This Body That Inhabits Me

A collection of essays on the mysteries of the body from one of Italy’s leading postwar communist intellectuals.

Politician, translator, and journalist Rossana Rossanda was the most important female left-wing intellectual in post-war Italy. Central to the Italian Communist Party’s cultural wing during the 1950s and ’60s, she left an indelible mark on the life of the mind. The essays in this volume, however, bring together Rossanda’s reflections on the body—how it ages, how it is gendered, what it means to examine one’s own body. The product of a decades-long dialogue with the Italian women’s movement (above all with Lea Melandri, a vital feminist writer who provides an afterword to the current volume), these essays represent an honest and raw meeting between communist and feminist thought. Ranging from reflections on her own hands through to Chinese cinema, from figures such as the Russian cross-dressing soldier Nadezhda Durova to the Jacobin revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, here we see Rossanda’s fierce intellect and extraordinary breadth of knowledge applied to the body as a central question of human experience.

Praise for Rossana Rossanda:

‘Rossana was a great intellectual, indeed an unprecedented one. She was cultured and refined but, at the same time, a militant to her very core, like any other grassroots comrade.’—Luciana Castellina, il manifesto

Praise for The Comrade from Milan:

‘The Italian Communist leadership of the generation of 1943–45 is exceptional: it has been described with wonderful skill in Rossana Rossanda’s autobiography.’—Eric Hobsbawm, London Review of Books

‘For nearly four decades, Rossanda has been Manifesto’s most individual editorialist and commentator . . . a unique signature in the Italian press.’—New Left Review

‘One of the most interesting works on the legacy of twentieth-century communism. For Rossanda, a partisan and communist to the last, the past was neither to be glorified nor taken as old hat—rather, it had to be understood in all its depth, with a view to the difficulty of real choices and the reasons for the paths not taken.’—David Broder, Jacobin