“Writing is always a political act”
Ramona Onnis (In viaggio verso un figlio, Meltemi 2024) explores the writings on assisted reproduction and the Lunàdigas docufilm, with an interdisciplinary and inclusive look, between medicine, literature, social sciences, reproductive rights of those who wish to generate and those who claim the freedom not to reproduce.
With Claudia Mazzilli’s review our collaboration with Ramona Onnis continues, after our first meeting in Paris. Ramona Onnis, of Sardinian origin, is an associate professor of Italian Studies at the Université Paris Nanterre; her research interests focus on the representation of women’s body and the relationship between motherhood and technique. On the occasion of the Equality Month, at the beginning of March 2024, she wished to organise the screening of the docufilm Lunàdigas, Or Concerning Childfree Women along with the presentation of the Live Archive at the university where she teaches. Her generous invitation was greeted with great enthusiasm by the Lunàdigas collective. Promoting the investigation of reproductive rights issues through the Live Archive, the beating heart of Lunàdigas, is one of the highest objectives of our research that feeds on the exchange with authors, experts, scholars and witnesses.
Reviewing books for a lunàdiga library is an adventure of meeting and welcoming writers, in which we hold different works together, without distinguishing between true and fictional stories. On the same digital shelf dwell the sociological or philosophical essay and the testimonies of activists. “Stories” (this is the title of our page) that cross beliefs and utopias, stereotypes and their overcoming. Books that intertwine embodied and imaginary life, personal and political, the materiality of individual existence and general demographic trends. We don’t want to establish hierarchies. We believe that these taxonomies are typical of patriarchal thinking. Moreover, we are not specialists, we read and write to open permeable boundaries between different kinds of knowledge, with an approach that is as informative as possible, aimed at curious lunàdigas like us. Books are only a small part of our exploration, aimed primarily at direct testimonies (the Live Archive), but also at visual arts (prendo pArte!): in whatever way you do it, with writing, with a sculpture, with the spoken word in front of a camera, “storytelling is a political gesture”.
Yes. “Telling stories is a political gesture”: says Ramona Onnis, author of In Viaggio verso un figlio. Raccontare la procreazione assistita (Meltemi, 2024): a work that, even with the most expert filters of an academic study, uses a method that we have felt very close to ours. The book was born from the impulse to create knowledge around the “wound” of infertility and Medically Assisted Reproduction (MAR), which in Italy is regulated by Law 40/2004. This law has been updated by four Constitutional Court rulings and a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights; since 2014, heterologous fertilisation has also been possible, but a conservative approach remains: MAR remains precluded to lesbians and single women, who are forced into ‘reproductive exile’ in foreign clinics (in France, however, single women and lesbian couples are able to access MAR from 2021).
Even if we limit ourselves to analyse the emotions and experiences of heterosexual couples, a varied spectrum of experiences emerges: beyond the diagnosis of more or less serious diseases (autoimmune diseases, cancer, endometriosis, etc.), more and more couples are embarking on MAR because economic and work difficulties lead women to postpone motherhood at times in the biological cycle when fertility is physiologically reduced; other causes are still scarcely considered: among these there is the connection between infertility and environmental issues, which significantly affects male fertility. On the other hand, the paths of MAR are many, some more “natural”, others more complex (heterologous fertilisation; cryopreservation…): some treatments are covered by the national health service, others are the prerogative of private centres. The benefits are therefore diverse and can entail considerable financial sacrifices, not always crowned by success (many women and couples naively believe that science and technology ‘can do everything’ or ignore the risks and side effects of treatments, such as hypertension, gestational diabetes, multiple pregnancies, etc.). The intersection of race, gender, and class also falls heavily on assisted reproduction, with plural and inhomogeneous experiences.
