Fillip

Reproductive Labour and Feminist Revolt: A Conversation with Leopoldina Fortunati
April 17th, 2026

6:30 p.m.

The People’s Co-op Bookstore
1391 Commercial Drive
Vancouver, BC

Join radical feminist activist and theorist Leopoldina Fortunati in a discussion of social reproduction and histories of feminist revolt moderated by Jaleh Mansoor and Arlen Austin. The conversation will draw on recent publications, including Gendered Labour and Clitoridean Revolt: Leopoldina Fortunati and Carla Lonzi, a collection recently released by Fillip that pairs Fortunati’s work with texts of Carla Lonzi, as well as a secondary literature considering the two thinkers as important poles of postwar feminist thought. We will discuss the traditions of autocoscienza, and experimental aesthetic practice associated with Lonzi’s work in relation to the analysis of reproductive labour, developed in Italian workerist feminism, specifically Fortunati’s classic work, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital, recently released in unabridged translation by Verso.

Leopoldina Fortunati’s work has spanned a broad range of disciplines, from political science and technology studies to histories of sexuality and fashion. She was active in the 1968 student movement and subsequently joined Potere Operaio, a prominent group of the Italian extra-parliamentary left. In the early 1970s, she was one of the founding members of Lotta Femminista, a feminist collective that formed part of the international Wages for Housework movement. She is the author of The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital, originally published in Italian in 1981 and re-released in an expanded English edition by Verso in 2025. With Mariarosa Dalla Costa, she co-authored Brutto Ciao. Direzioni di marcia delle donne negli ultimi 30 anni (1977) and was co-author with Silvia Federici of Il grande Calibano: storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale (1984). She is a senior professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Mathematics, Information Science and Physics at the University of Udine in Italy, where she founded and directed the research laboratory on new media (NuMe) and directed the University’s doctoral program in multimedia communication.

Jaleh Mansoor is a writer and an associate professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history with an emphasis on Post WWII European Art. Her areas of interest, in addition to art and its histories, include Materialist Formalism and Marxist Feminism. Mansoor’s first monographic book, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia was published by Duke University Press in 2016. Her latest book, titled after Picabia’s eponymous homage to a passage in Marx’s Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, is Universal Prostitution: A Counter History of Modernism, which came out with Duke University Press in May 2025.

Arlen Austin received his PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2024. His work addresses questions of media, value production, and reproductive labor. He is co-editor with Silvia Federici of The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1979: History, Theory and Documents, and has worked with Sara Colontuono and Leopoldina Fortunati on an updated and expanded translation of the latter’s classic work L’arcano della riproduzione, released by Verso in 2025. His writings have appeared in The Sage Handbook of Digital Labor, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Viewpoint, and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, among others. His works as a research-based artist have been presented at Redcat Gallery, The Bard Hessel Museum, and Exit Art, among other venues.