The retrospective interpretation of post-1968 Italian feminism elaborated in texts like Non credere di avere dei diritti (1987) by the Libreria delle Donne di Milano (The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective) has played an influential role in framing feminism in Italy as distinctively grounded in the concept of “sexual difference.” As Sara Colantuono suggests, Non credere di avere dei diritti made Italian feminism synonymous with femminismo della differenza by presenting “the narrative of a radical but somehow homogenous and cohesive movement” (Colantuono Reference Colantuono2024).Footnote 1 The prominence in the US academy of some Italian scholars affiliated with the Milan Women’s Bookstore and the philosophical collective Diotima based at the University of Verona has facilitated the taking hold of this picture of Italian feminism (Baeri Reference Baeri and Rossi Doria2003, 169–70; Rossi-Doria Reference Rossi-Doria, Bertilotti and Scattigno2005, 1–23). “Thinkers like Cavarero, de Lauretis and Muraro,” Colantuono observes, “are well-known in the US and their popularity has contributed to setting a correspondence between feminism of difference and Italian feminism in Italy as well” (Reference Colantuono2024). Colantuono’s observation echoes Christine Delphy’s critique of “French feminism” as an “invention” of the Anglo-American academy (Delphy Reference Delphy2000). Delphy argued that Anglo-American scholars—by focusing on a specific and disputed tendency of the French women’s movement (Psychanalyse et Politique) and a handful of theorists including Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray—had fabricated a distorted, limited version of French feminism which many feminists in France did not recognize (Reference Delphy2000, 167). In Italy, a somewhat similar process of transformation of femminismo storico into feminism of “sexual difference” (Cavarero Reference Cavarero, Cavarero and Restaino2002, 97–100) has also taken place, irrespective of the fact that the concept of sexual difference in 1970s Italian feminism was not a transparent, unambiguous notion. As Vincenza Perilli points out, the concept of “difference” has traversed Italian feminism in various, at times conflicting, ways; however, the interpretation advanced by the Milan Women’s Bookstore and the Diotima collective responds to a specific theoretical project that should not be aproblematically used to refer to Italian feminism as a whole (Perilli Reference Perilli2005, 149), whether in the 1970s or later periods.
The common conflation of Italian feminism with feminism of difference is especially evident when it comes to the figure of Carla Lonzi, former art critic and founding member of the feminist collective Rivolta Femminile.Footnote 2 As Anna Scattigno points out, the past and present reception of Carla Lonzi within Italian feminism has been marked by a series of tensions and unresolved issues (Reference Scattigno, Conte, Fiorino and Martini2011, 162). By the end of the 1990s, in the first systematic efforts to map the intellectual and historical contours of Italian feminist thought, Carla Lonzi’s work had been cast as the inaugural gesture in a genealogical arc—extending through figures such as Luisa Muraro and Adriana Cavarero—that found its most coherent theoretical articulation in the philosophy of sexual difference (Scattigno 2011, 164; Reference Scattigno, Mori, Pescarolo, Scattigno and Soldani2015, 301). The labeling of Lonzi as a feminist of difference typically stems from her critique of the principle of equality between man and woman. In Let’s spit on Hegel ([1970] Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023), Lonzi wrote, “[w]omen’s demand for equality with men in terms of rights coincides historically with men’s proclamation of equality among themselves. … The world of equality is that of domination perfected and legally enshrined; it is one-dimensional. … Today, equality of the sexes is the drapery disguising woman’s inferiority” (205–6). She added, “[t]he fundamental difference in humankind is that between man and woman” (205). As the thought of sexual difference began to be systematized in a series of texts by the Milan Women’s Bookstore and Diotima in the 1980s, as I will later illustrate, such claims were presented as key for theorizing sexual difference.
Building upon the Milan Women’s Bookstore’s texts and Diotima’s philosophers, several commentators have interpreted Lonzi’s rejection of a feminist politics rooted in demanding equality with men as testimony of her “feminism of difference.” For instance, Franco Restaino sees a theoretical continuity between the Women’s Bookstore, Diotima, and Carla Lonzi; he defines the latter as the “first brilliant and tenacious supporter of the thesis of ‘sexual difference’ as an alternative claim to equality between women and men” (Reference Restaino and di Giovanni2002, 269–86). For Ida Dominijanni, “Lonzi was the foremost protagonist of the feminism of difference in Milan and among the first female thinkers about sexual difference” (Reference Dominijanni, Casarino and Righi2018, 47). For Maria Luisa Boccia, Let’s spit on Hegel contains in essence the thought and practice of feminism of sexual difference (Reference Boccia, Conte, Fiorino and Martini2011, 152–53). For Annarosa Buttarelli, she is “the originator of Italian feminism of difference, of philosophical feminism” (Reference Buttarelli2024, 13). In Donna si nasce (Reference Buttarelli2024), Adriana Cavarero and Olivia Guaraldo assert that Lonzi’s “feminine revolt” is to affirm sexual difference (73).
The process of republishing Carla Lonzi’s work by the Italian publishing house La Tartaruga,Footnote 3 beginning in 2023, has provided further cultural approval for this conception of Lonzi as the initiator of sexual difference feminism (Colantuono Reference Colantuono2024). On the back cover of Sputiamo su Hegel e altri scritti curated by Buttarelli, Lonzi is presented as an Italian “writer and art critic, feminist theorist of consciousness raising and sexual difference” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023). In the brief introduction to the volume, Buttarelli claims that “[Lonzi’s] name and life are still an inspiration for those who seek the original meaning of their existence together with others in difference” (7–8). The editorial decision to present Lonzi’s writing with no critical commentary—for these “would extinguish their overwhelming force, their intense, speaking presence” (8)—leaves readers thinking of Lonzi as, indeed, a feminist of difference, whereby “feminism of difference” is implied as standing in opposition to an emancipationist politics that presupposes women’s integration into existing patriarchal structures.
However, as Liliana Ellena notes, the concept of “difference” holds an unstable status in Carla Lonzi’s vocabulary and departs significantly from the meanings it later acquired in the thought of sexual difference (Ellena Reference Ellena, Conte, Fiorino and Martini2011, 117). As I will argue in this article, defining Lonzi as a “feminist of sexual difference” uses a simplified interpretation of femminismo della differenza, one that equates it primarily with a rejection of equality politics. This reductive view assumes that such feminism is merely opposed to the idea that women, in order to be recognized as fully human, must aspire to live like men and that liberation lies in integrating into male-dominated structures (Manzione Reference Manzione2025). As I will show, the thought of sexual difference should not be diminished to a critique of emancipationism, but rather understood within a wider theoretical framework comprising a set of notions and practices such as the practices of disparity and entrustment and the project of “delineating or (re)constructing a female symbolic” (The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective Reference de Lauretis1990, 17)—which Carla Lonzi was extraneous to, when not altogether critical of it.
