays seems to frighten a good percentage of writers, as if it were a stain from which literature must cleanse itself but doesn’t know how – is the foundation of a good book. It answers the question: What is this novel about? Then, at a later stage, during the writing process, something more begins to emerge from the pages, something that some call “the theme.” The theme, indeed, is a reflection, a philosophical elaboration, a message. It answers a different question: What is this novel really about? This is a discovery made by the reader while reading, but it is also a discovery made by the writer while writing. Conversely, if a writer were to sit down with a preconceived doctrine – for example, “the rich are all bad” – and tried to disguise it within a story, not only would the novel be suffocated by a theme that blocks any free development of thought (that very freedom which makes thought fertile), but we would be faced with a servile novel, incapable of revealing anything new about the world, and thus, an empty one. These are the so-called thesis novels, to which even the most brilliant writers have sometimes succumbed (I’m thinking of an exceptional author such as George Orwell and his Animal Farm).

Having made this long (and perhaps pedantic) preamble, I can say that Le sorelle di Lisistrata was born simply from the encounter of two ideas. One stolen from reality: what would happen if Italy, following the American example after the overturning of the Roe vs. Wade decision, were to ban abortion? And another borrowed from imagination: what would happen if, in protest against this ban, a woman were to follow Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and call for a sex strike? The meeting of these two ideas seemed to me narratively explosive: here was a novel I would have liked to read and/or write.

At that point, it became a question of deciding the narrative perspective: who would tell such a story? Perhaps the protagonist? Perhaps an omniscient narrator? I wrestled with this for quite some time, and eventually found what seemed to me the most fitting perspective: that of a reporter. What if I wrote the novel as if it were a long, cold piece of reportage? The option made sense on several levels: first, it lent the story a certain degree of realism; second, it allowed me to adopt a stripped-down, journalistic style, giving me the chance to play with the quirks and distortions of that language; but above all – and here we finally reach the answer to your question – it allowed me to hide. I could make the author disappear from a novel that, on almost every page, demands that one take sides, that one express a moral and ethical judgement. In this sense, the novel tries to be a faithful mirror of our time, seeking to construct a story as plausible as possible, starting from its premise (the two ideas above), and developing it through a rigorous chain of narrative cause and effect until its final explosion. Thus – at least it seems to me – the balance and tension you refer to between (to use perhaps overly simple words) reality and fiction are not so much erased (which would be impossible) as somehow circumvented, at least formally, allowing me, the author, to step aside. Not to evade my responsibilities, but to allow the novel to live on its own, without being crushed or nullified by my own positions.

2. VF: Giorgio Agamben (2009) defines the “contemporary” as “that relationship with time that adheres to it, through a disjunction and an anachronism” (p. 41); at the same time he observes how, the contemporary is not one who merely inhabits their time, but also and mostly one who turns toward its darkness, not to lament, but to perceive the light that struggles to reach us. Your novel imagines a future Italy in which reproductive rights are dismantled, dissent is criminalized, and political storytelling becomes a tool of manipulation. In this sense, the novel embodies Agamben’s idea of the contemporary by illuminating the obscurities of the present through prophetic realism. But following his formulation, I would also ask: where do you locate the flickers of light in this darkness? Are there forms of resistance, care, or solidarity in the novel that point toward alternative futures – even if fragile, fragmented, or unresolved?

FB: I have always rejected that somewhat snobbish idea of literature that insists it must shock, unsettle, or disturb. Life itself already throws plenty of punches; I have no wish to join in the existential bullying with my stories. For this reason, I believe that it is not, perhaps, necessary, but certainly desirable, for a novel, even the darkest, cruellest, most merciless one, to contain at least a seed of light. Or better still: several seeds of light. In Le sorelle di Lisistrata, darkness reigns from the very first pages. And it is a darkness destined to grow ever denser, at times unbearable; it often seems impossible to glimpse even a glimmer. Yet I have the feeling that, by the end of the book, however angry, or even furious, the reader might feel, they do not come away despairing. And I believe this is thanks to her, Gaia, the protagonist.

Gaia is a resilient woman, one who does not give up; a young woman who, despite her sense of inadequacy, keeps her protest alive. From the moment she steps onto the page, Gaia carries within her a sense of hope, not so much that everything could be different, but that everything must be different. She is the light, mine and the novel’s: the affirmation of a will that, despite everything, refuses to bend. What comforts me is that Gaia does not seem to me merely a narrative device. I continue to see voices and wills like hers around me, and even though at times – and increasingly often – they appear to be in the minority, or worse, powerless, they remain alive. Often, far more alive than those who speak only of darkness.

3. VF: Your novel does more than reference Aristophanes’ Lysistrata; it reanimates the myth as a feminist and strategic resource within a contemporary media ecology. Gaia’s invocation of the sex strike becomes a viral, affective force that transforms private trauma into public action, blurring parody, tragedy, and revolt. In this sense, the novel uses myth not as nostalgic return, but as what Chiara Bottici (2021) might call a “mythopoetic” tool: a way to imagine otherwise, perform dissent, and reframe dominant narratives. As Bottici writes, “Myths are self-fulfilling prophecies: they do not wait for reality to prove their truth—they build it. […] A myth must constantly reinvent itself to remain alive, responding to ever-changing conditions of meaning” (p. 3). How do you understand the role of Lysistrata in your novel? Do you see Gaia and the women who follow her as mythmakers in their own right, creators of a counter-myth capable of disrupting dominant narratives of nationhood, morality, and motherhood?

FB: Writing a novel is a journey that spills beyond the pages. It involves studying, delving deeper, investigating: sometimes, to write a single line, one may have to go through hundreds of pages, or films, or conversations. During this journey, one of the discoveries I made was that my protagonist was not inventing anything new. The so-called “Lysistratic non-action” (that is, the sex strike first imagined by Aristophanes in Lysistrata) is a form of non-violent protest that women, at different times and in different contexts, have repeatedly turned to throughout history. I discovered that the myth had become reality, and that my story, without my even realising it, drew its strength not so much from the imagination of the Greek playwright as from its embodiment in the real protests of women who had actually done it. Indeed, to truly do it – to reinvent the myth in response to one’s own time and aspirations – is the best way to ensure that once upon a time may last forever after. Gaia and her sisters, in fiction, try to do just that: not only by attempting to dismantle dominant narratives, but above all by making themselves the protagonists of the narrative, to the point where they can no longer be ignored. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the protagonist’s strength lay precisely here: not merely in having proposed a sex strike, but in having made it impossible to ignore her words, her protests, her demands.

4. VF: The novel vividly illustrates how collective fear and manufactured emotion can solidify into what has been described as a “pyramid of hate” (Faloppa & Gheno, 2021) – a process through which everyday microaggressions rest upon, and contribute to, deep-rooted structures of systemic violence. In Le sorelle di Lisistrata, hate operates not only as a visceral emotion, but also as a rhetorical tool and a political technology: it is cultivated by media narratives, weaponized by institutions, and normalized within public discourse. Following Ahmed’s analysis (2004), hate can be understood as a cultural and affective mechanism that aligns subjects against imagined threats, producing boundaries between those who belong and those who must be expelled. How did you conceptualize the role of hatred in constructing this fictional world? In your view, is hate merely a byproduct of authoritarian populism, or does it function as its true affective engine? And crucially, do you consider this hatred to be gendered – both in the way it is directed and in how it is legitimized? Does the novel suggest that women – particularly those who resist normative roles—become symbolic targets of a broader cultural anxiety around social change? How do you see the interplay between fear, misogyny, and the desire for moral control operating within your narrative?

FB: Hatred is one of the main driving forces of the novel, because unfortunately it seems to have become one of the main driving forces of society – especially today’s media society. It is a hatred that manifests itself in numerous forms: there is the polarisation that social media and the speed of expression have imposed on us – “You’re either with us or against us!” – leaving no room for nuance, for reflection; there is the habit of hatred, born from the ease with which we can now resort to insult without any consequence (the notorious “keyboard warriors”); there is the hatred that is stimulated by algorithms, which benefit from exposing us to content we disagree with, since our attention – driven by anger – is far more easily awakened by what infuriates us than by what we agree with; there is hatred used as a tool of delegitimisation: anyone who expresses an opinion contrary to mine is an “hater”, and must be treated as such; and many other forms of hatred could be identified. Thus hatred becomes the nerve of a system that feeds on it and does nothing but fuel it further. And who are the main victims? Precisely those who choose to step outside the norm. In this sense, women – especially those who assert themselves beyond a rooted and obsolete vision – are the natural targets of a large segment of society (composed of both men and, unfortunately, also women) which – particularly on sexual matters (in the broadest sense) – feels not so much challenged as outright victimised by what it perceives as a profound lack of respect: how dare you question the established order?! Thus fear – because ultimately these people are often frightened (dangerous, but frightened) – turns into an anxiety to restore the lost order, with all the violent consequences this may entail.There is a rather stark passage in the novel, in which Gaia suffers the worst kind of violence as a form of punishment, and I believe that the criminals who commit that violence are neither ironic nor looking for a pretext: no, they genuinely believe themselves to be invested with that mission. The most terrible kind of hatred: ideological hatred, which absolves itself.

5. VF: Le sorelle di Lisistrata presents a media ecosystem where emotional manipulation, spectacle, and strategic framing play a central role in shaping public perception and institutional power. From the Minister’s fabricated abortion story to the viral spread of Gaia’s protest, the novel highlights how media not only mediate political reality but actively construct it. In conceptualizing this dimension, to what extent were you influenced by theories of media effects which argue that media shape not only what we think about, but how we interpret and value it? More specifically, how do you see the role of media in reinforcing cultural scripts around gender and motherhood in Italy? And what possibilities, if any, do you see for media to foster counter-narratives that resist consensus and open space for reproductive dissent?

