Clitoral Love. Love Experience and Subversion of Sexual Identity in Carla Lonzi's Self-Consciousness

Abstract

The article intends to investigate the role of love within Carla Lonzi’s thought. Love constitutes one of the many myths on which the prestige given to men rests. In fact, Lonzi identifies the matrix of patriarchal oppression in sexual inferiority, based on the undue representation of the coincidence between pleasure and reproduction from which derives the myth of the complementarity of the sexes. Sexuality is therefore the decisive field for the birth of women as clitoral women. The clitoral woman is not only the woman who experiences a form of dissident sexuality, but she expresses in addition a non-conforming sexual identity. In the article I aim to highlight the queer elements of Lontian reflection with respect to the themes of sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. The critique of political lesbianism is then examined and compared with the openness to homoeroticism among women that is widely present in the diaries of self-consciousness. The article argues that self-consciousness, besides being necessary for the experimentation of new forms of love relationships, can be considered as a love discourse, within which it is possible to identify some structural figures of the language of love.