The article is divided into two main sections. In the first part, I analyze the origins and developments of what the Milan Women’s Bookstore and Diotima began to systematize in the 1980s as the thought of sexual difference. I provide an overview of the practices and theoretical foundations that informed the pensiero della differenza, with particular attention to the exchanges and affinities between Milan-based collectives and Psych et Po in the early to mid-1970s. I begin by outlining the key theoretical orientations developed by the French group, before examining how their encounter with Italian feminists contributed to shaping the Italian feminism of difference, with the establishment of the Milan Women’s Bookstore and the Diotima research group. I then turn to some of the key early texts produced by the Bookstore and Diotima to assess how Carla Lonzi was retrospectively constructed as a forerunner of feminism of difference. I conclude this section by reflecting on the limitations of this framing, also by engaging with Lonzi’s own writing that critically interrogated the emerging categories of feminism of difference.
This historiographical analysis of the origins and theoretical developments of the thought of sexual difference allows me to make an additional intervention into the wider philosophical and political dimensions. Especially in recent scholarship, philosophers aligned with feminism of difference have drawn on Lonzi’s critique of emancipation to advance essentialist interpretations of identity categorization and question the freedom and very existential viability of non-binary, queer, and trans people.Footnote 4 For Guaraldo, “what today is called inclusivity in the past was called equality: 1970s radical Italian feminism perceived in it the threat of homologation to models forged by others” (Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 151–52). Guaraldo adds that,
the meaning of Lonzi’s entire work consists … precisely in the attempt to depart from such a homologation as it is a cancellation of women and their quest for autonomy and freedom. Today, as it was back then, the rhetoric on inclusion tends, with an odd regularity, to cancel women, by either assimilating them to sexual minorities or including them into a generic “universal” humanity. (Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 151–52)
In the co-authored Donna si nasce (Reference Cavarero and Guaraldo2024), Cavarero and Guaraldo further advance this reading to support gender-critical and trans-exclusionary arguments. This reading of Lonzi’s work, I argue, is problematic for several reasons: first, it uncritically follows the scholarship mentioned above in situating her within the tradition of femminismo della differenza; second, it imposes a reductive, anatomically grounded notion of female identity that is not explicitly present in her writing. The second part of the article specifically confronts this reading by reflecting on Lonzi’s approach to the body and sexual difference. To explore it, I will be drawing on Beauvoir’s concept of situation which, I argue, provides a more accurate and generative lens through which to read Lonzi’s broader feminist project.
The importance of this contribution is therefore twofold. On the one hand, it aims to disentangle Carla Lonzi from the narrative that positions her as the progenitor of femminismo della differenza by demonstrating her intellectual distance from—and, at times, explicit polemics against—the theoretical concerns later more fully developed by the Milan Women’s Bookstore and Diotima. Second, and closely linked to this reassessment, it challenges essentialist interpretations of her work which frame her thought within a fixed, binary conception of identity that is being advanced by key representatives of feminism of difference to support virulent trans-exclusive political projects. At a time when institutional attacks on bodily autonomy, gender-affirming care, and engagement with gender studies more broadly are being carried out not only by conservative forces but also by segments of Italian feminism, including thinkers affiliated with the Women’s Bookstore and Diotima, a close engagement with Lonzi’s work offers an opportunity to resist its appropriation for exclusionary purposes and, instead, to recover the expansive and transformative potential of her feminism.Footnote 5
1. From Psych et Po to the Libreria delle Donne di Milano and Diotima: the origins of the thought of sexual difference and Carla Lonzi’s early criticism of femminismo della differenza
1.1 “Long live the symbolic revolution”: Psych et Po’s theories of sexual difference
There is first mention of Psychanalyse et Politique’s activity in no. 3 of Le Torchon Brûle (1972), a short-lived bulletin of the French Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) (Pavard Reference Pavard2005, 46). Combining practices of “speaking up, self-consciousness, body awareness, analysis of our contradictions and of the unconscious” (Le Torchon Brûle 1972, 18), Psych et Po sought to investigate the “feminine specificity repressed by machismo” and affirm women’s sexual difference through a subversive use of psychoanalysis (Pavard et al. Reference Pavard, Rochefort and Zancarini-Fournel2020, 279). Drawing on Lacan, Psych et Po’s leader Antoinette Fouque argued that women’s sexual difference had been repressed by the symbolic order—the system of signs expressed in language and founded on the Law of the Father (Duchen Reference Duchen2012, 79). For feminine specificity to be brought into existence, a liberation of women’s “procreative power” needed to be accomplished (Laufer Reference Laufer, Rassial and Chevalier2016, 32). Arguing against the Freudian and Lacanian view of a single, naturally male libido, Fouque claimed that there was a specifically female libido (libido creandi) connected to women’s capacity to procreate that patriarchy had foreclosed (Pavard Reference Pavard2005, 52; Costello Reference Costello2016, 101–2). Since the symbolic order, for Fouque, was founded on matricide, “the entry of the libido creandi into the Symbolic is … coextensive with the advent of women as truly sexually different” (Costello Reference Costello2016, 102). Only through a symbolic revolution, one which enabled a reaffirmation of the foreclosed feminine subject, could a truly dual sexual difference be realized.Footnote 6 The founding of the publishing house des femmes by Psych et Po in 1974 embodied this vision of women’s liberation, where women’s writing was seen as a pathway to realizing the libido creandi (Costello Reference Costello2016, 102).Footnote 7
Psych et Po’s position within the wider women’s movement in France was a contentious one, not least because of the group’s rejection of the term feminism (Lasserre Reference Lasserre2018). The street and social activism pursued by different tendencies of the MLF was seen by Psych et Po as synonymous with an egalitarian struggle that denied female specificity and produced “nothing but a sterile assimilation, a psychosexual amputation” (Pavard Reference Pavard2005, 52), their feminism leading to “the definitive erasure of women” (Lasserre Reference Lasserre2018). Simone de Beauvoir, who became an activist of the MLF in the 1970s and participated in actions such as the 343 Manifesto for legal abortion, the occupation of Le Plessis-Robinson, and the Bobigny trial (Pavard et al. Reference Pavard, Rochefort and Zancarini-Fournel2020, 282–90), amongst other episodes, epitomized—for Psych et Po—this kind of “superficial, pre-freudian and outdated” feminist struggle (Pavard Reference Pavard2005, 51). The materialist feminist editorial collective Questions féministes, of which Beauvoir was a founding member, for their part, rejected Psych et Po’s approach as one grounded in an “idea of ‘Woman’ as existing outside of society” (Questions féministes 1980, 5). Questions féministes opposed “arguments that are based on the supposedly obvious ‘facts of nature’” to explain the difference between men and women, discharged Psych et Po’s criticisms of feminists as seeking to “become men” and gain inclusion in patriarchal society, and qualified their project as one grounded in a comprehensive change of social structures (5–6). Many other feminists within the diversified landscape of the MLF also “rejected the uniformity that Psych et Po seemed to require,” as Duchen points out, “and the hierarchical grouping around Antoinette” (Duchen Reference Duchen2012, 40).