FB: The media – especially social media, in the worst version of a series of algorithms owned by a handful of ultra-millionaires who, outside any form of regulation, decide the topic of the day, promoting what they think should be promoted and concealing what they think should be hidden – are our modern Scheherazade: they tell the stories, and we are captivated. But Scheherazade – the original one – not only declared her fiction, she also had a noble purpose: to save women like herself, victims of the hatred (there it is again) of a deranged ruler. What is the purpose of today’s media? First and foremost, to enrich investors. But not only that. It has now become clear that controlling public opinion is among their principal objectives. For this reason – in a novel that speaks of entire peoples in mobilisation – it was impossible to detach the narrative from something as apparently unliterary as the media. Specifically, gender and motherhood are arenas on which the future of politics and society is now being played out (these are issues that move people more than economic crises, environmental crises, even war). Allowing the narration of such sensitive matters to be outsourced to those aforementioned multimillionaires, who possess the power to control (and censor) whatever does not fit within their personal agenda, represents a dangerous frontier, one in which no one – in the few expressive spaces they may manage to carve out (as Gaia does in the novel) – stands any real chance of winning. The only solution I can see is to regulate those spaces, removing them from the self-governance of private entities: in short, there can be no Zuckerberg, no Musk, who holds the freedom and the power to decide who may speak, about what, when, and how – even if that means killing whatever algorithm drives the delivery of content.

6. VF: In one of the most emotionally charged scenes of the novel, Gaia stands before Parliament and utters six words – “I’m pregnant. I don’t want to keep it” (p. 109) – that the narrator describes not only as personal declarations, but as questions that the Italian public feels compelled to answer. These statements, though uttered in the first person, are received as collective provocations. You write: “All that remained of her was the deafening uproar of those six words. I’m pregnant. I don’t want to keep it. Two statements that were also a question that Italians felt compelled to answer. Forced to answer. How else could they go on?” (p. 142). The novel powerfully stages the way personal reproductive experiences are transformed into public moral battlegrounds. How did you envision this scene, in which a survivor’s trauma is not met with empathy or care, but becomes a national referendum on motherhood, agency, and belonging? Do you see this moment as a commentary on how Italy’s cultural and political discourse routinely appropriates women’s bodies as symbols for broader ideological conflicts?

FB: More than a critique, it is an accusation. Democracy – that famous lesser evil – is not a goddess to whom everything must be sacrificed. There are aspects of life that must be removed from the decision of the majority. Let’s make a hypothesis: tomorrow the country wakes up and decides to establish a lottery in which, once a year, someone is chosen by lot to be stoned to death (the idea, of course, comes from Shirley Jackson). Is that legitimate? According to the most rigidly democratic logic, if that is what the majority wants, the answer is: yes. Yet we all feel, instinctively, that it is an aberration. So why is it that, when it comes to deciding over a woman’s body, the issue is elevated to a political question – as though this ennobled the debate – when in fact it concerns an invasion that should be removed precisely from that debate? In this sense, the scene in the book becomes a question not only for the Italian people within the novel, but also for the reader outside it.

7. VF: Le sorelle di Lisistrata engages directly with some of the most urgent debates of our time: on reproductive rights, gendered violence, and the politicization of women’s bodies. Yet it does so not through didacticism, but through a complex and emotionally charged narrative form.
   What do you hope the novel contributes to these ongoing conversations, not only in terms of its thematic content, but also through its formal, ethical, and political approach to storytelling?
   Why do you think this kind of narrative intervention is needed now, in this particular historical moment? What role can fiction play in unsettling dominant discourses, making visible what is often silenced, or offering new affective and imaginative vocabularies for resistance?
   In short, how do you see your work positioning itself, artistically and politically, within the broader cultural struggle over meaning, resistance, and agency?

FB: I am very cautious about assigning a social mission to literature: my fear is that a tool for analysis, investigation, and discovery might become a tool for propaganda (even when the ideas being promoted are worthy ones). I am convinced that the usefulness – political or social – of a novel is a marvellous side effect, which occurs when the author tells a story that engages honestly and intelligently with the present. When that happens, something precious takes place: the reader has the chance to travel through imagination into worlds that broaden their vision of reality, and in this sense they are able to amplify that quality so central to the act of reading: empathy. It is in this sense that a good book can – if I may use an overused phrase – “change the reader’s life”, just as a journey, a conversation, a love affair, or indeed any experience that widens our perspective can. For this reason, it is not wrong to speak of agency in relation to books: we approach them seeking comfort, pleasure, entertainment (for these are, for the most part, the driving forces behind reading), and we part from them having gained a new awareness, one that is capable of guiding our actions.

References

Aristophanes. (1994). Lysistrata (D. Parker, Trans.). Dover Publications. (Original work published ca. 411 B.C.E.).

Agamben, G. (2009). What is an apparatus? And other essays. Stanford University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.

Baccomo, F. (2025). Le sorelle di Lisistrata. Mondadori.

Bottici, C. (2021). A feminist mythology. Bloomsbury Academic.

Compagna, D., & Steinhart, S. (2020). Monsters, monstrosities, and the monstrous in culture and literature. Vernon Press.

D’Elia, C., & Serughetti, G. (2021). Libere tutte: Dall’aborto al velo, donne nel nuovo millennio. Minimum Fax.

Faloppa, F., & Gheno, V. (2021). Trovare le parole: Abbecedario per una comunicazione consapevole. Edizioni Gruppo Abele.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.

Foucault, M. (1977). What is an author? In D. F. Bouchard (Ed. & Trans.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews (pp. 113–138). Cornell University Press.

Foucault, M. (1983) Discourse and truth: The problematization of parrhesia. The University of California, Berkeley.

Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648

Foucault, M. (2017). Subjectivity and truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980–1981 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Frigeni, V. (2024). Il lato oscuro della maternità: Il femminismo di Eugenia Roccella. gender/sexuality/italy, 10(1–2), 50–67.

Frigeni, V. (2025). Therapeutic abortion narratives in contemporary Italy: A mothering, feminist, and political choice. In B. Boudreau & K. Maloy (Eds.), Abortion in international popular culture: The decision heard round the world (pp. 105-132). Bloomsbury Academic.

Hanafin, P. (2007). Conceiving life: Reproductive politics and the law in contemporary Italy. Ashgate.

Higgins, L., & Leps, M. C. (2022). Heterotopic world fiction: Thinking beyond biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje. Academic Studies Press.

Jackson, S. (1949). The lottery and other stories. Farrar, Straus and Company.

McRobbie, A. (2009). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. SAGE.

Miccichè, M. (2025). Realismo patriarcale. Come il sistema ci educa alle diseguaglianze. Einaudi.

Norledge, J. (2022). The language of dystopia. Palgrave Macmillan.

O’Reilly-Conlin, C. J., & O’Reilly, A. (Eds.). (2025). Gone feral: Unruly women and the undoing of normative femininity. Demeter Press.

Oziewicz, M. (2017, March 29). Speculative fiction. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-78

Orgwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm. Secker & Warburg.

Rich, A. (2021). Of woman born: Motherhood as experience and institution. W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1976)

Ross, L. J., & Solinger, R. (2017). Reproductive justice: An introduction. University of California Press.

Salvatori, L. (2023). Artivism as transformative practice: The case of Non Una Di Meno. In D. Lisle (Ed.), Research handbook on visual politics (pp. 138-151). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800376939.00018

Shaw, R. M. (2022). Reproductive citizenship: Technologies, rights and relationships. Palgrave Macmillan.

The Choice (2025) and a Conversation with Orsola Severini

Review and Interview by
Julia Campisi  
York University    

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My son will be at daycare for another four hours- enough time, I thought, to read the first half of Orsola Severini’s The Choice. I sat down, hesitant at first, expecting another clinical account of motherhood. In the first chapters, Severini’s prose verges on the clinical, but beneath it an emotional current pulse. I couldn’t stop reading. The micro-gestures between Orsola and Marco, her partner, the unspoken negotiations, the everyday monotony, and the medical jargon you have never heard before mirrored my own experience of becoming a mother. The safe space that Orsola was creating for me within her chapters was deeply vulnerable, relatable, and at times acted as a form of care for my emotions. She resisted simplification and moved between emotions in the most realistic way a mother does. Motherhood, I’ve learned, is a deep experience, one that defies any singular script or preconceived sense or understanding. It was within the pages of this book that I realized that this is the power of motherhood, not its weakness. 

Like most women, much of what I experienced during my pregnancy was endured in silence. The first three months of pregnancy are marked by secrecy, that “just in case” period. Reading The Choice brought me back to that moment before my own 20-week anatomy scan, or in the Italian context, the nuchal translucency ultrasound. It’s strange, even cruel, that we are told to announce a pregnancy before this scan, the very one that could demand an impossible decision about your body, your baby, your family. I’ve always found that contradiction absurd, as if silence were protection. But The Choice made me realize how these contradictions are structural or, more specifically, as Veronica Frigeni mentions in the preface, vitapolitical: “a biopolitical framework that does not empower women but entraps them within an imagined natural order, where motherhood is idealized and reproductive choices are policed” (Severini,2025, 5). Severini writes within this tension, showing how nonsense can become the only sense that society allows. This cultural practice, intended as caution, becomes one of many invisible burdens women carry. It’s here that The Choice resonates most powerfully: in the agency Severini reclaims, not only for herself but for all women. She is inviting us to rethink the maternal not as a fixed identity but as an ethical and temporal condition, one marked by negotiation, interruption, and endurance.

In this sense, Severini’s text aligns with Adriana Cavarero’s notion of the inclined subject, a figure defined not by autonomy but by relational exposure and care (Cavarero, 2016). The maternal body, for Cavarero, reveals an ethics of inclination, of being turned toward another. Severini enacts this inclination through form: her narrative bends repeatedly toward her children and her father, refusing the linearity of self-contained subjecthood. Even in her most painful moments, her thoughts remain tethered to others, already in debt to care before caring for herself. Severini moves back and forth between the past (her father) and the present (her pregnancy and loss). At first, these chapters may feel disjointed, but through the lens of scholar Lisa Baraitser, the chapters read as temporal returns, constitutive loops of maternal time rather than digressions. Baraitser examines the relationship between reproductive and non-reproductive time, asking how maternal time might be rethought through repetition, suspension, and forms of time that refuse to flow (Baraitser, 2014). Applied to Severini’s writing, her father’s memories resurface at moments of crisis, not as simple repetition but as shifting rhythmic pulses that sustain her when time and she herself seem to collapse. For me, they became brief reprieves from the present, a slipping, so to speak, in and out of the narrative like consciousness under anesthesia. The recollections work as a way for her, a way to survive these intrusive moments that she is being forced to face alone. These oscillations are not nostalgic but anchoring; they let her endure when there is no time left in which to wait it out.

