Love and Violence – Body and Machine

Fundamental dychotomies

Iconografie, Oggetto 7 (10 agosto 1977 - 1979) by Lonzi CarlaLa Galleria Nazionale

There are many aspects through which the vast subject of feminism can be explored. And there are also multiple issues that feminism has not yet thoroughly covered.

Going back to Lonzi's phrase that indicates perfect equality in love, it can be said that one of the topics that have not yet been thoroughly explored is precisely this: love.

Rassegna stampa, Oggetto 335 (18 ottobre 1969 - 23 ottobre 2001) by Lonzi MartaLa Galleria Nazionale

So mundane, but perhaps also extremely crucial in order not only to understand the dynamics of women and men in their different life paths, but also to understand other factors linked to the intimacy that love generates between two individuals.

WOOJ – Women Out of Joint (newspaper)La Galleria Nazionale

The acts of violence, which, unfortunately, are perpetrated against women almost every day, are still inconceivable.

Why all this continues to be a sick normality should be investigated precisely within the sphere of intimacy, in the love unleashed by that intimacy and which in the long run causes shortcomings and dystopias.

Centro studi e documentazione pensiero femminile, Oggetto 17 (19 marzo 1996 - maggio 1996) by Lonzi MartaLa Galleria Nazionale

Man has always perceived women with fear: an unmanageable and generating force that they feel the need to subdue, believing it to be too powerful compared to the “stronger sex” which, instead, only assumes a marginal role in the reproductive process.

WOOJ – Women Out of Joint (newspaper)La Galleria Nazionale

This fear, this helplessness in front of women, who are however neither submissible nor controllable, causes men to lose those beliefs that have always led them to think they hold specific rights towards the other sex.

It is this fear that triggers violence.

Rassegna stampa, Oggetto 206 (18 ottobre 1969 - 23 ottobre 2001) by Lonzi MartaLa Galleria Nazionale

Examining the couple, intimacy and therefore love is essential to probe and understand those mechanisms that still lead to otherwise incomprehensible violence.

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In the society of need - as the world we live in has been defined - our work aims to make up for emptiness and satisfy the need.

Continuing the species is also an intrinsic human need and thus women become gears of the production system, creating and accompanying life.

This is the idea that for centuries man has nurtured towards women, or rather the female body.

WOOJ – Women Out of Joint (newspaper)La Galleria Nazionale

Actually, giving a more in-depth analysis of the experience of pregnancy, it would be better to state that, more than a mechanical process, it resembles a cognitive one.

Even in the latter we allow something to grow inside within us, an idea and, as in childbirth, we let it emerge by detaching ourselves from it in a sort of alienation.

Rassegna stampa, Oggetto 120 (18 ottobre 1969 - 23 ottobre 2001) by Lonzi MartaLa Galleria Nazionale

This is how the cognitive process, in a similar way to the reproductive one, carries the species forward.

In a society like ours, mechanics have given way to creativity and this creativity should be encouraged to lead to improvement.

WOOJ – Women Out of Joint (newspaper)La Galleria Nazionale

Once again, starting from a reflection whose focus appears to be women, speculation leads to several other aspects of social, economic and emotional life.

Interventi ed incontri su Carla Lonzi, Oggetto 255 (14 novembre 1984 - 26 gennaio 2002) by Lonzi MartaLa Galleria Nazionale

All this further demonstrates that the life experience of women, regarded for centuries only as machines, as an organism that gives and must give life, is needed to develop a society capable of improving itself in every aspect and to take flight, moving away from those standards still bound to the patriarchy.

Credits: Story

Written by Maria Eugenia Bavaro.

Credits: All media
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