While conflicts permeated the decade, tensions between Psych et Po and the wider MLF reached a climax in November 1979 when the former registered the name and logo Mouvement de Libération des Femmes—MLF as their trademark. This appropriation of one part of the movement—and one which proposed a controversial vision of women’s liberation—meant for many “the appropriation of the whole movement” (Costello Reference Costello2016, 108). From then on, two widely different MLFs were in place: on the one hand, the association MLF set up by Psychanalyse et Politique, which claimed to represent feminism in France, and, on the other, a plurality of grassroots groups which rejected the former’s claim and represented the MLF “non-deposé.”Footnote 8
1.2 Meeting the French: the development of sexual difference feminism in Italy
In its early years, Psych et Po sought to share its practices with an international audience by organizing week-long rencontres, typically held in seaside locations or in the countryside. The first of such rencontres took place in La Tranche sur Mer in 1972 and was attended by around 300 women from all over Europe (Le Torchon Brûle 1973, 16–17).Footnote 9 It was in La Tranche, and at the following meetings in Vieux-Villez and Chateau Coupigny that the encounter between Psych et Po and Italian feminists—including Lea Melandri, Lia Cigarini, and Antontella Nappi of the Milan-based Collettivo di Via Cherubini, Daniela Pellegrini of DEMAU, and Maria Schiavo from the Collettivo Femminista Torinese—occurred (Melandri Reference Melandri2000, 57–62; Schiavo Reference Schiavo2006, 59–73; Pellegrini Reference Pellegrini2012, 45–55).
One of the major themes emerging from the meeting in La Tranche was the practice of female sociality, accomplished through practices of nudity and bodily exploration (Nappi Reference Nappi1974, 20–24). The Italian participants were struck by Fouque’s proposition to employ psychoanalytic theory as a tool for women’s liberation. In the words of Cigarini, who attended the second meeting in Normandy:
I had never thought about how the knowledge analytic tool could be precious for the political practice of the women’s movement. And yet, in Vieux-Villez, I realized the necessity of the analytic tool (if used subversively) to rediscover the body and give it voice through a careful analysis of blocks, censors, paralyses, and consider the key role of the phallus in sexuality. (Cigarini Reference Cigarini1999)
Also attending Psych et Po’s meeting in Vieux-Villez was Melandri, for whom “the attempt to bring into women’s relations the analytical practice” (Reference Melandri2000, 63) was a novelty.
Inspired by the rencontres with Fouque and Psych et Po, two groups were set up in Milan: the Gruppo analisi, founded by Cigarini, and the Gruppo pratica dell’inconscio, founded by Melandri (Lussana Reference Lussana2012, 79). Drawing on their exchanges with the French, these groups turned to psychoanalysis for the tools it provided to liberate and subvert sexist society (Melandri Reference Melandri2000, 189). Between 1974 and 1975, they worked towards the formulation of the pratica dell’inconscio (practice of the unconscious), which emerged out of the perceived limits of consciousness-raising in addressing women’s reciprocal relationships, “the fantasies, desires, [and] fears” underpinning them, the “unconscious-conscious relation,” and the bond with the mother (Melandri Reference Melandri2000, 71). The practice of the unconscious was structured by two phases: the first one reproduced the clinical setting between analyst and patient, while the second one entailed a moment of collective discussion of what had been uncovered during the first phase of therapy (Schiavo Reference Schiavo2006, 122–23; Mercandino Reference Mercandino2017, 196). Unlike Cigarini, Melandri soon opted to limit the practice to the moment of group discussion (Melandri Reference Melandri2000, 71–72). The different paths pursued by the two groups left a lasting mark on the Milanese feminist landscape. Members of the Gruppo pratica dell’inconscio went on to set up the Gruppo Sessualità e scrittura and the Libera Università delle Donne di Milano. Meanwhile, the Gruppo analisi established Gruppo n. 4, which in turn founded the Milan Women’s Bookstore in Via Dogana in 1975 (Mercandino Reference Mercandino2017, 196–97). As can be read in Non credere di avere dei diritti, the idea of establishing a bookstore was inspired by Psych et Po’s Librairie des femmes in Paris (The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective Reference de Lauretis1990, 91).
The Milan Women’s Bookstore—whose founding members included, amongst others, Lia Cigarini, Luisa Muraro, Elena Medi, and Bibi TomasiFootnote 10 —emerged in the 1980s as a central site for the development of the pensiero della differenza. A pivotal moment in this development was the publication of the Green Sottosopra Footnote 11 issue, “More Women than Men,” authored collectively by the Bookstore in 1983. This text articulated the need to “sexualize social relationships” as a response to what the authors—drawing on the theoretical insights of Luce Irigaray and Antoinette Fouque—identified as the symbolic erasure of the feminine from the prevailing symbolic order, namely from dominant cultural, political, and linguistic frameworks (Libreria delle Donne di Milano 1983). The publication introduced two key practices that became foundational to the thought of sexual difference: affidamento (entrustment) and disparità (disparity). These practices represented a revaluation of hierarchical relational modes among women. As the authors wrote, “to recognize that someone like us has ‘something extra’ breaks the rule of male society according to which, once the mother is removed, all women are definitely equal” (Libreria delle Donne di Milano 1983). As Equi Pierazzini explains, acknowledging disparity among women—recognizing one woman’s greater competence in a specific context—was seen as a form of affirming women’s full subjectivity and enabling deeper relational and political bonds (Reference Equi Pierazzini2019, 288). These practices were explicitly formulated to move beyond the horizontal organizational structures that had characterized earlier feminist collectives, offering instead a model of asymmetrical but affirming relations among women.