As I finished The Choice, I thought of Anne Carson’s Lecture on The History of Skywriting, where she remarks that “being the sky requires a fair amount of just hanging there” (Louisiana Channel, 2019). Severini’s memoir feels like that kind of suspension—maintained in time rather than driven by it, a record of care that endures through returns and interruptions. Within this rhythm, The Choice exposes the limits of the neoliberal fantasy of “choice,” revealing endurance as a site of both constraint and resistance. It shows how the maternal body becomes a surface where biopolitical forces are inscribed and continually rewritten (Baraitser, 2014), and how subjectivity inclines toward others as a temporal as much as an ethical condition (Cavarero, 2016). And still, beneath governance and discourse, one image persists: a heart forming within your own, beating inside your body before it walks the world—the pulse of maternal time.

A Conversation with Orsola Severini

JC: Lisa Baraitser writes that “repetition is linked with the radicality of care.” Your book often returns to gestures of care—feeding, touching, waiting, watching. Do you see these repetitions as a form of resistance or as evidence of the exhaustion care can produce?

OS: If I understand the question correctly, I would say that in moments of shock and emotional rupture, we often experience a kind of split within ourselves. That was certainly true for me. On one hand, I had to appeal to my rational side (to decide to terminate the pregnancy, knowing it was the most loving and necessary choice). On the other hand, I was still gripped by instinct: I spoke to the baby, I caressed my belly (automatically, almost unconsciously) because I felt the need to protect him. These gestures are deeply embedded in us, and they can be comforting, grounding (in the book, my mother cares for me mostly through those gestures and by taking care of children for me), while my father manages to communicate, for example, when we cook together. 

But care can also become a trap. Especially in the early stages of motherhood, these repetitive gestures (feeding, soothing, enduring) can isolate women, imprison them in routines that generate exhaustion or even distress. So yes, repetition can be radical, but it can also be ambivalent. It holds both resistance and risk.

JC: The book exposes how “choice” in motherhood is never fully autonomous, always entangled with institutions, medicine, and culture. How do you understand choice now, after having lived through and written about it? Has anything changed in the Italian system? 

OS: When I found myself in that situation, I was completely unprepared. I had no idea how difficult it would be to access a therapeutic abortion in Italy. I thought the decision would be dramatic only because I was ending a much-wanted pregnancy, and it was. But it also felt, at the time, like the only logical thing to do to minimize suffering for everyone involved, starting with the unborn child. It was, for me, a choice rooted in love.

What I didn’t realize then, and what I came to understand through living it and writing about it, is that this decision or “choice” is, in fact, deeply political. Especially the act of speaking about it publicly. That, for me, is the choice I most fiercely claim: the decision to break the silence around an act of love that thousands of women in Italy are forced to endure in secrecy and shame.

Unfortunately, the situation in Italy has not improved. Even though abortion has been legal since 1978, around 80% of public healthcare providers refuse to perform abortions, citing conscience objections. So, while the law exists on paper, access is increasingly denied in practice, especially in the South of the country.

JC: You capture the isolation of early pregnancy—the “just in case” silence. Why do you think secrecy still dominates the early months of gestation? Did writing this book feel like translating it or breaking that silence?

OS: I lived the early stages of my pregnancies with enormous stress: constantly afraid that my body might betray me, that I wouldn’t be “able” to hold onto the baby. There’s a latent sense of guilt (like in many aspects of women’s lives) that underlies this fear, as if any complication might be your fault. And when that guilt is combined with secrecy, it creates a profoundly delicate and solitary phase in a woman’s life.

That silence is so deeply ingrained that we’re told not to share the news too early, as if grief should be hidden, and we would have the right to grieve the loss of such a loss (there is no ritual in our society for that). I really wanted to translate it into something that could be shared. I wanted to give voice to that fragile, invisible time, and to the many women who live it in fear and solitude, because nobody had told about it before, and everything about motherhood felt so performative.

JC: Your prose moves between clinical description and lyrical intimacy. Was that duality intentional? How did you navigate the tension between medical language and personal embodiment?

OS: Yes, that duality was absolutely intentional and, for me, necessary. I wanted the reader to feel both the coldness of the medical system and the raw, intimate reality of the individual experiencing it. Medical language can be distancing, even dehumanizing, but it also has a crucial function: it is precise, non-judgmental, and allows us to describe what happens to the female body in situations that are often shrouded in silence or shame.

I believe that when the female body is not sexualized, we know very little about it (especially in terms of physical processes like miscarriage, therapeutic abortion, postpartum recovery, and breastfeeding). I think narratives (and things are thankfully starting to change) must also focus on this dimension, and we cannot reduce these experiences to moral or ethical debates alone, because doing so shifts the focus away from the actual problem: the body and how the body connects to the psychological, the social, or the religious spheres. 

In addition, I tried to use the duality of language to mirror the duality of the book’s structure. On one side, there is the political dimension (what happens to a woman, any woman, who seeks therapeutic abortion in Italy, the systemic obstacles, the institutional silence, etc.). On the other hand, there is the personal dimension, because trauma is never abstract. We each process it through the lens of our own history. In my case, that meant confronting an unresolved relationship with my father, an eccentric doctor who had fought for abortion rights in the 1970s but was absent when I needed him most. 

JC: Your decision to write The Choice transforms an intensely private experience into a public act of reflection and care. How did you navigate that threshold between the private and the shared, between what to protect and what to make visible? 

OS: I wrote The Choice in a state of urgency. I often say that I “vomited” the story onto my computer because I needed to speak, and yet I couldn’t find the space to do so. Everyone around me told me to move on, to focus on my “beautiful family”, as if that child wasn’t a part of it. That silence was unbearable. Writing became the only place where I could acknowledge him, where I could say: he existed, and I am his mother.

At first, I didn’t think it would become a book. But then I realized that what had happened to me had happened to many others, and yet I wasn’t hearing those stories. Finding a publisher was difficult. Some suggested I remove the entire section about abortion and focus only on my father, which felt both paradoxical and ironic. Eventually, I found a courageous publisher who asked if I wanted to change my name and references to preserve anonymity. But if I was going to tell my story, I had to go all the way. Otherwise, I would be contradicting the very intention behind the book, to break the silence, not to mask it. Of course, I changed the names of others involved, out of respect for their privacy. But the story is mine, and I claim it fully. 

JC: Much of The Choice is grounded in Rome and Italian social norms. How do you think your story might have unfolded differently within another cultural or legal system—say, in Canada or Northern Europe?

OS: I’m quite certain that, practically speaking, things would have been easier. In countries like Canada or parts of Northern Europe, I likely would have encountered fewer institutional obstacles, more consistent medical support, and perhaps less stigma, and the whole process might have been smoother, more humane. But on a personal level, I believe the emotional experience (the grief, the ambivalence, the inner conflict) would have been very similar. Because those dimensions are not only shaped by external systems, but also by our histories, our relationships, our sense of self. 

At the same time, I’m genuinely curious to hear how women in other countries live these experiences. I hope the book can open a space for dialogue across borders. While the Italian situation is particularly dramatic, the right for women to control their bodies is under threat throughout the West. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision a few years ago is a stark reminder of how fragile these rights are. That’s why I believe it’s essential for women to connect beyond national boundaries; in a globalized and interconnected world, reproductive justice must also be a global conversation.

JC: Was there a certain way that you felt like you had to grieve the loss of your baby differently from the loss of your father? When people die, the ceremony is so important for those still living – it gives closure. It seems like a lot of families don’t get that sort of same closure with the death of their unborn babies. I think most of this has to do with the fact that a lot of these “miscarriages” or “therapeutic” abortions still happen in silence. What is your take on this? 

OS: You’re absolutely right. When my father died, there was a funeral, a gathering, food, and stories. There was “il consolo” (a Southern Italian tradition of bringing comfort through presence and nourishment). But when I lost my baby, there was nothing. No ritual, no recognition. Just silence or urges to change the subject. That absence was devastating. Writing became my ritual. It was how I mourned, how I made sense of the loss, how I created a space for memory. I believe we need new rituals, ones that honor these invisible griefs and allow families to process them with dignity, and women sharing their experiences could be a very good one.

JC: Now that The Choice is out in the world, has your relationship to the story changed? Do you still feel inside its temporality, or has time finally begun to move differently?

OS: Time has shifted, but the story still lives in me. Publishing the book allowed me to place the experience outside of myself: to give it form, voice, and distance. But I still carry it. I always will. That child existed. I am his mother. And that bond doesn’t dissolve with time. What has changed is that now, when I speak about it, I feel less alone.

One of the most unexpected outcomes was how my father (who had been a real, complex presence in my life) became a character. That’s a strange experience. I’m not always sure where memory ends and narrative begins, or how much of him I’m remembering versus how much I’m reimagining through storytelling. 

JC: Have you ever considered sharing the letter you wrote to your mother?

OS: My mother is an extremely private person. In the first version of the manuscript, I had written more about but she asked me to remove those parts, and I had to respect that. What remains in the book is essential and true, but carefully measured. As for the letter my father wrote to her, she never let me read it. So yes, we’re two curious women wondering what it contains.

