Beyond the double blind spot: Relocating communist women as transgressive subjects in contemporary historiography

Abstract

This article identifies a specific historiographical gap obfuscating communist women, namely, a ‘double blind spot’ rooted in the combined effect of the scant consideration of women in histories of communism and of communist activists in accounts of the women's movement. It traces this pattern of invisibilisation back to the paradigm of communist women's ‘instrumentalisation’ and to the resulting paradox of an ‘activism without agency’. The article then provides a critique of this received image; first, through an analysis of emerging scholarship on the female communist experience; second, through recourse to actors’ own perspective on the rapport between communism and feminism and the possibilities of ‘double militancy’, drawn from sources of the post-1968 Italian context. It closes with an argument for relocating communist women as an unexpectedly transgressive subject of twentieth-century history.