This publication played a critical role in the formation of the philosophical community Diotima, established in Verona by Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, Chiara Zamboni, and others.Footnote 12 In the writings of both the Milan Women’s Bookstore and Diotima, particular emphasis was placed on the imperative to construct a truly dual symbolic order, one capable of granting symbolic placement to women, historically excluded from the ostensibly “universal” subject which, in fact, masked a masculine norm. Drawing on Irigaray’s critique of the phallogocentricFootnote 13 symbolic order that erased feminine specificity, both groups insisted on the importance of elaborating a new symbolic economy grounded in female sexual difference (Irigaray Reference Irigaray1985, 78). The Bookstore’s collectively authored volume Non credere di avere dei diritti (1987) marked another major contribution to the theorization of sexual difference. Echoing the earlier Sottosopra Verde, the text stressed the need to sexualize social relations in order to expose how the apparent neutrality of society concealed deeply embedded sexual asymmetries. The goal, as stated in the volume, was to establish “a female genealogy or a female symbolic” (The Milan Women’s Bookstore Reference de Lauretis1990, 10). Here, the practices of affidamento and disparità were further developed as means of both challenging the male symbolic order and fostering a symbolic space in which women could be recognized as autonomous and differentiated subjects.Footnote 14 Diotima’s Il pensiero della differenza sessuale (1987) also contributed to the systematization of this theoretical framework. The text revisited many of the concerns first articulated by the Women’s Bookstore, including the influence of Irigaray in diagnosing the prevailing symbolic order as male-sexed and the need to bring female sexual difference into symbolic existence (33–37). The concept of female mediation, crucial for the creation of a dual symbolic order, was also central to Diotima’s project (34–35, 76–78, 100).
The writings of the Milan Women’s Bookstore and the Diotima collective positioned Carla Lonzi and Rivolta Femminile as foundational figures in the affirmation of a feminism grounded in sexual difference. Lonzi’s critique of equality as a form of women’s subjugation to patriarchal norms was interpreted as “proof” of her feminism of difference.
The texts of Rivolta femminile state that the logical result of this revolution is the concept of sexual difference. In fact, the difference between man and woman is presented as something which cannot be left out of consideration. There is neither freedom nor thought for woman without the thought of sexual difference. (The Milan Women’s Bookstore Reference de Lauretis1990, 38)
In the Sottosopra Rosso issue published by the Bookstore in 1996, Lonzi’s Sputiamo su Hegel was newly presented as a pivotal text that had led members of the Libreria to affirm the impossibility of overcoming sexual difference. “All differences,” they wrote, “are in theory negotiable—whether cultural, temperamental, based on interests, or age—except this one: sexual difference is, so to speak, irreducible, because it belongs to the body in its unassailable opacity” (1996). Their reading of Lonzi centered on the latter’s critique of emancipationist politics and her rejection of assimilation into male-defined norms. On the basis of this interpretation, Lonzi was presented as a thinker of sexual difference and thus a key figure providing theoretical backing to the propositions advanced by feminism of difference. However, to reduce the thought of sexual difference to a critique of emancipationism is to miss its wider theoretical framework: central theoretical categories defining the pensiero della differenza—including the emphasis on the phallo(go)centricity of the symbolic order and the urge to create a female genealogy; the revaluation of women’s disparity through the practice of entrustment and the identification of symbolic mothers; the focus on language as a site for the creation of sexual difference drawing on Lacanian theory—were either absent in Lonzi’s work or challenged by her. While Lonzi’s premature death in 1982 meant she did not participate in the debates that would shape Italian feminism in the following decades, early critiques of the Milanese feminists’ emerging frameworks appeared across her writings, as the next section illustrates.
1.3 Lonzi and the thought of sexual difference
One notable example is “Myth of the cultural proposal,” published in Rivolta Femminile’s Male presence in feminism (Lonzi et al. Reference Lonzi, Lonzi and Jaquinta1978), where Lonzi strongly contested the idea that change could be pursued through cultural mediation. This position stood in contrast to the later emphasis of the Bookstore and Diotima on symbolic elaboration and genealogical construction. In the text, Lonzi criticized the practice of the unconscious (a method—as seen above—adopted by some of the Milanese feminists who would set up the Bookstore), and reproached Lea MelandriFootnote 15 for failing to acknowledge the skepticism that a significant part of the feminist movement manifested toward this practice (Reference Lonzi1978, 139). Specifically, she took issues with the circularity of psychoanalytic theory and the flexibility of the analyst-patient dynamic structuring the practice of the unconscious:
This diversion of relationships, in feminist groups, towards the “analisi del profondo” or practice of the unconscious bothers me for various reasons, but especially because it’s easy to say that there is neither analyst nor analyzed, that there is circularity. It’s not true: the culture of analysis is there. That is to say: what is said collapses into thin air and theory is the only thing that remains. (145)
Lonzi also addressed the theme of the mother–daughter relationship, key in both the practice of the unconscious (L’Erba voglio 1974-1975, 19–22) and in the later development of the pensiero della differenza. She rejected Melandri’s attempt to frame it as a foundational category of female identity:
If I experienced tension, pain and confusion, it was not because I didn’t know that the Mother had betrayed me … The problem with Dora’s case was not so much that Freud’s interpretation was inadequate … as that no other type of listening or dialogue was available for poor Dora than the one with someone who would have interpreted her and derived theories from her. (Lonzi Reference Lonzi1978, 147–48)
Lonzi was also sharply critical of the theoretical affinities between the Milanese feminists and the French of Psych et Po. In a diary entry from November 1974, Lonzi—connecting concepts of culture, ideology, and the feminine to Psych et Po and their publishing house des femmes—angrily contested the notion that psychoanalysis could function as an instrument of liberation,
I’m all shaken up. Matilde is back from Paris and brings news and books. I’m not interested in this feminism, this female culture. Those massive books by Mitchell, and the others—aloof, full of nothing but ideology and culture, culture and ideology in every possible variation! All distorted, and now spread around, advertised, wrapped in chic green bags in Fiorucci style with the label “Édition des femmes”! And from this tragic distortion they invite—no, they blackmail—feminists, flaunting the supposed necessity of psychoanalysis “from Freud to Lacan”! Shit, nothing but shit! (1978, 679)
In an earlier interview with Michèle Causse, author and collaborator of des femmes, Lonzi had already expressed strong opposition to the increasing influence of psychoanalysis within feminism. She argued that, “the feminists who are struggling to demonstrate the usefulness of psychoanalysis for the liberation of women and consider it a ‘mistake’ to reject it a-priori derive this concern from a cultural identification” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Chianesi1977, 105).