Bibliography 
Baraitser, L. (2014) “Time and Again: Repetition, Maternity and the Non-Reproductive”, Studies in the Maternal 6(1), 1-7. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.3
Louisiana Channel. (2019, March 13). Anne Carson: Lecture on the history of skywriting [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F9xUhaimTY
Cavarero, A. (2016). Inclinations: A critique of rectitude (A. Wilson, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2014)

Veronica Frigeni, PhD
Visiting Researcher – Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (ZtG), Humboldt Universität zu Berlina

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1. Representations and (In)visibility of the Maternal

VF: Let’s begin with a broad question: how are representations of motherhood currently configured in contemporary Italian literature, in light of the social, cultural, and political transformations that have affected the maternal? In what ways does literary writing become a space for negotiating – or contesting – gender norms? And further, which images of the mother dominate today’s Italian literary landscape, and which ones remain absent or have been erased? What do these representations (or omissions) tell us about the regimes of (in)visibility that govern the maternal body in Italian culture?

MR: From my point of view, motherhood, understood as a dynamic experience shaped by social, economic, and cultural contexts, is portrayed in contemporary Italian literature from a critical perspective that challenges the traditional archetype of the devoted and perfect mother. This figure, still dominant in the Italian cultural imagination, is confronted by current narratives that reveal the ambivalence and inner conflict many women experience in relation to the maternal role and the institution of motherhood, as well as the difficulties increasingly faced by women in conceiving. Rather than idealizing motherhood or positioning the mother as a passive object of narration, contemporary literature – and I would argue, contemporary cinema as well – gives voice to numerous silenced subjectivities. These voices demystify the idea of a natural maternal instinct in women and show how maternal identity is constructed through a tension between individual desire, social expectations, and the lack of structural support.

This new configuration, which began to take shape especially from the second half of the 20th century thanks to feminist thought, allows for the visibility of a plural, imperfect, and ultimately deeply human experience of motherhood. These new representations of motherhood entail significant transformations in literary production, which becomes a critical tool capable of exploring the light and shadow surrounding the maternal experience through subjective, first-person narratives. This paradigm shift encourages the adoption of particularly meaningful literary forms, such as autofiction or the confessional genre, which allow for the narration of personal, sometimes painful or traumatic experiences, while also reclaiming motherhood – traditionally relegated to the domestic and private sphere – as a political issue.

By sharing common experiences, often hidden or silenced, this literature not only makes visible the complexity of maternal experience, but also actively contributes to its redefinition from a critical and collective perspective. For this reason, in my opinion, depictions of devoted mothers, aligned with the traditional “good mother” prototype, no longer predominate in Italian literature. In contemporary literature, maternal figures have been humanized: they are portrayed with their contradictions, their own agency, and, above all, the real difficulties they face. In fact, experiences that were long rendered invisible, as they threatened the idealized image of motherhood, are increasingly being brought to light: the struggle to conceive, maternal ambivalence, and the experience of abortion are now themes openly addressed by many Italian women writers in their novels.

However, from my perspective, a certain silence still persists in Italian literature around stories of mothers who express regret following motherhood. Such narratives would directly challenge the idealization of unconditional maternal love. There is also a noticeable lack of explicit representation of the physiological processes related to motherhood. In this regard, the representations – or, in many cases, the striking absences – of the maternal body in contemporary Italian literature reveal the persistence of a visibility regime strongly influenced by what I would dare to call a “sacralization” of motherhood. Although the maternal body has historically been established as a central cultural symbol, associated with ideals of purity, self-sacrifice, and fertility, its more concrete, physical, and sensory dimensions continue to be relegated to the domain of the unspoken or the marginal.

In this sense, the physiological traces of motherhood – the bodily changes a woman undergoes, their effects on sexual pleasure, childbirth and its consequences, or even breastfeeding – rarely find a space for explicit representation in literature. Breastfeeding, for instance, though socially accepted in abstract terms as an act of care and nourishment, continues to be subject to symbolic and normative repression when practiced in public spaces, where it is expected to occur discreetly, almost clandestinely. Furthermore, there is an expectation projected onto breastfeeding that it should bring satisfaction and fulfillment to the mother, ignoring the fact that, in many cases, it can also be experienced as traumatic, laden with pain, exhaustion, and in conflict with normative ideals of happy motherhood.

These omissions reveal a cultural apparatus that continues to shape the boundaries of what can be represented when it comes to the maternal body. But they also reveal the limits of what a woman dares to tell – for modesty, fear of misunderstanding, or social judgment – and the impact such a narrative may have on its readers. The expectation of how a narrative will be received, shaped by a culture that still considers certain experiences inappropriate or excessive, can act as an additional filter, restricting not only public discourse but also intimate writing itself. I believe there is, in general, a resistance to represent the maternal body in its materiality, and this is something that, as Andrea O’Reilly (2024) argues, academic feminism – and I would add, literature – must confront when addressing the subject of motherhood.

2. The Maternal and Intersectionality

VF: In recent theoretical debates, it has been emphasized that “in literature as in life, motherhood is constructed intersectionally: gender, class, race, nationality, sexuality, and age all impact upon how motherhood can be done, as do migrant experiences” (Henriksson, Williams, & Fahlgren, 2023, p. 2). In light of this perspective, how does contemporary Italian literature engage with an intersectional understanding of the maternal? Do current narratives succeed in portraying the plurality of maternal experiences beyond the white, bourgeois, heteronormative model? And how do they interact with new configurations of motherhood – queer, non-biological, surrogate, migrant – as well as with contemporary feminist struggles for reproductive justice? Would you consider literature a privileged space for thinking through the polymorphic politics of the maternal?

MR: I’ll begin with the last question: yes, absolutely. Literature, particularly matrifocal literature (Daly and Reddy, 1991), constitutes a privileged space for politicizing motherhood, as it enables the reclamation of narrative and restores, through the text, the maternal to its plural and political dimension. As Elizabeth Podnieks observes, literature is a space of “textual liberation” (2020, p. 176) in which Italian women writers explore, question, and openly engage with motherhood and how it is shaped by power structures, norms, and cultural discourses. Unlike more normative discourses, literature offers a flexible framework in which authors can problematize motherhood not merely as a biological fact, but as a social construction traversed by multiple intersectional axes.

In my view, contemporary Italian literature articulates, starting from subjectivity and lived experience, a critique of the social, cultural, and symbolic structures that have historically defined the maternal, unmasking myths and idealizations surrounding the figure of the mother. I think of novels such as Cose che non si raccontano (Things That Are Not Told) by Antonella Lattanzi, Cattiva (Bad) by Rossella Milone, La figlia sbagliata by Raffaella Romagnolo (The Wrong Daughter), I giorni dell’abbandono (The Days of Abandonment) by Elena Ferrante, La scordanza (The Forgetfulness) by Dora Albanese, to name a few, and I see how all these texts demystify motherhood, revealing ambivalences, inner conflicts, and structural tensions that permeate maternal experience and that have traditionally been silenced by normative discourse.

However, although these authors do incorporate issues of, especially, class and age, and also race and gender in narrating maternal experience, the opposite is not always true: many works centered on these other dimensions do not necessarily address motherhood. In other words, literature focused on the maternal has always tended to explore intersectionality, precisely because the experience of motherhood inevitably exposes the tensions and inequalities that women face in their multiple social identities. In this sense, I believe contemporary Italian literature includes a rich and valuable corpus of migrant women writers. Now, although I do not consider myself a specialist in this field, my perception is that this literature tends to focus more on issues such as identity, exile, memory, or uprooting, rather than on the maternal experience as a central axis. I would say that, although motherhood is present in these works, it appears tangentially and rarely occupies the center of the text – or at least it has not yet been read from this perspective – and perhaps this is precisely where the most interesting aspect lies: in how we (do not) see and (do not) read other forms of motherhood. It would certainly be enriching to integrate this perspective into the analysis, as it would allow us to expand our understanding of the multiple forms of maternity. But I insist: matrifocal literature, precisely due to the intersectional nature of motherhood, embraces numerous social and political dimensions.

Following the reasoning around the openness to multiple dimensions of analysis, it is undeniable that contemporary literary narratives have made significant progress in representing a plurality of maternal experiences that depart from the traditional white, bourgeois, and heteronormative model. We are now witnessing the emergence of stories about non-biological motherhood La memoria impossibile (The Impossible Memory) by Emilia Marasco, Io mi fido di te. Storia dei miei figli nati dal cuore (I Trust You. The Story of My Children Born from the Heart) by Luciana Littizzetto, Bambini di ferro (Iron Children) by Viola Di Grado, to name a few – of biological but non-genetic motherhood – as in the generative journeys described by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli in L’isola delle madri (The Island of Mothers) or by Chiara Laudani in Per non scomparire (To Not Disappear) – alongside all the recent narratives about medically assisted procreation. These texts not only broaden the maternal imaginary but also make it more complex and politicize it in new directions, showing alternative ways of being mothers. Nevertheless, within this increasingly broad spectrum of narratives about motherhood, I believe there are still missing voices, stories that, for example, recount the experience of homosexual motherhood or, as already mentioned, racialized motherhood. Reflecting on this question, however, led me to ask myself two things:

1) In relation to what Andrea O’Reilly defines as “queering motherhood,” it is common to present queer motherhood as an innovative, contemporary practice, or as something foreign to Western cultural frameworks. However, if we look toward the Mediterranean tradition – and particularly the Italian context – we can observe that certain forms of motherhood now identified as queer were already present in the past. Literature, in particular, bears witness to models of collective motherhood, especially in Southern Italy, where women wove networks of care with neighbors, the figure of the comare (godmother), grandmothers, and other female figures who shared the responsibility of raising children in a kind of communal and shared motherhood. In these contexts, motherhood did not end with the mother–child relationship, but unfolded in a plural and intergenerational dimension rooted in forms of daily solidarity.

It was within these “extended families” that not only caregiving practices were transmitted, but also material and symbolic knowledge: knowledge of childbirth and the body, natural remedies, emotional languages, relational codes, and forms of female authority that escaped institutional control. The comare, the grandmother, the neighbor are not merely auxiliary figures, but vital nodes in a network that redefines motherhood as a relational and political practice, removing it from isolation and idealization. Moreover, there were maternal experiences that defied normative age boundaries: women became mothers both at 18 and at 40, perhaps for different reasons, but without being penalized by ageist logics. Perhaps, instead of projecting alternative maternal forms solely into the future, we should critically question the historical process that led to the erasure or delegitimization of these communal and plural practices from our past.

