Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti

This article analyses a small selection of texts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with the aim to shed new light on the role that the experience of combat during the First World War played in the evolution of the narrative of the body in Marinetti’s imagination. Different pre-war narratives of the body will be first analysed and then placed against the backdrop of the cultural productions of the war years. Specific attention will be paid to the images of the prosthetic body with a wider look onto other social discourses (medical science, politics, propaganda). The article will argue that Marinetti re-writes and adjust his earlier narratives of the body and highlight the ambivalences and social fantasies, mostly relevant to gender and sexuality, underlying them.