While Non credere di avere dei diritti (1987) presented Rivolta Femminile’s second manifesto, “I say I,” opening Male presence in feminism, as a rejection of “ideological feminism”—where ideology is a form of thought that overlooks sexual difference, the authors pointed out (The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective Reference de Lauretis1990, 97)—it is worth noting that the manifesto in fact targeted those very Milan-based feminists who had distanced themselves from autocoscienza in favour of the pratica dell’inconscio. Indeed, the back cover of Male presence in feminism explicitly stated that, with it, Rivolta Femminile “takes up a stance once more: as in 1970 with regard to culture and to male society, this time it challenges those feminine attitudes that, although belonging to the women’s movement, nonetheless retain a basic ambiguity” (Lonzi et al. Reference Lonzi, Lonzi and Jaquinta1978). Marta Lonzi’s “The rights of my subjectivity”—included in the same volume—also warned against “positions that have been provided already by culture” (21) and explicitly reproached the Milanese feminists for continuing to operate within inherited male categories of thought (28–29). She returned to this critique at the conclusion of Male presence in feminism, in a series of previously unpublished responses to articles published in La Repubblica as part of a national debate on feminism involving Luce Irigaray. In one telling passage, she challenged Irigaray’s position—taken up by the Milanese feminists—that women could subvert existing cultural tools to elaborate a female culture: “Why using Lacan to see oneself? Lacan is useful to know Lacan!” (186).
In addition to opposing the theoretical foundations of the practice of the unconscious and the emphasis on the mother–daughter relationship, as sketched in “Myth of the cultural proposal,” Lonzi also refused the notion of a hierarchical relation among women. In a diary entry written shortly after learning about the “cultural feminism” of édition des femmes, she rejected any suggestion that feminism should pursue leadership or hierarchy (Lonzi Reference Lonzi1978, 681), a position at odds with the practices of entrustment and disparity later formalized by the Milan Women’s Bookstore and Diotima. These practices, while central to the pensiero della differenza, stood in contrast with Lonzi’s commitment to autocoscienza, a practice that—despite the tensions and contradictions that emerged from it (Lonzi Reference Lonzi1978)—she conceived as radically non-hierarchical and antithetical to culture itself. As Giovanna Zapperi explains, autocoscienza “has no pre-established rules, no leader, no control … it is the opposite of culture, as it abolishes roles and identifications in order to open the path towards a different becoming” (Ventrella and Zapperi Reference Ventrella and Zapperi2020, 101).
Although Lonzi shared concerns regarding the purported neutrality of established knowledge systems which historically justified the subjugation of women, she did not, as Zapperi also suggests (Reference Zapperi2017, 13), operate within the same theoretical-political project developed by the Bookstore or Diotima. Specifically, her understanding of “difference” significantly diverged from the interpretation that would later be consolidated within the framework of sexual difference, as the next section will illustrate. Unlike the pensiero della differenza, Lonzi neither advocated the construction of a dual symbolic order nor grounded sexual difference within a necessarily binary system. Although Diotima’s Il pensiero della differenza sessuale (1987), for instance, explicitly stated that its aim was not to ground sexual difference in biology, the text nonetheless operated on the assumption that a woman is a woman by virtue of being “sexed as female” (62). As one passage put it, “[a]ccording to the thought of sexual difference, I differ from Filippo essentially, and, just as essentially, I am the same as Caterina. Equal in essence to Caterina” (Diotima 1987, 73). While the authors acknowledged that the question “what is a woman?” was complex and fraught—since any answer inevitably drew on a language that historically subsumed feminine difference under a false, male universal—female sexuation was still treated as the defining and transparent characteristic of womanhood: “[t]he most obvious answer would be: ‘a rational living being sexed as female’ … Clearly, we cannot answer this question while ignoring the fact that we are, above all, women” (51). Within this framework, being a woman meant first and foremost being sexed as female, a “difference” understood as inherently oppositional to the dominant male symbolic order.
Seminal texts by the Milan Women’s Bookstore, such as Non credere di avere dei diritti (1987), also relied on a binary logic of maleness and femaleness, ambiguously invoking an “original difference” (78) and referring to women’s “belonging to the female humankind” (80)—a position that appeared to be implicitly rooted in biological difference. For example, in proposing how to challenge the male-coded domain of law, the authors suggested introducing female mediation into the courtroom: “the criterion of belonging to the same (female) sex refers to a competence more profound than that of professional qualifications and introduces the value of female experience into a field where it was not taken into account before” (The Milan Women’s Bookstore Reference de Lauretis1990, 71). While these positions often presented themselves as grounded in symbolic and experiential specificity rather than biology, they nonetheless rested on a fixed binary conception of sexual difference. This binary logic is not incidental, but foundational to the project of the Milan Women’s Bookstore and Diotima of constructing a dual symbolic order aimed at rendering the historically erased feminine pole visible. References to Lonzi, such as her claim that the difference between men and women is the most fundamental difference in humanity, are frequently mobilized by the Bookstore and Diotima to justify these positions. However, such an interpretation misunderstands the meaning of “difference” in Lonzi.
Having shown her distance from—and in some cases, outright critique of—the emerging practices and theoretical commitments that would undergird the pensiero della differenza, in the next section I illustrate how “difference”, in Carla Lonzi, is rooted in a different framework than the binary logic foundational to the thought of sexual difference sketched above. I argue that Lonzi’s position can be more fruitfully and faithfully read by drawing on Beauvoir’s concept of situation. This interpretation resists both binary logic and gender-critical appropriations of her work, as most recently advanced by Cavarero and Guaraldo in Donna si nasce (Reference Cavarero and Guaraldo2024).