2) Regarding the expression “going beyond the white, bourgeois, and heteronormative model,” while it is essential for deconstructing the notion of a singular maternal experience, I worry that it may create the mistaken impression that structural difficulties have already been overcome and can thus be left behind. This is not to deny the importance of giving visibility to non-normative forms of motherhood, on the contrary, this is a necessary and vital step. But I believe that these representations must coexist with the need to make visible the trap of normative motherhood: the one presented as a choice, as desirable, but which in fact merely reproduces patriarchal logics that assign women a role of subordination. A trap which, under the guise of free choice, conceals a structural imposition deeply rooted in the patriarchal symbolic order. Because even when motherhood is lived with desire, awareness, and outside of the heterosexual framework, the gender mandate that defines women based on their reproductive capacity and caregiving availability continues to operate. We must not forget that women – all women – are still today subject to structural violence simply for being women, and that such violence reproduces itself even in contexts where greater autonomy appears to have been achieved.

Making visible racialized, queer, or homosexual motherhood is fundamental, but it is not enough unless we radically question the hegemonic model of motherhood: the one that still functions as a universal measure, albeit masked by seemingly more inclusive forms. To think that expanding the representational spectrum equals solving the problem is to ignore that many structures of oppression remain intact, and that the apparent freedom of a few women does not equate to real collective liberation. Motherhood, as an institution regulated by patriarchy, cannot be liberating until the material, symbolic, and emotional conditions that uphold it are overturned. This is why I consider literature, an exemplary space for narrating the complexity of experience, an indispensable tool for reflecting on the political nature of the maternal. I welcome the fact that it opens the field to new forms of motherhood, but politicizing motherhood today cannot be reduced merely to amplifying voices: we must interrogate the structures that determine who can be a mother, how discourses on motherhood are transformed, and at what cost. Expanding the imaginary without questioning the patriarchal framework that sustains it risks generating a false perception of progress, while many women continue to suffer violence simply because they are women. Literature must not only represent, but also disrupt, question, and denaturalize the conditions that continue to subordinate women through motherhood.

3. Genealogies and Counter-Narratives: Matrilinearity and the Maternal Voice

VF: From a feminist genealogical perspective, can we trace connections between maternal narratives written by Italian women in the twentieth century and those emerging today? In your view, is there a “subterranean tradition” or counter-narrative of motherhood that crosses generations and resists dominant paradigms? In their 2010 collection Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts, Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O’Reilly describe a shift from “daughter-centric” narratives to “matrilineal” and “matrifocal” texts, highlighting the increasing centrality of the maternal voice in post-1990s literature. Do you see a similar development in the Italian context? How are contemporary Italian women writers working to re-inscribe the mother as a speaking subject, and motherhood as a personal, political, and creative narrative?

MR: I believe it is indeed possible to trace lines of continuity between the maternal narratives of 20th-century Italian women writers and those of today. There undoubtedly exists a dissident and submerged narrative that has crossed generations and managed to resist, in various forms, the dominant canon. Although 20th-century writings more frequently focused on the maternal figure from the daughters’ perspective, even then an impulse to break away from familial and social impositions could be glimpsed. Those writers – writing as daughters –began to question motherhood, the maternal figure, and to confront their own subjective fractures in relation to that legacy.

I’m thinking of those authors who, as early as the beginning of the 20th century, approached motherhood without embellishment, such as Sibilla Aleramo – “an isolated and revolutionary voice” (Sambuco, 2014, p. 45) –or Annie Vivanti, and of those who followed, like Fausta Cialente, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Fabrizia Ramondino, or Anna Maria Ortese, among others, who – drawing on their experience as mothers or daughters –understood that motherhood is a central aspect of women’s lives and must be addressed beyond the domestic sphere. These 20th-century writers challenged, from their respective positions, family structures, the obligation of marital destiny, or domestic confinement, and in doing so, they became points of reference for the future. Their writing, though not always explicitly feminist, already operated as a form of symbolic insubordination. Because the very fact that a woman wrote – and wrote about herself, her world, and other women – was enough to inaugurate a genealogy. In that inaugural disobedience, I see the seed of today’s matrifocal writings.

Many contemporary writers have had to seek out those predecessors – marginalized or made invisible – in order to restore them to their rightful place in literary history. In them, they have found a symbolic and vital point of reference, from which a literary genealogy has emerged that recognizes those authors as intellectual “mothers,” bearers of a legacy. This act of rediscovery has highlighted the urgent need to reclaim the maternal figure, both in its real dimension and in its symbolic power, as a foundation for the transmission of women’s lives. By recovering the legacy of their foremothers and speaking from their own maternal experiences, these writers are, in a sense, the “Icaruses of the 20th century”: women who, thanks to the wings inherited from those who came before them, have been able to take flight, to leave behind the gravitational pull of the private sphere as the only possible space, and to occupy the public space from which they now write their maternity.

That flight was neither solitary nor spontaneous: it was made possible because others, before them, had shown that there was a life beyond submission, that it was possible to speak in one’s own voice. These writers continue that thread of dissidence, amplify it, and bring it into the present. The critique, in the 20th century, of the maternal model through the daughter’s gaze paved the way, in the 21st century, for writings that, from within the maternal experience, seek to redefine it without idealization; this trajectory, both emotional and political, solidifies a literary genealogy capable of sustaining a continuous critique of the institution of motherhood and of imagining ways of being mothers beyond traditional models.

4. Poetics of the Maternal

VF: From a formal perspective, what stylistic, structural, or linguistic choices characterize today’s writing of the maternal? Can we identify a “poetics of the maternal” that subverts patriarchal narrative codes or proposes a reworking of maternal experience in embodied, affective, or relational terms?

MR: Yes, I do believe it is possible to speak of a poetics of the maternal, insofar as motherhood – and, more generally, the maternal as a critical category – activates new forms of writing, new ways of representing subjectivity, the body and female experience, destabilizing traditional narrative codes. Motherhood, as suggested by Lisa Baraitser (2018), is not only written as content, but is assumed as an epistemological and literary framework, as a critical lens through which to rethink the very possibilities of writing and authorship. The maternal, when written, is not configured solely as a theme, but as a practice that overflows and subverts inherited genres, that places the body and the bond with the other at the center of discourse, and that requires new linguistic and structural forms to be narrated.

Italian women authors who write about the maternal tend to use hybrid genres – diaries, autofiction, narrative essays, letters – that allow for exploration of the intersection between the intimate and the public, between personal experience and aesthetic elaboration. This responds to the need to find narrative forms adequate to narrate an experience that is neither closed nor obeys a causal progression more typical of the literary canon. Motherhood, by its very nature, tends to express itself through fragmentary, porous and open narrative forms. Fragmentariness responds to the impossibility of sustained temporal continuity: I think of the rhythms of care and the needs of the other – in particular the child – or also of the experience of those narrating the paths of medically assisted procreation, which seem to shatter any attempt at unitary narration. The porous refers to the dissolution of boundaries between self and other, since motherhood is constituted as an intersubjective experience in which maternal identity is built in constant negotiation with the body, desire, the presence/absence of the child and the context. Openness, finally, signals the impossibility of closure of the maternal experience, which does not find a clear ending, but remains a practice in continuous transformation, with effects that extend over time. These characteristics impose modes of writing that move away from causal logic and the linear narrative model and instead orient toward more flexible formats, capable of opening up to other structures, other temporalities and other voices.

In this perspective, Italian matrifocal literature is fully inscribed within this poetics of the maternal. Contemporary Italian women authors propose a radical exploration of the maternal as experience, as dissidence and as a form of knowledge. Writers such as Giorgia Surina, Anna Giurickovic Dato, Michela Marzano, Simona Sparaco, Gaia Manzini, among many others, work on the formal possibilities of this poetics: they narrate from exhausted bodies, from ambivalent bonds, from that uncomfortable position that is the maternal without myths and without veils, breaking the taboos tied to motherhood. The maternity they describe does not appear as consecration, but as conflict, as a place from which to observe the world with a lucidity born of fragility, of desire, of care and of loss. Writing from the maternal implies assuming a subjectivity that is never unitary, because it is always given in relation to the other – to the child or even to society – and to one’s lived experience. This narrative decentering generates a writing that unsettles, interrogates and claims a legitimate space from which to think not only the self, but also the shared experience of motherhood, since motherhood, as a cultural construction, crosses all women, mothers and non-mothers alike, and deeply questions society.

Moreover, and in connection with the genealogy of women writers, this poetics is not an exclusively contemporary phenomenon. Already in twentieth-century Italian literature we find significant precedents that started from the concrete experience of women. Writers such as Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Alba De Céspedes, Francesca Sanvitale or Laudomia Bonanni, to name a few, addressed in their works, with intimate language, an introspective, sensorial and affective style, themes such as motherhood, marriage, infidelity or domestic oppression, disarticulating the classical forms of narrative starting from subjectivity. Although many of these twentieth-century authors did not center their works exclusively on motherhood, it appeared intertwined with other dimensions of female experience, addressed as an experience situated within power structures. That form of writing already pointed to a poetics of the maternal understood as resistance, as a place of questioning and as a possibility for transformation. In this tradition, language plays a central role: far from being sentimental or minor – as has often been claimed from a patriarchal perspective – the prose of these authors was, and still is, alive, affective, at times experimental, endowed with a lexicon capable of anticipating the times and that allows for thinking of a maternal aesthetics not bound to inherited forms.

5. Maternal Writing and Feminisms

VF: To what extent do contemporary literary representations of motherhood engage with the agendas of Italian and international feminisms? What convergences, tensions, or divergences emerge between maternal writing and feminist practices – particularly with regard to the body, desire, reproductive labor, and subjectivity?

