Sexing the Manifesto: Mina Loy, Feminism and Futurism

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Notes

¹Bonnie Kime Scott notes that Loy ‘gained stunning momentum in recent modernist studies … for her feminism, her own approach to the lyric, and her reflections on other modernists and modernist questions, including Futurism, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein’ (in Bradshaw and Dettmar, p. 539).

²Contrary to my reading of the similar thematic ground explored in both the manifesto and ‘Love Songs’, Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that ‘at the very least the poem stands in a contradictory relation to the manifesto’ (1998:53).

³In a typewritten copy of ‘Aphorisms’, held in the Loy papers at the Bienecke, the original title is crossed out and replaced with ‘Aphorisms on Modernism’. One wonders if this is an attempt, after the fact, to distance herself from the Futurist movement.

⁴Papini was political editor of Lacerba, a bi-weekly newspaper that published many Futurist-inspired manifestos.

⁵Carolyn Burke, on the relationship of ‘Love Songs’ to both Futurism and Imagism, argues that ‘the Futurists’ reorientation of artistic attention to the modes of modern life prompted Loy's turn from fin-de-siècle aestheticism to an engagement with modernist art and poetry’ (1987: 37).

⁶This echoes later criticism by Carl Van Vechten, who told Loy that she had great promise as a poet if only she would stop writing about sex (Conover 1996: xvi).

⁷Marinetti's advocating of Italian race-superiority inspired his belief in women's exemplary social role as producers of ‘pure’ offspring who would guarantee the future of Italian superiority.

⁸In spite of its misogynist rhetoric, a few women found in Futurism's rejuvenation of social and aesthetic codes a space to articulate their own self-affirming model of creative ambition, though its less than progressive model of gendered relations also limited its realisation.

⁹For an extended analysis of the contradictions of Futurism, see Blum, The Other Modernism.

¹⁰Loy's emphasis on women breaking out of their psychological dependency on men forms interesting parallels with the consciousness-raising groups of second-wave feminism.

¹¹Early polarised debates between free love advocates and social purity reformers inaugurated a recurring feature of feminist polemical debate: between those that define sex in terms of the dangers it poses for women (exploitation, sexual abuse, contamination) and those that promote women's autonomous sexual expression. The tension between the feminist social purity movement and the libertarian advocates of free love in pre-war Britain form parallel to the antipornography and pro-sex feminist debates of the 1980s and 1990s.