2. Carla Lonzi, the body, and sexual difference: a Beauvoirian reading
Suggesting that Lonzi and Beauvoir share fundamental theoretical affinities could raise some criticisms. Admittedly, while crediting The Second Sex as “one of the early elements through which ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’ sprang into motion” (Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 288), Lonzi herself disparaged the French philosopher for presumably failing to abandon male culture in favor of an ideal of liberation fashioned on a male-defined notion of emancipation. Amongst the Italian scholars who have pointed out the affinities between Lonzi and Beauvoir, Boccia (Reference Boccia2023, 130), Mercandino (Reference Mercandino2017, 130), Rudan (Reference Rudan2023, 100), Cavarero and Guaraldo (Reference Cavarero and Guaraldo2024, 152) have advanced similar interpretations of Beauvoir’s work, presenting her as an egalitarian thinker whose vision of women’s emancipation consisted in their homologation to the masculine “norm.” However, this argument has been extensively refuted by a broad scholarship that has illustrated how, for Beauvoir, legal changes and civic liberties, paid work, and the advent of a socialist society are not themselves conducive to liberation.Footnote 16 The persistence of patriarchal social norms and cultural codes making female subordination into a social destiny fundamentally precludes change. Thus, when Beauvoir argues that “even in the most favorable circumstances … it is out of the question to think of her as simply free” (Reference Beauvoir2010, 746), she is closer to Lonzi’s claims that “[e]quality is what is offered to the colonized in laws and rights” (Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 206), it is “a legal principle” (205), and “the drapery disguising woman’s inferiority” (206), than commonly accepted.
As anticipated, Beauvoir’s influence on Lonzi has been observed by several commentators. For Rudan, Beauvoir is a “ghostly” presence in Let’s spit on Hegel: “although she is never mentioned, she clearly and inevitably is the source of inspiration [behind it]” (Reference Rudan, Baritono and Ricciardi2020, 269).Footnote 17 In The Second Sex, Beauvoir famously set out to interrogate women’s situation on the basis of the understanding that what have been said and written about women who “were only too clearly dictated by [men’s] own interest” and, as such, should be suspect ([1949] Reference Beauvoir2010, 30). Tracing the roots of women’s subordination across biology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, religion, history, and literature, Beauvoir shows how men have historically gained the power to define women by setting social norms that qualified femininity as submissive, inferior, domestic. “He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other,” a formulation that signals not the expression of an immutable nature or an ahistorical reality, but rather the result of a process by which women’s alterity has been naturalized and historicized as inferiority (Reference Beauvoir2010, 26). While in the first volume, Beauvoir illustrates how the answer to the question “what is a woman?” has been provided by a patriarchal construction of femininity, in the second tome she proceeds to show how such prescribed norms of femininity have shaped women’s life experiences, their relations with themselves and their bodies, their interpersonal relationships, their place in society, and the opportunities open to them.
Like Beauvoir in The Second Sex, Lonzi in the Manifesto, Let’s spit on Hegel, and The clitoridean and vaginal woman confronts the traditions of male thought and accuses them of having provided rational backing to women’s social, economic, and sexual subordination. Man’s power, for Beauvoir as much as for Lonzi, has been to conceive of himself as neutral and to construct women’s submission as natural: “the [male] ruling caste bases its argument on the state of affairs it created itself,” in Beauvoir’s words (Reference Beauvoir2010, 33). “Up until now the myth that the one complements the other has been used by man to justify his own power,” Rivolta’s Manifesto states (Reference Femminile and Penny2018, 227). Beauvoir’s understanding of femininity as shaped by a patriarchal epistemology that has impacted on women’s experiences resound in such sentences as:
The image with which man has interpreted woman has been his own invention. (Rivolta Femminile Reference Femminile and Penny2018, 227)
Civilization had despised us as inferior, the church has called us sex, psychoanalysis has betrayed us, Marxism has sold us to hypothetical revolution. We ask for testimonials for centuries of philosophical thought that has theorized about the inferiority of woman. (229)
We consider incomplete any history which is based on nonperishable traces. Nothing, or else misconception, has been handed down about the presence of woman. (229)
Beauvoir’s and Lonzi’s critiques of Hegel, particularly the master–slave dialectic, are a notable site of convergence between the two thinkers. Both read the Phenomenology of spirit as advancing a model in which women’s subordination to men is naturalized through a sexed division of the ethical and political labor: man is aligned with human law and civic life, while woman is destined to safeguard divine law and reproductive functions. While scholars agree that Beauvoir influenced Lonzi’s engagement with Hegel, they diverge on the extent to which the two thinkers can be read together. Rudan (Reference Rudan, Baritono and Ricciardi2020, 270) and Mercandino (Reference Mercandino2017, 129–30), for instance, argue that Beauvoir departs from Lonzi in that she draws an analogy between woman and slave which implies that women’s participation in the struggle for recognition would put an end to their oppression. “It is thus not about spitting on Hegel,” Rudan argues, “but about correcting him,” in Beauvoir’s case (Reference Rudan, Baritono and Ricciardi2020, 271). Contrary to this interpretation, I follow Beauvoirian scholars such as Manon Garcia (Reference Garcia2018, 149–54) and Kimberly Hutchings (Reference Hutchings, Hengehold and Bauer2017, 139), who contend that, for Beauvoir too, women stand outside of the dialectic. In order for a consciousness to take part in the dialectical movement, a primary position of equality is required; however, as Beauvoir extensively illustrates in The Second Sex, woman’s situation fundamentally differs to that of men. As Garcia points out, women’s subordination has no parallel and is not the result of a singular historical event: “the woman is not in a position of original equality with man and as such the man/woman relation cannot be compared to the one between master and slave in the Hegelian sense” (Garcia Reference Garcia2018, 150). Beauvoir’s concept of situation is critical here. When Beauvoir argues that human beings are socially situated, she affirms that individuals come into a world that already assigns meaning to them. For Beauvoir, the situation of women is one which already prescribes them submission as a social destiny and prevents them from exerting freedom and making choices in the same way as men (Garcia Reference Garcia2018, 70–86). “As a social destiny, becoming a woman is created by the imposition of and socialization into certain human-made expectations, values, and norms,” Burke points out (Reference Burke2025, 25). Because a woman’s specific situation is to come into a world where femininity is already coded as submission and constituted as inferior, she is not subject and object like the master and slave, like other (male) individuals (Garcia Reference Garcia2018, 147). In this sense, Beauvoir’s critique of the dialectic aligns more closely with Lonzi’s statement that “[t]he servant-master dialectic is a settling of accounts between groups of men” (Rivolta Femminile Reference Femminile and Penny2018, 229) than has been commonly acknowledged in Italian feminist scholarship.