MR: Literary narratives of motherhood maintain a rich and complex relationship with the various currents of feminism. In many cases, these narratives function as textual forms through which to engage with – but also to question – the theoretical frameworks of feminism, especially concerning the subject, the body, practices of care, and new forms of reproduction. On the one hand, I believe there is a clear convergence in the shared effort to depatriarchalize the maternal experience, that is, to free it from the traditional imaginary that associates it with sacrifice, renunciation, and unconditional love. Contemporary women writers portray the maternal as a situated, corporeal, ambivalent experience, marked by the tension between desire and duty, between self and other. In line with Adrienne Rich’s (1984) reflections and her theory of the “politics of location,” Italian writers speak of motherhood and locate themselves in their own bodies, as material reality, also describing where that experience has led them and how it has been codified in the context in which they live, often very distant from their actual experience.

However, some strands of feminism have shown a certain reluctance to place motherhood at the center of reflection, associating it with a reproduction of the traditional order to be overcome. In contrast, many Italian authors have chosen to critically reclaim the maternal experience, asserting its epistemological and narrative value. In their texts, motherhood does not appear as a mere biological function nor as an essentialist trap, but as a complex, plural, and contradictory experience. In a time dominated by liberal and neoliberal models based on individualism, abstract rationality, and the independence of the subject, these authors write from the body and propose an ethics of care and a politics of interdependence that are profoundly countercultural and feminist. The maternal paradigm that emerges from matrifocal literature can be read as an emblem of a new humanism based on interdependence, reciprocity, and the recognition of vulnerability and human strength. This paradigm challenges both the Western philosophical tradition, which has historically denied the body and the feminine, and certain currents of feminism that have marginalized the maternal experience in the name of an emancipation understood exclusively as individual autonomy.

These voices call for a critical rereading that assumes motherhood as a place of knowledge, agency, and resistance. Reappropriating motherhood, as these writers do, does not mean re-naturalizing its forms nor uncritically accepting the gender mandates that have historically accompanied it, but rather freeing its processes from the symbolic and practical colonization to which they have been subjected. This entails rejecting the imposition of educational models disconnected from the maternal body and desire, and the systematic denial of care in the name of progress or a misunderstood idea of equality. In opposition to some feminist currents that promote absolute autonomy of women as an emancipatory ideal, these authors remind us that human life, of both women and men, is woven with ties, mutual needs, and dependencies that should not be hidden but politically recognized and valued. Ultimately, the texts suggest that the problem is not motherhood itself, but a socioeconomic and cultural system that turns its back on the education and care of children.

6. The Maternal Between Local and Global

VF: Finally, turning to a transnational perspective: how would you position Italian maternal writing in relation to literature from other cultural or geographic contexts, whether European or beyond? Are there specific traits, genealogies, or urgencies that distinguish the Italian approach?

MR: From a transnational perspective, Italian maternal writing displays distinctive traits that, in my opinion, place it in a unique position within the contemporary literary landscape. Unlike other contexts, in Italy – where the cultural and religious weight placed on the maternal figure must be considered – there is a particularly intense and lucid literary production surrounding themes such as infertility and medically assisted reproduction techniques. This is, without a doubt, one of the aspects that has most captured my attention as a researcher and clearly distinguishes Italian literature from others, such as Spanish literature. As a Spaniard, I live in a country with one of the most permissive laws in Europe regarding assisted reproduction, and one of the leaders in these practices, with a high number of women undergoing procedures that involve numerous physical and psychological difficulties due to the constraints inherent in such processes. However, there are very few literary accounts that deeply and critically explore this experience.

And this is precisely what surprises and moves me in contemporary Italian literature: the way in which many women writers have broken the taboo of infertility and share with readers not only their personal experience, but also their critiques of the difficulties arising from the implementation of the well-known Law 40. They do so through an honest and often searing writing style that is unafraid to show the physical, emotional, and existential impact of treatments, as well as the contradictions that the desire for motherhood can generate in a country where the maternal figure has historically been exalted as an ideal of femininity. The rawness of these testimonies, as well as the openness toward what is unprecedented, failed, or unfinished, make Italian literature a particularly fertile laboratory for thinking about motherhood in its full contemporary complexity and for reflecting on the key issues in the current debate regarding assisted reproduction and its limits.

Works Cited

Albanese, D. (2017). La scordanza. Rizzoli Editore.

Baraitser, L. (2018). Foreword. In Gill Rye, Victoria Browne, Adalgisa Giorgio, Emily Jeremiah, and Abigail Lee Six (Eds.), Motherhood in Literature and Culture. Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe (pp. xiii-xv). Routledge.

Cutrufelli, M.R. (2020). L’isola delle madri. Mondadori.

Daly, B., & Reddy, M. (1991). Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities. University of Tennessee Press.

Di Grado, V. (2016). Bambini di ferro. La nave di Teseo.

Ferrante, E. (2002). I giorni dell’abbandono. E/O.

Heal, O. (2019). Towards a matricentric feminist poetics. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 10 (1-2), 117-130.

Henriksson, H. W., Williams, A., & Fahlgren, M. (2023). Ambivalent narratives of motherhood and mothering: From normal and natural to not-at-all. In H. W. Henriksson, A. Williams, & M. Fahlgren (Eds.), Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing (pp. 1–15). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17211-3_1

Lattanzi, A. (2023). Cose che non si raccontano. Einaudi.

Laudani, C. (2022). Per non scomparire. Scritturapura.

Littizzetto, L. (2022). Io mi fido di te. Storia dei miei figli nati dal cuore. Mondadori.

Marasco, E. (2008). La memoria impossibile. TEA.

Milone, R. (2018). Cattiva. Einaudi.

O’Reilly, A. (2024). In (M)Other Words: Writings on Mothering and Motherhood, 2009-2024. Demeter Press.

Podnieks, E., & O’Reilly, A. (Eds.). (2010). Textual Mothers, Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Rich, A. (1984). Notes Toward a Politics of Location. In Blood, Bread, and Poetry. Selected Prose 1979-1985 (pp. 210-31). Norton.

Romagnolo, R. (2015). La figlia sbagliata. Sperling & Kupfer.

Sambuco, P. (2014). Italian Women Writers, 1800–2000: Boundaries, Borders, and Transgression. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Marta Balzi, PhD
Independent scholar    

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Abstract

This article examines Grossi Maglioni’s Beast Mother project (2015–ongoing) as a feminist reappropriation of classical maternal mythology. Through a comparative reading of Beast Mother and Titian’s Diana and Callisto (1556–59), based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it argues that the Italian artist duo reclaims Callisto’s punitive transformation into a bear as a site of maternal agency, collective strength and resistance. Drawing on feminist theories of motherhood, monstrosity and the maternal symbolic, the article “steals” Callisto from patriarchal myth in order to expose the structures that have historically cast pregnant and maternal bodies as shameful, vulnerable or monstrous. It focuses on three interconnected strands of Grossi Maglioni’s practice: Gesti di relazione, which re-enacts gestures of judgement and submission embedded in Western visual culture; Beast Mother, which transforms maternal monstrosity into a feral and generative counter-mythology; and Occupazioni, which brings care labour into public space as artistic and political action. By placing Renaissance mythological painting in dialogue with contemporary feminist art, the article reconceptualizes motherhood not as private burden or biological destiny, but as a collective, creative and transformative practice.

Keywords: Callisto, maternal mythology, feminist art, motherhood, monstrosity, care labour, contemporary Italian art, Ovid; Titian.

Giusy Di Filippo, PhD
Chercheuse associée – UMR Dicen IDF, Université Paris Nanterre    

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Abstract

This article examines the role of podcasting in reconfiguring the discursive and cultural meanings of motherhood in contemporary Italy amid demographic decline, state pronatalism, and conservative gender politics. Drawing on Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood as institution and mothering as lived practice, Andrea O’Reilly’s matricentric feminism, Adriana Cavarero’s philosophy of vocal relationality, and Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective orientation, it introduces the concept of “sounding motherhood” to explain how podcasts make audible maternal experiences marginalized by dominant discourse. Through an analysis of the celebrity-hosted podcasts Mama non Mama (2021) and Morgana, La madre (2023–2024), the article identifies reactive and reconstructive vocal strategies that challenge normative constructions of motherhood. It argues that while podcasting expands the possibilities for maternal self-representation, the visibility and legitimacy of maternal voices remain conditioned by celebrity, platform infrastructures, and cultural power.

Keywords: Podcasting, motherhood, mothering, sounding motherhood, matricentric feminism, vocal relationality, celebrity culture, Italy, Giorgia Meloni, maternal subjectivity.

Claudia Dell’Uomo d’Arme, Postdoc
Chercheuse associée – UMR Dicen IDF, Université Paris Nanterre    

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Abstract

This article offers an interdisciplinary cartography of contemporary feminist philosophy with Rosi Braidotti’s thought as a central reference, while proposing an original figure—Alter-a Mater—to address a persistent gap: feminist theory still lacks a concept that holds together motherhood & maternal spheres, alterity and otherness, as well as a posthuman inter-connected zoé perspective. Building on Braidotti’s bio-centred feminism and nomadic reasoning, I differentiate Alter-a Mater as a conceptual but mostly agentive figure that signifies the maternal as a threshold space. Through the critical device of Alter-a, multiple passages across identities, languages, species, and technologies become thinkable and practicable within arts and academic literature, emerging forms of reasoning, and socio-political design. My proposal converses with scholars such as Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. Methodologically, Alter-a Mater reframes the female-feminine corps made by multi-positional natures. In my paper, they structurally transform and translate loss and vulnerability (trauma, repression, instrumentalisations of the maternal) into affirmative politics, pursuing those settings in which alliance-building across human and more-than-human assemblages. Conceptually, Alter-a Mater is rich in plural life yet narrowed by the maternal approach as the primitive relational infrastructure. Politically, Alter-a Mater foregrounds collective futurity by conjugating the maternal into a situated praxis of thresholding. In this lively archive, the critical travelling encounters several becoming-other patterns: for the nexus-infans, Alter-a imagines co-creative languages, based on care, love, and bodily thinking.

Keywords: Feminine subjectivity, motherhood, alterity, otherness, posthumanism, zoé, maternal ethics.

