Abstract
This paper examines texts written by, or in collaboration with, female ex-members of the Italian left-wing armed organization, the Red Brigades. The corpus differs from male-authored or male-centred texts in that issues relating to identity and selfhood lie at the very heart of the project of narrating the terrorist past; the primary concern of Italian women's post-terrorist narration is not to narrate the experience of belonging to an armed organization, but to construct a new identity distinct from a pre-existing self identified exclusively with the transgressive experience of political violence. I consider the corpus in the light of a number of critical problems posed both by the specificity of female perpetration and by the dearth of theoretical writings on perpetrator trauma more generally. I identify in each text an acute anxiety about the very act of speech or narration and find that, in order to circumvent the perceived prohibition on speech, the women of the Red Brigades subtly insinuate into their life writing a discourse of alterity bordering on subalternity that obscures the boundary between victim and perpetrator. The unacknowledged slippage between discourses of perpetration and victimization is explored in relation to Ruth Leys’ critique of Cathy Caruth's formulation of trauma as the wound that cries out through the voice of the victim. The paper concludes by questioning whether perpetrator trauma can ever be articulated as such and by considering the implications of that question for traumatized perpetrator and victimized society alike.
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Notes
The figures are drawn from Alison Jamieson's reconfiguration of the Italian Ministry of the Interior table for the period 1969–1987. The total number of attacks in that wider period is 14,491; the total number of deaths is 419 and 1,182 injuries. Further details regarding the breakdown of attacks and deaths according to provenance are also provided. See Jamieson (1989: 19–21).
A further complication for the potential of neofascism to contribute to the memory of the anni di piombo is the fact that although successive judicial investigations and trials have attributed all major bombings of the anni di piombo to radical neofascist groups, prominent neofascists continue to reject those findings and insist on a construction of neofascism as the victim, rather than the perpetrator, of such bombings (see Cento Bull, 2007).
All translations from the Italian are my own, except where stated otherwise.
In comparative terms, women's participation in terrorism in Italy is considered to be particularly high. The latest statistics reveal that women comprised 20 per cent of the membership of all left-wing armed organizations, and 13 per cent of the most notorious organization, the Red Brigades (see De Cataldo Neuburger and Valentini, 1996: 7–8).
Rare exceptions include Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery (2001), which provides some exploration of perpetrator trauma in Vietman war veterans, Bernhard Giesen's recent study of perpetrator trauma in post-war Germany (2006), and Leigh Payne's Unsettling Accounts: The Politics and Performance of Confessions by Perpetrators of Authoritarian State Violence (2007). None, however, constitutes a comprehensive study of perpetrator trauma.
Excluded from this list is the epistolary exchange between Braghetti and right-wing ex-terrorist Francesca Mambro's Nel cerchio della prigione (1995). Although this text does provide a certain amount of autobiographical reflection, it serves less to narrate the self than to represent the other, each woman narrating the story of the other.
Kaplan's analysis of outlaw genre focuses on texts written in non-Western societies, and on the ways in which such texts employ but re-conceptualize the quintessentially Western genre of autobiography as a critical act of resistance to Western culture. Such analysis is not appropriate to discussion of the texts under consideration here; my understanding of the coincidence between ex-terrorist narratives and Kaplan's wider categorization of ‘outlaw genre’ is restricted to the texts’ formal construction and the collaborative procedures deployed.
My thanks are due to Judith Bryce for her assistance and expertise in translating this passage.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for granting me a Research Leave Award to complete this paper and others forming part of my project on women, terror and trauma in Italian culture. My thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers of Feminist Review for their extremely close reading and insightful comments.
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Glynn, R. writing the terrorist self: the unspeakable alterity of Italy's female perpetrators. Fem Rev 92, 1–18 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2009.6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2009.6