Referring to Beauvoir’s existentialist concept of situation provides a productive lens though which to understand Lonzi’s approach to the body and her vision of a feminist future. Admittedly, there are passages in Lonzi’s writings that lend themselves to biological interpretations of sexual difference. In The clitoridean and vaginal woman, for example, she writes: “[t]he guarantee of the absence of biological aggressiveness in woman is her lack of a penis” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 127–28). However, throughout her work this notion of difference is consistently framed in relation to what Let’s spit on Hegel described as women’s “age-old absence from history.” Even when she refers to an “originating stimulus of aggression that operates in man” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 128), Lonzi’s overarching concern lies not with biology per se, but with the historical and cultural meanings inscribed onto bodies and the social consequences these meanings produce. Like Beauvoir, Lonzi does not treat sexual difference as a set of fixed physiological traits but as a historically situated and culturally mediated experience. Caught within a world codified by patriarchal norms of femininity, Lonzi shows how women are confronted by sexual scripts founded on penetration and reproduction, fully disregarding their pleasure and reproductive freedom (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 77–136); they are presented with a norm of heterosexuality that normalizes women’s relegation to domesticity (Rivolta Femminile Reference Femminile and Penny2018, 228); they are made to experience motherhood not as a choice but as an expectation, while care responsibilities are feminized and imposed as natural obligations (228), and so on. In all these cases, Lonzi follows Beauvoir in considering biological assets as part of a woman’s situation; it is not the significance of such assets that is of interest to her, but rather the socio-political meanings that have been inscribed in them and the material consequences they exert on women’s lives. In this sense, what Burke points out with regards to Beauvoir’s approach to the body applies equally to Lonzi: “a girl, then, is a girl not strictly because of her genitalia or other physiological differences, but because of how her embodied existence unfolds and is taken up in a given context. It is not her body that dictates who she is. Who she becomes is a matter of her bodily relationality in the world with others” (Reference Burke2025, 28). Lonzi’s focus, then, is not on founding a new order upon sexual difference, but on exposing and dismantling the meanings and structures that have naturalized women’s subordination.
Cavarero and Guaraldo (Reference Cavarero and Guaraldo2024) are not mistaken in noting that, for Lonzi, a tabula rasa of established norms and roles must be pursued for a different way of being woman to be realized (80). However, when they interpret Lonzi’s affirmation of the clitoris as the foundational, constitutive element of women’s freedom (79), the starting point for the creation of “a cultural discourse, a new symbolic horizon … where freedom finds its declination in the feminine” (80), they position her within a framework which Lonzi herself did not share. Their reading implies a linear continuity between biological sex and female identity—as seen above, a somewhat taken-for-granted element in the early texts by the Bookstore and Diotima—which Lonzi neither explicitly affirmed nor systematically articulated. Rather than offering a theory of female identity grounded in anatomy, as Cavarero and Guaraldo suggest, when Lonzi argues that “[t]he identity that springs from the clitoris starts from a nothingness, from a cultural void … It is this ‘I’ as a cultural void that constitutes the prerequisite for a rediscovery of our body, that is, of our culture” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Chianesi1977, 21-22), she is proposing that only through a process of “deculturation” from established patriarchal norms can a different way of self-realization become possible. Her approach to the body, and specifically the reference to the site of female pleasure, should not be reduced to refer to mere anatomy. Indeed, a few lines later in “An itinerary of reflections” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Chianesi1977) she clarifies, “the cultural void in which to identify oneself is not the original integrity, but rather a continuous wearing down of the unconscious ties with the male world by means of living through them and becoming aware of them. The authenticity possible for each woman is put to the test in this process” (Reference Lonzi and Chianesi1977, 36). Rather than situating authenticity in the biological fact of female anatomy, this passage suggests that the possibility of “authenticity” lies in an ongoing process of de-naturalization of received knowledge. This is consistent with Lonzi’s urge to deculturize oneself, to “sabotage every aspect of culture that continues to ignore [women’s oppression]” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 55).
Lonzi’s focus on female pleasure is integral to this process of deculturation. Continuing her critique of male intellectual and scientific authority, begun in the Manifesto and Let’s spit on Hegel, in The clitoridean and vaginal woman she exposes how heterosexist scripts of sex have obscured women’s autonomous sexuality by establishing a coincidence between female sexuality and reproduction. This conflation, she argues, has confined women to a sexual norm that privileges male pleasure and disempowers female desire. In providing a counter-script on sex centered on female pleasure, the pamphlet aligns with 1970s feminist debates on scientific misconceptions of the female body, the stigmatization of women who do not experience pleasure from penetration, and the wider social and political implications of reclaiming sexual autonomy (Koedt Reference Koedt2013). The figuration of the clitoridean woman in Lonzi’s text functions not as a biological identity, but as a metaphor for a woman who has embarked on a process of deculturation, who has begun to confront the false universals that have constructed her inferiority. In her words, “[t]he clitoridean woman is not the liberated woman, nor the woman who has escaped from suffering the male myth—these women do not exist in the civilization in which we find ourselves—but the one who faced this myth moment by moment and was not captured by it” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 111); “[t]he clitoridean woman has nothing essential to offer man and expects nothing essential from him” (115).
Contra Guaraldo and Cavarero, who read Lonzi as anchoring women’s liberation and “female identity in the anatomical element of clitoral pleasure” (Reference Cavarero and Guaraldo2024, 80), I argue that there is no indication in Lonzi’s writing that points towards a clear coincidence between the anatomy of the female sexual organ and female identity or female liberation. Given her consistent emphasis on “deculturation,” I rather argue that her vision of feminist liberation is more closely aligned with Beauvoir’s project, namely one grounded not in the revaluation of female biology or symbolic femininity, but in the radical critique of the patriarchal norms and codes historically structuring society, social relations, and modes of existence. Indeed, echoing Beauvoir’s existentialist philosophy, Lonzi asserts that “[n]o one is conditioned a priori to the point that one cannot free herself; no one cannot be so free of conditioning a priori to be free” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 56). For a radically different way of being woman to emerge, existing cultural conditionings must be addressed and de-naturalized. In this sense, Lonzi is straightforward in crediting the consciousness-raising practice as conducive to “women’s leap to subjectivity” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 141): “realizing that every connection to the male world is the real obstacle to one’s liberation triggers self-awareness among women, and the surprise of this situation reveals unknown horizons for their expansion” (141–42). Rather than anchoring liberation in biological assets, in the revaluation of feminine features or in the creation of a new symbolic order rooted in anatomical specificity, as implied by Cavarero and Guaraldo’s interpretation, at the heart of Lonzi’s work stands the urge to expose and undo every aspect of a culture that has theorized and naturalized women’s inferiority.