Zijun Wang, PhD
Lecturer in Italian Studies, Jilin International Studies University.   

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Abstract

This paper examines the representation of motherhood and the mother-daughter relationship in Dacia Mariani’s La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa. The study finds that the novel challenges traditional notions of maternal identity within the framework of Italian patriarchal culture. Set in eighteenth-century Sicily, the narrative follows Marianna, a deaf and mute noblewoman who, through writing and introspection, gradually reclaims her autonomy and redefines her maternal legacy. While her mother embodies a conventional model of womanhood, constrained by societal expectations and silent complicity in patriarchal norms, Marianna’s detachment from her marks the beginning of a journey toward self-determination. Mariani raises crucial questions about maternal inheritance, female autonomy, and the possibility of disrupting oppressive structures across generations. The novel speaks to contemporary debates on gender, motherhood, and women’s agency by exposing the historical roots of patriarchal systems that continue to impact female experience..

Keywords: Motherhood, mother-daughter relationship, Italian patriarchy, maternal identity.

Veronica Frigenia, PhD
Visiting Researcher, Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (ZtG), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.   

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Abstract

This article examines the contested politics of maternal representation in contemporary Italy by analyzing Dal latte materno veniamo (From Mother’s Milk We Come), a bronze sculpture by Italian artist Vera Omodeo. The study explores how public monuments function as ideological sites where meanings of motherhood, femininity, and citizenship are negotiated. Drawing on feminist theory, urban cultural studies, visual culture, and Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible, the article investigates the institutional controversies surrounding the sculpture, from its rejection by the Municipality of Milan to its subsequent appropriation within the Italian Senate and eventual installation in public space. It argues that the monument exposes the tensions between patriarchal and feminist constructions of motherhood and illustrates how maternal embodiment is alternately celebrated and politically instrumentalized. Omodeo’s work does not reproduce a singular narrative of maternity and produces an ambivalent position. The statue thus becomes a site of dissensus that challenges conventional monumentality and expands debates on visibility, care, embodiment, and public memory. Ultimately, the article contends that maternal monuments should be understood as dynamic arenas, where competing visions of gender, citizenship, and historical recognition are contested.

Keywords: Dal latte materno veniamo, motherhood, maternal embodiment, public monument, public art, Italy, Vera Omodeo, gender politics, symbolic representation, sociopolitical debate.

Editorial Introduction

Reimagining Motherhood and Mothering in Contemporary Italy: Cultural Representations, Political Struggles

Veronica Frigeni, PhD
Visiting Researcher, Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (ZtG), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.   

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1. No Country for Mothers

Building on Rich’s (1976) influential distinction between “motherhood” as a patriarchal institution and “mothering” as a lived, embodied, relational and potentially empowering experience, this special issue explores how maternal identities are constructed, contested, and reimagined within contemporary Italian culture. Taking a cultural studies approach, it investigates the politics of representation by analyzing how motherhood and mothering emerge across literature, popular culture, social media, and public monuments. Following Woodward’s insight (2015) that “people make sense of experience” – including maternal experience – “through cultural representations as well as material conditions” (p. 93), the issue brings together interdisciplinary perspectives to examine the maternal as both a site of meaning-making and sociopolitical negotiation.

In contemporary Italy, motherhood has become an increasingly prominent and contested issue (Lazzari & Charnley, 2016). It features more visibly across political and cultural discourses, yet it is frequently framed in reductive and polarized terms, ranging from conservative, right-wing, and populist celebrations of “righteous motherhood” to ambivalent or critical feminist perspectives (Pető & Juhász, 2024). Set against the backdrop of demographic decline, ongoing debates over reproductive rights, and evolving definitions of family, motherhood has emerged as a key site of ideological struggle. In response, the government, driven by a neoliberal and socially conservative agenda, has established the Ministry for Family, Natality, and Equal Opportunities, a move that underscores institutional efforts to “resolve” the fertility crisis by advancing a traditional, heteronormative model of motherhood rooted in reproduction, family cohesion, and national identity (Frigeni, 2024b).

Yet, despite the symbolic centrality of the maternal figure in Italian cultural imaginaries, Italy remains, in many respects, no country for mothers (Minello, 2022). Material support for motherhood is lacking, and structural barriers – including inadequate childcare provision, rigid labor market structures, persistent gender wage disparities, and minimal paternal participation in caregiving – continue to constrain women’s ability to reconcile mothering with paid employment. Italian welfare policies remain anchored in a familist paradigm that presumes the mother as the default caregiver, thereby marginalizing alternative family configurations and erasing the diversity of maternal subjectivities (Gusmano, 2023). This disconnect gives rise to a profound contradiction: while motherhood is idealized and celebrated in national rhetoric, it is often unsupported and even penalized in practice.

Italian cultural and political contexts continue to be shaped by a deeply entrenched maternal ideal that carries considerable symbolic weight while simultaneously restricting women’s actual agency. As Bassano and Tiralongo (2018) observe, the word “woman” in Italy still evokes a predetermined “destiny,” bound to culturally embedded expectations around maternity (p. 107). Motherhood remains a central trope in the national imaginary (Morris & Willson, 2018), although it often functions more as myth than as lived reality: mothers are revered within private and symbolic domains, yet denied meaningful presence or influence in the public sphere. This idealized figure draws heavily from religious iconography, most notably the Madonna and child, which frames mothers as selfless, pure, and desexualized beings (Bravo, 1997). Despite the waning institutional power of the Catholic Church, its cultural legacy persists in secular narratives, continuing to valorize a maternal model rooted in sacrifice and devotion, particularly toward sons. O’Reilly (2021) terms this dynamic a patriarchal and maternalist construction of motherhood: one that exalts maternal self-abnegation while systematically withholding social, political, and economic recognition from actual mothers. Within this framework, motherhood is often framed as the ultimate fulfillment of female identity, generating a fundamental contradiction: maternal labor is idealized rhetorically yet devalued materially. Mothers are thus caught in a double bind, celebrated symbolically but unsupported in practice, their agency constrained by an ideal that obscures the diversity and complexity of real maternal experiences.

The persistent tension between symbolic valorization and material neglect of motherhood in Italy reflects a broader institutional failure to support maternal citizenship in substantive terms. As Giorgio (2012) observes, successive governments, irrespective of ideological orientation, have consistently favored rhetorical affirmations over policies that address the structural and social realities of mothering. A salient example is the 2016 “Fertility Day” campaign, introduced by then Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin, which, under the guise of addressing demographic decline, reduced women to reproductive agents and reinforced biologically determinist notions of female value. The initiative was met with widespread criticism for its regressive framing of womanhood as primarily defined through procreation. This dynamic has been further exacerbated under the leadership of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, whose government has advanced a conservative, pronatalist agenda. The appointment of Eugenia Maria Roccella – an outspoken pro-life figure with essentialist views on gender and motherhood – as Minister for Family, Natality, and Equal Opportunity, exemplifies the state’s strategic alignment of maternal empowerment with normative, heteronormative ideals of womanhood (Frigeni, 2024b). Within this framework, maternal legitimacy is contingent upon adherence to a narrowly defined model of motherhood: cisgender, heterosexual, biologically reproductive, and embedded within the traditional family unit.

Consequently, non-normative maternal identities and family formations are routinely excluded from institutional recognition and public discourse. These include surrogacy, prohibited by a universal ban enacted in October 2024, trans and queer parenthood, and other alternative caregiving constellations. Despite their lived validity, such experiences are frequently pathologized, rendered invisible, or delegitimized, reinforcing a restrictive and ideologically charged conception of reproductive justice. This selective visibility serves to consolidate dominant narratives while foreclosing meaningful engagement with diverse maternal subjectivities. Italian legislative and cultural discourses continue to be underpinned by what Gusmano (2023) identifies as “relational normativity,” comprising three interrelated paradigms: heteronormativity, which positions heterosexuality as the normative sexual orientation; mononormativity, which presupposes monogamy as the default relational structure; and monomaternalism, which acknowledges only one legitimate mother figure—typically a cisgender, monogamous, biological mother. These ideologically entrenched paradigms exist in tension with shifting demographic trends. Increasing numbers of women are delaying motherhood into their forties, while the proportions of childless women – those who may yet have children – and childfree women – those who reject motherhood altogether – are steadily rising. These developments underscore the growing incongruity between contemporary reproductive practices and the state’s prescriptive model of maternal identity.

This inhospitable climate for mothers must also be understood within the broader “culture war” currently reshaping Italy’s sociopolitical landscape, which centers on gender, reproduction, and national identity. These conflicts extend far beyond the realm of formal policy or legislation; they are enacted through what De Blasio and Selva (2024) describe as “communicative and cultural processes” that harness media platforms, political rhetoric, and institutional authority to shape public sentiment and normalize particular ideological positions. At the core of this polarization is a clash between conservative Catholic and sexual-difference feminist positions –frequently aligned with pro-natalist, biologically essentialist discourses – and the countervailing demands of queer, transfeminist, and intersectional movements committed to bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, and the deconstruction of binary gender norms. The so-called “gender ideology” panic plays a central role in this cultural struggle (Montecchio, 2024), functioning as a potent moral crusade that channels anxieties about shifting gender roles and legitimizes reactionary policy interventions. This moral panic has fueled renewed attempts to curtail LGBTQ+ reproductive rights, redefine parental roles strictly along biological lines, and promote a narrowly defined vision of citizenship grounded in heteronormative, patriarchal, and natalist values. Through these dynamics, motherhood – and, more broadly, reproduction – becomes a key terrain on which battles over identity, belonging, and power are fought.