Ramona Onnis has selected a number of narrative works that tell the story of MAR: novels by women writers, but not only; she also examined Lunàdigas‘ docufilm, selected at festivals in 27 countries, the multimedia project Archivio Vivo (we will discuss this later) and Paolo Virzì’s film, Every blessed day (2012), which relates the desire to procreate and the precariousness of the world of work. Ramona Onnis’ is therefore an interdisciplinary research, which goes far beyond literary criticism and compares the way in which women writers narrate MAR with the data made available by the social sciences and medical and psychological studies. And we come to some of the texts studied: the authors themselves, questioned about the relationship between autobiographical experience and the fictional character of their work, each position themselves differently. Annarita Briganti (Non chiedermi come sei nata, Cairo, 2014) considers her work a memoir whose protagonist, Gioia, is the author’s alter ego. Antonella Lattanzi, in Cose che non si raccontano (Einaudi, 2023), narrates her experience of assisted reproduction, the painful loss of the three fetuses already considered children and each called by his or her own name, the obstetric violence suffered, the complications that have put her life at risk (with an embolization and an operative hysteroscopy). The author, while telling an autobiographical story, claims its literary nature beyond the purely testimonial dimension: “writing a novel is never letting go, it is always holding the reins very tight”, she declares in the interview that closes the book by Ramona Onnis. Rich in humor is the writing by Eleonora Mazzoni (Le difettose, Einaudi, 2012), in which personal experience is filtered by an alter ego, Carla Petri, to avoid the excess of autobiography (in fact Mazzoni is the mother of two children conceived with MAR; instead, the alter ego Carla Petri gives up on realizing her dream of motherhood). Giorgia Surina (In due sarà più facile restare svegli, Giunti, 2022), who claims to have been inspired by the story of a friend, composes instead a novel with two voices, with two single friends who decide to face the path of the MAR together; and even when Gaia’s partner returns, it will be her friend (Bea) who will guide her choices. It does not escape Ramona Onnis that the intrusive control of the friend is a problematic aspect in the novel, which however seems to want to recreate a feminine symbolic double order (on which Luce Irigaray and Luisa Muraro have written): horizontally through sisterhood, vertically through the matrilineal mother-daughter. Maddalena Vianello, an expert on gender policies, is the author of In fondo al desiderio. Dieci storie di procreazione assistita (Fandango, 2021): among these stories there is the author’s autobiographical one, but also the story of Marilena and Laura (a lesbian couple who resort to heterologous fertilization in Spain) and the story of Tina, suffering from a serious form of endometriosis, which involves the removal of the ovaries and an early menopause (here MAR, foster care and adoption are intertwined as possible solutions to the desire for motherhood).
Ramona Onnis’ study has to do with “narrative medicine”, which is slowly taking root in Italian universities and which was inaugurated in the early 2000s by the work of the American internist and literary scholar Rita Charon, who considers it “a healing activity that is formed through the practice of reading, writing, narrating and reflecting” (p. 19). In the field of Medical Humanities, where medicine and literature intersect according to various approaches and strands, often the medical area has ended up prevailing, with its aseptic dimension. Ramona Onnis intends precisely to rebalance this reflection with the contribution of the literary dimension, in order to enhance both empathy and relationality in the care pathway and the agency of the writers’ word with respect to patriarchal knowledge. In fact, even that of official medicine is a male discourse, with its set of asymmetries of power and gender.
For example, with regard to heterologous fertilisation, it is interesting to compare the narratives of women writers with the data from psychological studies. The choice to rely on donors outside the couple can be painful, due to the lack of biological bond with the child or because it will involve the difficult decision of whether or not to tell them about their origins. The importance given to genetics, however, tends to diminish as the relational ties between parents and children consolidate and, when a daughter or son wants to find out who is the donor of oocytes or sperm, this research is oriented towards a definition of their identity and does not involve the delegitimization of their parents: this is the case of Jessie, born from oocytes donated by Antonia to Myrtha, in Antonella Sarchi’s novel Il dono di Antonia (Einaudi, 2020). This topic, still little addressed in literature, has been explored in depth by child neuropsychiatrists, paediatricians and psychologists, for some of whom the right to know one’s origins is inalienable, while for others the parents’ right to secrecy prevails. The issue has important legal implications: in Italy the rule provides for the anonymity of the donor and, although since 2015 the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian National Institute of Health) has established a national registry of donors for heterologous fertilisation, nevertheless, due to quite a few regulatory gaps, access to information by those born from MAR is not well regulated, except for strictly health-related information. And here we are at the heart of the problem: according to scholars such as Irène Théry and Carlo Flamigni, MAR should be considered not only as a therapy for infertility but as a new form of generating, which culturally produces another model of parenthood, thus overcoming the opposition between the biological and the psychological parent (p. 121 and notes 60-62).
More generally, MAR protocols too often see technique triumphing, marginalising the human and psychic dimension, which it is precisely the arts and literature that can put back at the centre, bringing medical practices back to a humanistic vision, without creating barriers between reworked or fictional stories by writers and purely testimonial narratives. In the literary works examined, the body is always at the centre, never separated from its emotional part. Blood is a recurring motif, against every taboo that for millennia has linked it to toxicity and impurities. As Ramona Onnis observes, citing the French philosopher Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, these writers contribute to a “female genital turning point“, emancipating us from patriarchal thinking (p. 34). Writers, in short, contribute to building that philosophy of storytelling of which Adriana Cavarero speaks (Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood and Women breastfeeding wolf cubs. Icons of the hyper-maternal): a relational space of speech, open to otherness, whose subject is the unique life, unrepeatable and embodied in the contingent, against the masculine and abstract universal.
