Loy’s Dialogue with Lacerba and Italian Feminism

This chapter contextualizes Loy's readings of Futurist ideas and aesthetics within the specificity of the Florentine avant-garde; it analyzes Loy’s responses to the writings and ideas on sexuality, sexual morality, feminism, motherhood, genius, autobiographism and avant-garde art, published in the magazines Lacerba (1913–1915) and La Voce (1908–1916), which have so far been neglected by scholarship. The chapter shows that the reception of Otto Weininger's and Karl Kraus’s works in Lacerba at the hand of Giovanni Papini infiltrated Loy's early texts, together with the debates on similar questions in the expatriate community. It analyzes the echoes between Loy's poems and the writings of Ada Negri, Sibilla Aleramo and Enif Robert. The author here argues that Loy’s aesthetics began to crystallize as a form of critique of the fundamental categories pertaining to the definition of art, artwork and author, as well as of gender identity, on the basis of the Florentine sources and debates that she incorporated into her writing. The chapter thus contributes to a necessary decentering and regionalizing of modernism, complicating the picture of modernist internationalism.