"Bombing for Peace" : il racconto della pace nelle parole delle donne

My work starts on the assumption that wars have a precise language and rules that reverberate in the traditional patriarchal tales in which heroism in battle is the primary value of human society, at least in the Western world. V. Woolf, as early as the end of the XIX century, is one the first female voice to be heard in a wartime context and in opposition to the dominant rhetoric, and probably the most authoritative. Her words keep being repeated today in women's writings against all forms of violence. Starting from «Thoughts on peace in an air raid» (1940), but also drawing on other related writings, I would like to try to reconstruct the transnational and transdisciplinary inheritance of Virginia Woolf's position, tracing the declinations of the original mandate identified by the British writer in narratives, theoretical writings and political experiments. I would like to define the primarily feminine principle - not in terms of sex but as a cultural, gendered attitude – shaping many forms of artistic and factual resistance, poetically told and/or articulated in rigorous theoretical forms, to the fierce futility of armed conflict resolutions. I will move through different territories, both geographical and symbolic, sampling different works that propose different ways of dealing with conflict situations, based more on an ethics of care and negotiation than on direct confrontation.