The narratives reveal the sense of shame that women feel when they resort to reproductive medicine: women experience it in solitude, to avoid the stigma typical of the traditionalist Catholic mentality, for which reproduction and sexuality are inseparable, but also because of a public debate that confuses or overlaps GS (gestational surrogacy) and medically assisted reproduction (MAR), sometimes stirring up the ghosts of transhumanist, eugenic and neoliberal commodification of the living. Concerns which it is good to raise, but which must not put technologies and their applications all on the same level, at the risk of falling back into an essentialist view of motherhood (pp. 41-49). Quoting Rosi Braidotti (p. 44), Cecilia D’Elia and Giorgia Serughetti, in the name of a new female political subjectivity, Ramona Onnis hopes that this literature will contribute to opening up a third way: ‘to accept the challenge of the change brought about by technologies, without any nostalgia for the body-nature to which we were condemned, but neither do we want to flee from corporeality’. (p. 65). It is interesting that none of the protagonists of these novels relies on the technique in an uncritical way (pp. 49-54); these women denounce both hypermedicalization and obstetric violence, which passes in aseptic language (“embryonic reduction”; “abortive material”…), or through guilty judgments by medical personnel (the assisted women, for example, are reproached for having decided too late to start a family!), or through inappropriate procedures (placing women suffering from infertility and those who have just given birth in the same wards contributes to making the first ones feel wrong, flawed…).
Particularly significant are the writers’ accounts that focus on the irreconcilability of productive work (the profession carried out by women in MAR) and reproductive work, which is often invisible, as sociologist Irène-Lucile Hertzog notes (p. 62 and footnote 117): yes, because carrying out clinical analyses and undergoing hormonal and pharmacological treatments becomes a real work that absorb time and energy and require a very punctual schedule, planned in weeks, days, hours and minutes! Stress sometimes leads women to recriminatory attitudes even towards their partners, whose emotions are neglected because MAR techniques involve men in a less invasive way, with the consequence that men experience feelings of exclusion, with loss of self-esteem and guilt (pp. 143-152). Even in cases where procreation is renounced, one experiences an invisible grief, as noted by the sociologists, psychologists and psychotherapists cited by Ramona Onnis (p. 70, footnotes 147-150): compared to socially accepted bereavements, losing what one never had (a child that never existed) is an experience that finds little understanding and acceptance.
Often the protagonists are unwilling to delegate control of themselves or, after relying for years on alienating procedures in order to achieve the goal of a child, they feel the need to take back the reins of their bodies, which have been acted upon by others for too long, even renegotiating their life plans and relativising their desire for a child. These narrations, therefore, place at the centre the concept of “limit”: the limit that each woman feels she cannot overcome, even though the end of treatments does not entail “a restoration of the status quo ante’” and “the body remains wounded” (p. 70; pp. 165-167). A non-normative or absolute limit: a limit that is placed there and strengthens self-determination, in spite of those who believe that being a mother means being in conformity with the archetype of the mater dolorosa, and motherhood is always a natural willingness to sacrifice, to give of oneself, an innate feminine inclination even in assisted procreation. For the very same reasons, when the goal of being a mother is achieved, women who have resorted to MAR more than the other mothers do not dare to complain of the heavy burden that parenthood entails and, in the words of psychologist Valentina Berruti, the widespread belief is that“if they so desired a child, they should not complain about the fatigue involved” (p. 122 e nota 65). But even these mothers suffer from performance anxiety and, to use the title of Orna Donath’s essay, they can “regret motherhood”. Mixed feelings of fatigue, guilt and loneliness inspired Antonella Lattanzi to write another book, Questo giorno che incombe (HarperCollins, 2021), in which a mother does no longer know if she wants to be a mother and at the same time, she reproaches herself for having postponed motherhood for too long to prioritize her career. Lattanzi, on the other hand, does not hold out any hope for a cultural revolution heralding new and alternative gender roles and remains convinced that in Italy motherhood and professional fulfilment are still destined to be mutually exclusive for a long time to come. Silvia Ranfagni, on the other hand, in the novel Corpo a corpo (E/O, 2019) proposes a model of a single, wealthy, narcissistic mother who decides to have a child with MAR on a whim, for mere personal gratification. In this way, the author tries – with some uncertainty, common to other authors – to overturn the patriarchal paradigm of sacrificial and fulfilling motherhood.
