From Self-Management to Institutionalization and Back. Feminist Health Centers in Italy between the 1970s and today

This dissertation explores the long and complex trajectory of Feminist Self-managed Health Centers (FSHCs) as a form of feminist action in Italy. It delves into their origins, institutionalization, and resurgence as a grassroots repertoire in the cities of Rome and Milan. FSHCs constituted a crucial repertoire in 1970s feminism. They represented feminists’ turn to direct action in a context where essential women’s healthcare services were lacking, information about contraception was limited, and abortion was illegal. Feminists engaged in these initiatives enacted a strong critique of medical authority and experimented with the horizontal diffusion of knowledge and practices in the medical field. In 1975, the Italian Parliament established Family Health Centers (FHCs). The new institution represented an indirect and controversial outcome for feminists. Coupling together highly innovative characteristics largely modeled upon feminist initiatives and conservative family-oriented approaches, FHCs were perceived by feminists of the time as a form of cooptation of their radical initiatives. While the process of institutionalization engendered profound debates within the movement, by the end of the decade feminist self-managed initiatives closed, as the service started being implemented and the movement declined.When in 2017 a new cycle of feminist mobilization emerged in Italy, it reclaimed both the defense and reappropriation of FHCs and promoted the emergence of new FSHCs, explicitly modeled upon their 1970s antecedents. This thesis examines the relationship between the past and the present of feminist movements in Italy, focusing on how processes of institutionalization affect subsequent activism. It aims to understand how contemporary activists interpret health centers both as an institution and as a grassroots repertoire. It draws on, contributes to, and interweaves studies of social movements’ temporal dynamics and studies of institutionalization in social movements. While institutionalization is generally understood either as marking the end of a movement cycle or as constituting a form of movement continuity beyond cycles of protest, this work entails an analysis of the challenges and contradictions that institutionalization poses to subsequent activism.The study is based on a comparative qualitative case-study analysis in the cities of Rome and Milan. It draws on 40 interviews with feminist activists, archival research, participant observation, and document analysis.