Within this broader context, feminist discourse on motherhood in Italy is ambivalent. While the maternal figure may seem an outdated subject of feminist inquiry, for Italian feminists, it remains a vital and unresolved concern. As Casarino and Righi (2018) suggest, “we are never quite done with the mother” (p. 1). Mothering has long represented a central thread in feminist genealogies (Ammirati, 2020), particularly within Italian feminism since the 1970s, which has sought to dismantle patriarchal myths that conflate womanhood with reproduction and care. Yet contemporary feminist discourse often exhibits a symbolic void around the maternal. There is a pervasive sense of alienation and disorientation among feminist mothers, caught between the pressures of patriarchal norms and the critiques of feminist thought, struggling to articulate diverse and evolving maternal identities. Within this broader cultural and political landscape, feminist discourse on motherhood in Italy is marked by a profound ambivalence, caught between a critical legacy that has historically challenged the patriarchal construction of maternity and the pressing need to reclaim and rearticulate maternal experiences in light of contemporary feminist struggles. This ambivalence, partly rooted in the matriphobic tendencies of second-wave feminism, reveals the difficulty of acknowledging and legitimizing the many ways of being – or not being – a mother today. As Vianello (2021) notes, experiences of feminist mothering are frequently marginalized, if not silenced, within dominant feminist discourses. For many, motherhood remains either an anachronism to be sidelined or a taboo to be avoided, especially in its more complex or non-normative forms.

Italy thus lacks a cohesive, feminist, mother-centered narrative capable of both critiquing institutionalized motherhood and imagining new maternal futures. What is needed is a feminist reappropriation of the maternal, one that recognizes the multiplicity of mothering practices and promotes theoretical and political frameworks attentive to their lived realities. In previous work, I have argued for the necessity of introducing a matricentric perspective in Italy: a mode of feminist thinking and activism that centers mothers’ experiences and foregrounds the maternal as a critical site of resistance, negotiation, and possibility (Frigeni 2024a). Such an approach reveals that an Italian matricentric feminism already exists, albeit often in muted, contested, or marginal forms, and it urgently needs to be voiced. Within this framework, cultural production and representation play a crucial role: they do not merely reflect social realities, but actively participate in shaping them. As such, the maternal offers a powerful lens through which to interrogate the politics of gender, care, and citizenship in contemporary Italy.

2. Cultural Narratives of Mothering and Motherhood

In a context where, as Woodward (2022) observes, “motherhood has long been an absent presence, assumed by and yet left unrecognized and unstated” and what is most often missing are mothers’ own voices (p. 9), it becomes crucial to examine not only how mothering is lived, but how it is represented. Narratives structure how people interpret their position in the world, align with collective identities, and engage with systems of power. Storytelling organizes facts, emotions, and experiences into meaningful frameworks, enabling individuals to navigate complex social and political environments (Bruner, 1991). This narrative structuring does not simply communicate existing identities or institutions; it plays an active role in constituting and transforming them. Consequently, exploring representations of motherhood means grappling with how maternal identities are discursively constructed, stabilized, or challenged through stories – stories that are always embedded in broader cultural, ideological, and political matrices.

Representations of motherhood – across cinema, literature, television, visual art, social platforms, and urban narratives – do not merely reflect reality, but shape cultural understandings of the maternal. As Hall (1997) and Foucault (1978) have emphasized, representation is a key site where power is articulated and contested. Motherhood, far from being a private or purely biological matter, is a deeply mediated construct, defined by shifting scripts of normativity, virtue, sacrifice, and deviance. Within this framework, representations of motherhood are never neutral or purely descriptive; they are interpretive acts that shape how maternal identities are understood, valued, or contested within the social and political sphere. Narratives, then, become both the terrain and the tools of ideological struggle, capable of reinforcing dominant paradigms or opening space for counter-hegemonic redefinitions of what motherhood can be.

Drawing on several theorizations of motherhood and mothering, this special issue takes seriously the idea that cultural representations are performative: they shape what motherhood can be, what forms of maternal labor are recognized or erased, and whose maternal identities are granted legitimacy. By turning to representation, we gain insight into how mothering is implicated in broader cultural negotiations of agency, citizenship, belonging, and care. On the one hand, as Henriksson, Williams and Fahlgren contend (2023), “narrativity [is] central for understanding the importance of motherhood” (p. 6). Mothering, like representation, is fundamentally a relational practice, embedded in affective, social, and discursive exchanges that shape how we understand both the self and the world. To mother is not merely to perform a set of biological or cultural functions, but to engage in a dynamic process of care, negotiation, and meaning-making. Motherhood, in this view, is not simply a biological or individual state, but a relational practice shaped through narratives that circulate in cultural, institutional, and interpersonal contexts. As Somers (1994) argues, identities are formed and sustained through narrative structures that are socially embedded; they emerge not in isolation but through our location within broader relational and political networks. Narratives of motherhood thus serve not only to describe, but to produce maternal subjects, simultaneously shaping who mothers are and how they are recognized – or disavowed – within the public sphere. This insight foregrounds the political stakes of cultural representation: to tell stories about motherhood is also to negotiate power, legitimacy, and belonging within society.

On the other hand, representation, far from being a static mirror of reality, is better understood as a dynamic and refracted process – a dialogic act that situates subjects in relation to others and within broader symbolic and cultural orders. In this sense, both mothering and representing operate within what feminist theory defines as a space of relationality, a space that is not only interpersonal, but also imaginative and political. The act of imagining alternative relational and social configurations is not a peripheral concern but lies at the heart of feminist theory and activism. As Baumeister and Horton (2015) argue, the feminist imagination enables world-making practices by envisioning relational forms and values that challenge normative constraints. Echoing this, feminist writer Olufemi (2020) asserts: “The feminist imagination carves out a site of agency that forms the impetus for action … It enables resistant acts to take place by dismantling hegemonic notions of what is permissible under current conditions” (p. 35). This imaginative work is integral to the politics of representation, particularly when it comes to motherhood.

As Henrikkson, Williams, and Fahlgren (2023) note, “in narratives, in texts, motherhood gains meaning on existential and symbolic levels” (p. xx). From this perspective, the maternal – and its cultural representation – becomes a potent lens through which to interrogate dominant ideologies and to envision relational, embodied, and transformative alternatives to them. Representational practices across literature, media, and visual culture do not simply reflect maternal experience; they actively shape the social expectations, ethical norms, and institutional structures that govern maternity. Analyzing these representations, then, becomes a critical feminist method for understanding how motherhood is mobilized within political discourse, reinforced or challenged by cultural narratives, and redefined by feminist, queer, and decolonial interventions seeking to reimagine what maternal identity can mean in contemporary society.

3. Positioning the Maternal: Voices, Formats, Perspectives

This issue combines interdisciplinary approaches, drawing from sociology, political theory, gender studies, cultural analysis, and visual culture. It explores how traditional ideals of motherhood coexist or collide with more subversive, intersectional, or precarious maternal narratives in contemporary Italy. Contributors examine how cultural texts grapple with the institutionalization of motherhood, the moralization of maternal choice, and the pressure to embody impossible standards of care and sacrifice.

Key questions addressed in this issue include:

• How do representations of mothering reflect or resist Italy’s political, religious, and cultural discourses on gender and family?
• What narrative and symbolic strategies are used to construct or deconstruct maternal imaginaries in literary and cultural texts?
• To what extent do contemporary works by LGBTQ+ individuals, migrants, or artists from marginalized backgrounds challenge hegemonic models of motherhood?
• How do intersectional perspectives – considering class, race, disability, and sexuality – reshape what is thinkable and sayable about mothering?
• What is the current state of Italian literary criticism on motherhood? What are its dominant theoretical approaches, unresolved tensions, and emerging directions?
• How are alternative family structures, reproductive autonomy, and maternal labor negotiated in cultural texts in light of evolving social and identity frameworks?

By centering on representation, this special issue does not aim to displace lived maternal experiences but rather to interrogate the cultural logics through which those experiences are rendered visible, intelligible, or delegitimized. Representation is approached here not as a substitute for material realities, but as a critical site where meaning is produced, contested, and potentially reimagined – a terrain, in other words, for feminist critique, political resistance, and speculative reconstruction of the maternal.

As Kaplan (1992) observes, “the mother has been everywhere … but always in the margins, always not the topic per se under consideration. The mother, that is, [is] generally spoken, not speaking; she [is] usually discussed as an integral part of a discourse … spoken by an Other” (p. 3). In the Italian context, the maternal figure remains omnipresent in political rhetoric, visual culture, and public discourse, yet mothers themselves are rarely granted full subjectivity or discursive authority. This special issue addresses that paradox by foregrounding maternal voices and critical perspectives across multiple formats: scholarly essays, a book review paired with an author interview, a piece of feminist reflection, and an in-depth dialogue with a scholar of Italian literature.

This special issue is divided into two complementary sections. The first, “Voices”, brings together a range of contributions that explore motherhood through personal, creative, and dialogic forms. It includes interviews with authors and literary critics, autobiographical poetry, and a piece of feminist reflection. These contributions offer alternative and affective modes of engaging with maternal experiences, expanding the space of discourse beyond traditional academic formats.

The second section, “Analysis”, features scholarly essays that draw on theoretical frameworks to examine literary texts, visual culture, and broader cultural narratives. These essays explore how motherhood is represented, contested, and reimagined in contemporary Italian contexts, with particular attention to questions of identity, power, and resistance.

Taken together, these contributions map a constellation of maternal representation and resistance, engaging with a terrain that remains both politically fraught and under-theorized. Rather than offering a unified thesis, the issue eventually invites readers to consider the multiplicity of ways in which maternity is constructed, negotiated, and potentially transformed across disciplinary, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries.

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Veronica Frigeni obtained her PhD in Italian from the University of Kent in 2018 and worked as a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in Italian at the University of Cambridge and will be a Visiting Scholar in Residence in Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna from April 2024. Veronica has written a monograph on Antonio Tabucchi and articles on Jhumpa Lahiri, Giorgio Agamben, and Igiaba Scego. She has also contributed chapters on transcultural feminist writers, motherhood, and trauma. Additionally, she is a contributor to forthcoming anthologies such as The Mother Wave (Demeter Press), The Palgrave Handbook of Parenting in Popular Culture, and Abortion in Popular Culture (Lexington Books). Veronica is a co-editor of the upcoming volume Mothers and Life Writing, published by Demeter Press.