In the texts examined by Ramona Onnis, confirming the claims of psychotherapists and psychologists such as Laura Marcone and Alessia Greco, the protagonists who try their hand at MAR did not imagine how exhausting it could be (pp. 63-64). On an exquisitely literary side, Ramona Onnis examines the metaphors used. Infertility as a journey. Or as a disease to be cured: these narratives can be likened to patho-graphies (which have flourished in recent decades, since illness is no longer felt as an ordinary event and can enter into narrativity), even though infertility does not always depend on a pathology but on physiological causes related to age and, moreover, in the literary corpus analysed by Ramona Onnis, it is not always considered a disease by the protagonists (p. 69 and p. 80). Worthy of note are the war metaphors (war, battle, enemy…), on which Susan Sontag (Illness as metaphor. AIDS and its metaphors) had opened a critical reflection, with the precise aim not to overload the patient with responsibility and guilt, and on which Daniele Cassandro recently wrote (We are at war! The coronavirus and its metaphors, in “Internazionale”, 21 March 2020): a language that “makes us obedient, docile and, in perspective, already designated victims” (p. 68). Ramona Onnis also analyses the style of these writings, often fractured and laden with silences, with non-linear narratives, full of flash-backs and anticipations, or with original pronominal choices (from the I to the you, as in Silvia Ranfagni’s novel, Corpo a corpo), or with hybridisations between novel and non-fiction (Maddalena Vianello, In fondo al desiderio): narrative techniques typical of the ‘wounded storyteller’ and ‘chaotic storytelling’, which is the attempt to say the unspeakable (the definitions are from Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller – Body, Illness, and Ethics, University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Writing does not always heal but, as Antonella Lattanzi states in the final interview (pp. 183-190), it allows us not to succumb to pain. For many authors, writing is also a way of building supportive communities of women: creating knowledge around motherhood, infertility, parenthood; reacting to sweetened narratives that leave in the shadows or in the dark, in the silence of indifference or outright censorship, other ways of becoming and being mothers and fathers, or of failing to become mothers and fathers, or of not wanting to be parents at all. These are writings that invoke a desiring motherhood/ non-motherhood (and speaking of desiring motherhood, we, like Ramona, want to mention the beautiful issue of Legendaria magazine no. 161, September 2023).
Ramona Onnis’ journey ends with the pages dedicated to Simonetta Sciandivasci (I figli che non voglio, Mondadori, 2022) and to Lunàdigas‘ multimedia project, with a chapter dedicated to our activities and an interview with Nicoletta Nesler. A deepening that does not neglect the patriarchal regurgitations and regressive policies that, in recent years, threaten women’s rights and that wants to start from the word lunàdigas, a word that affirms instead of denying (unlike formulas such as childfree, childless, “without children”, “who do not want…”). In this way, the representation of women’s desires is not unilateral (i.e: only aimed at women who desire a child despite infertility diagnoses) but also includes women who feel complete without having generated, because children are not desired in the name of self-determination, and not for socio-economic reasons. We overcome, therefore, the easy dichotomy between one and the other nulliparous, those who cannot have children and those who do not want them; different but both defective and non-compliant: “nulliparous” is on the other hand a term use in veterinary “strongly stigmatizing that reduces the woman to her position in the order of reproduction” (p. 35). Because it is patriarchal the bipolarism that opposes women afflicted by the “disease of emptiness” (p. 29) and those who do not feel the desire for children. For this reason – we repeat it again – “writing is always a political act”, whether it is done on the impulse of direct testimony or literary creation, without raising walls between those who wave the banner of their lives and those who create, without producing identity closures that risk plunging women into mutual incommunicability. Like Antonella Lattanzi, we believe that “ we should not write about what we have experienced, but about what we have felt”, even with the resources of empathy and imagination.
With Claudia Mazzilli’s review our collaboration with Ramona Onnis continues, after our first meeting in Paris. Ramona Onnis, of Sardinian origin, is an associate professor of Italian Studies at the Université Paris Nanterre; her research interests focus on the representation of women’s body and the relationship between motherhood and technique. On the occasion of the Equality Month, at the beginning of March 2024, she wished to organise the screening of the docufilm “Lunàdigas, Or Concerning Childfree Women” along with the presentation of the Live Archive at the university where she teaches. Her generous invitation was greeted with great enthusiasm by the Lunàdigas collective.
