Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-03T17:34:53.541Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Emotions and gender in oral history: narrating Italy's 1968

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Rebecca Clifford
Rebecca Clifford*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Classics, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
*
∗Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The year 1968 was and remains an emotion-laden topic in Italy, and yet few historians have used emotions to parse the history and memory of this period. This paper draws on a collection of interviews with former activists in the student movement and the New Left to explore the ways in which expressions of feeling in life-history narratives can flag up possible lines of difference in women's and men's stories. It draws on three emotive themes – rebellion, violence and liberation – to explore the interaction between gender, feeling, narrative, and what the author calls the ‘third person in the room’: meta-narratives of 1960s activism that can exert a powerful weight on the interview, blending and blurring the lines of individual and collective experience.

Keywords

emotionsgenderoral history1968activism
Type
Articles
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 17 , Issue 2: Special issue: Emotions , May 2012 , pp. 209 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Averill, J.R. and Nunley, E.P. 1992. Voyages of the heart: Living an emotionally creative life. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Bascetta, M., Bonsignori, S., Grispigni, M. and Petrucciani, S. 2008. Enciclopedia del '68. Rome: Manifestolibri.Google Scholar
Bobbio, L. 1979. Lotta Continua. Storia di una organizzazione rivoluzionaria. Rome: Savelli.Google Scholar
Cento Bull, A. and Giorgio, A. 2005. Speaking out and silencing: Culture, society and politics in Italy in the 1970s. Oxford: Legenda.Google Scholar
Clifford, R., Gildea, R. and Warring, A. Forthcoming. Gender. In Voices and networks of revolt: Around 1968 in Europe, ed. Gildea, R., Mark, J. and Warring, A. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cubitt, C. 2001. The history of emotions: A debate. Early Modern Europe 10, no. 2:225–27.Google Scholar
Della Porta, D. 1995. Social movements, political violence, and the state: A comparative analysis of Italy and Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, T. 2003. From passions to emotions: The creation of a secular psychological category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, S.M. 1979. Personal politics: The roots of women's liberation in the civil rights movement and the New Left. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Evans, S.M. 2009. Sons, daughters and patriarchy: Gender and the 1968 generation. American Historical Review 114, no. 2:331–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frazier, L.J. and Cohen, D. 2009. Gender and sexuality in 1968: Transformative politics in the cultural imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginsborg, P. 1990. A history of contemporary Italy: Society and politics, 1943–1988. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Grele, R.J. 1991. Envelopes of sound: The art of oral history. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, M. 1950. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Harré, R. 1986. The social construction of emotions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Harrison, L. 1966. L'iniziazione: come le adolescenti italiani diventano donne. Milan: Rizzoli.Google Scholar
Hilwig, S. 2009. Italy and 1968: Youthful unrest and democratic culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, G.-R. 2007. The spirit of '68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jasper, J. 1998. The emotions of protest: Affective and reactive emotions in and around social movements. Sociological Forum 13, no. 3:397–424.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lumley, R. 1990. States of emergency: Cultures of revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Marwick, A. 1999. The sixties. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Migone, G.G. 1991. Il caso italiano e il contesto internazionale. In La cultura e i luoghi del '68, ed. Agosti, A., Passerini, L. and Tranfaglia, N., 3–37. Milan: FrancoAngeli.Google Scholar
Mouton, M. and Pohlandt-McCormick, H. 1999. Boundary crossings: Oral history of Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa. History Workshop Journal 48:41–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Passerini, L. 1991. Storie di donne e femministe. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier.Google Scholar
Passerini, L. 1996. Autobiography of a generation. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Portelli, A. 1981. The peculiarities of oral history. History Workshop 12:96–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Portelli, A. 1991. The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Portelli, A. 1997. The battle of Valle Giulia: Oral history and the art of dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Portelli, A. 1999. L'ordine è già stato eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria. Rome: Donzelli.Google Scholar
Reddy, W. 2001. The navigation of feeling: A framework for the history of emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rossi-Doria, A. 2005. Ipotesi per una storia che verrà. In Il femminismo degli anni Settanta, ed. Bertilotti, T. and Scattigno, A., 1–23. Rome: Viella.Google Scholar
Stearns, P.N. and Stearns, C.Z. 1986. Anger: The struggle for emotional control in America's history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Thoits, P.A. 1989. The sociology of emotions. Annual Review of Sociology 15:317–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomson, A. 1994. Anzac memories: Living with the legend. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thomson, A. 1998. Unreliable memories? The use and abuse of oral history. In Historical controversies and historians, ed. Lamont, W., 23–34. London: UCL Press.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, A. 1999. Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar