Page - 15 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

underlined essential concern among these women that feminist elaborations on science- technology was not to be separated from political relationships among women. Alongside a significant lack of academic institutionalization which, for a long time and partly still today, has characterized women's/gender/feminist studies scholarships in Italy, between the 1970s and the 1990s, multiple articulations and ramifications outside academy, including women's centers, libraries, magazines, bookstores, can be considered the peculiar public- institutional contexts where the cultural, intellectual, political elaboration carried by feminists flourished, in most of cases not apart from political intervention on the territory. As frequently reminded in national and international literature on Italian women's and feminism's history (Marcuzzo & Rossi-Doria 1987; Bono & Kemp 1991; Bertilotti & Scattigno 2005; Guerra 2008), this can be considered a generic aspect describing Italian feminism between the end of the 1970s and the end of the 1990s, therefore exceeding both the specific cases of Coordinamento and Ipazia. It could be furthermore observed that in several feminist (or women's) Italian contexts of these years, the word “practice” did not exclusively relate to activism, initiative, public intervention, while it was often meant as closer to the idea of “practical philosophy”, or a practice of doing (among the English references: Scarparo 2004), whose sense might be partly resonant with some basic concepts of international feminist theories of the 1990s developed around, or with reference to, Adrian Rich's 'politics of locations' (Rich 1986). Among them: situated knowledge (Haraway 1988), positioning and situating (Alcoff 1996), women's transversal politics (Collins 2000; Yural-Davis 1997). However, the peculiarity of the Italian case is that feminist elaborations were (and still are) a living thought, carried on in the presence of other women – “pensiero in presenza”, in the words of philosopher Chiara Zamboni (Zamboni 2009), and grounded on the terrain of a plurality of women's public spaces, where thinking together and discussing with other women, was more politically important than elaborating theories1. Coming back to Coordinamento and Ipazia from this perspective, it could be noticed that both their relational practices were not so much aimed to question how (and whether) to bridge the gap between feminist theorizing on S-T and doing S-T as a feminist. Notably, this issue was a central problematic question raised in early feminist epistemological debates, beyond the alternative between the woman question in science and the science question in feminism (Harding 1986), as much as feminist empiricism was not to be assimilated to doing scientific research as a feminist (Longino 1987). Much more frequently, but not less importantly, they ware more basically intended to build a bridge, a connection, between feminist thinking S-T from inside/outside S-T. As biologists Rita Alicchio and Cristina Pezzoli wrote: “we were in search for common words, grounded in one's own experience, transversal to different disciplines, allowing a mutual understanding, possibly but not necessary aimed at identifying shared priorities/initiatives” 1 It is for this reason that, although the quoted article describes “practical philosophy” with specific reference to Female Philosophical Community Diotima, it is concurrently possible to consider that such “pensiero in presenza”, which qualifies an important aspect characterising this women's community (Zamboni 2009), resonates with a living thought practice that – thought not peculiarly philosophical – was (and still is) largely widespread in different women's/feminist places in Italy. I would like to precise that I am not distinguishing between the two terms “feminist” and “women's” to conform to the prevalent modes these places named (and still name) themselves. 15