My reading of Lonzi’s work thus orients me to markedly different conclusions than those drawn by Cavarero and Guaraldo. Not only do I contest their portrayal of Lonzi as the most original initiator of sexual difference feminism—a claim I have problematized in this article by tracing the historical and theoretical development of the thought of sexual difference and Lonzi’s extraneity from it; but I also take issue with their interpretation of Lonzi’s project of liberation as one structurally anchored in female anatomy. This reading, harking back to and in some ways intensifying 1980s and 1990s interpretations of Lonzi as a foundational figure for the Milan Women’s Bookstore’s and Diotima’s projects of constructing a dual symbolic order centered on sexual difference, lends support, they argue, to a “decisively critical judgement of queer and trans movements” (Cavarero and Guaraldo Reference Cavarero and Guaraldo2024, 112), to the questioning of trans lives (117–20), and to the critique of transfeminist social movements like Non Una Di Meno for supposedly “cancelling” women (120). While the duality of sexual difference is described as an “insurmountable presupposition” by feminists of difference (Diotima 1987, 78), this emphasis is notably absent in Lonzi. Instead, consistent with her sustained critique of the “systematic thinkers responsible for the great humiliation imposed on us by the patriarchal world” (Rivolta Femminile Reference Femminile and Penny2018, 229), Lonzi investigates how women’s “difference” has been the result of historically sedimented background beliefs, social norms, and gendered power dynamics which have unjustly relegated them to a subordinate status relative to men. Even when deploying the embodied metaphor of the clitoridean woman, there is no clear indication that Lonzi inscribes the foundation of female identity in the specificity of the female body (Cavarero and Guaraldo Reference Cavarero and Guaraldo2024, 80). As in Beauvoir, then, I am persuaded to understand Lonzi’s approach to “difference” as something that lies not primarily in biological explanations or in a female character mutilated by the sexist domain that must be thought symbolically and affirmed but is rather the result of historical and cultural legacies that have enabled this state of affairs.
Ultimately, when Lonzi engages with the female body, she does so to highlight how it is shaped by the laws, taboos, and norms that structure its social legibility. Thus, while she does take for granted that a body biologically coded as female is inhabited by a woman, and vice versa, she does not suggest that female identity is inscribed in the female morphology. What is of interest to her is how patriarchy has historically interpreted and mobilized these differences. As Burke writes of Beauvoir, and as can be said equally of Lonzi, “that there are bodily differences … means that our experience of the world and existence will also be different. How it will be different, though, is not determined by brute, biological differences, but by how those differences are lived in the world” (Burke Reference Burke2019, 12; Marso Reference Marso2012, 11).
As Stefania Voli points out, it would not be until the 1980s that broader discussions on sex/gender distinctions would become more widespread in Italy (Reference Voli2016, 241), despite the earlier presence of the Italian trans movement,Footnote 18 emerging research on gender, and to a certain extent Beauvoir’s The Second Sex which had brought into question a rigid male/female dichotomy before that time. Lonzi, who passed away in 1982, did acknowledge the embodied reality of sexual difference, but did not unambiguously embed in it a theory of female identity. Rather, she was concerned with exposing the myths of male culture and their materialization onto the body. Therefore, I would exercise caution with respect to Cavarero and Guaraldo’s interpretation of Lonzi as providing theoretical support to advance a trans-exclusive, gender-critical agenda—and one which, failing to engage with the plurality of trans people’s agency and lives and referring to trans experiences as a “contagio” [epidemic] amongst teens (Reference Cavarero and Guaraldo2024, 118), has extraordinarily demeaning and virulent overtones. Even though in Lonzi’s writing there is no questioning of a binary conception of gender presentation and gender identification, such an interpretation is not completely incompatible with her work,Footnote 19 especially, as I argued, considering her approach to the body as also part of one’s situation rather than foundational of identity. Ultimately, I believe, her aspiration to “rise to be equal to an answerless universe” (Rivolta Femminile Reference Femminile and Penny2018, 230), an “unexpected future” (Lonzi Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 240), a reality in which both difference and equality are rejected and wherein “no human being, no group, shall claim definition or be defined by comparison with another human being or group” (Reference Lonzi and Buttarelli2023, 206–7), can be read back to our current juncture as opening conceptual space for non-essentialist, more expansive interpretations of difference.
3. Conclusion
In this article I have confronted arguments which pose Carla Lonzi as the initiator of the Italian femminismo della differenza. First, I showed how the practical and intellectual connections between the French group of Psych et Po and some Italian feminists in the early 1970s provided the basis for the development of the thought of sexual difference in Italy. While Lonzi did share with feminists of difference a fundamental skepticism about emancipationist politics, understood as a form of assimilation to male norms, I showed how the thought of sexual difference should not be reduced to a critique of emancipationism but rather understood as a body of practices and theories which Lonzi was extraneous to, when not explicitly critical about. Second, I explored Lonzi’s approach to the body and sexual difference. I have specifically focused on the recent scholarship by Cavarero and Guaraldo, which suggests that the thought of sexual difference stands in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis non-binary, queer, and trans lives and employs Lonzi’s work to support these claims. In contrast, I drew on Beauvoir to argue that it was the patriarchal socio-cultural and political entanglements inscribed in the body that captured Lonzi’s attention around sexual difference. In advancing this interpretation, I responded to existing arguments by philosophers close to feminism of difference seeking to deploy Lonzi’s work to support essentialist stances and, in contrast, argued for a non-essentialist reading of Lonzi.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Maud Bracke, Carlotta Cossutta, Elena Caruso, and Sam Rutherford for reading earlier drafts of this article and providing thoughtful and valuable feedback. I would also like to thank Catriona MacLeod, Carolina Topini, Alessia Zinneri, and the PhD students in the Centre for Gender History at the University of Glasgow who read and commented the article.
Marianna Golinucci received her PhD in Gender History at the University of Glasgow with a thesis on Scottish exceptionalism and Black Scottish feminism. Her research interests include the history of feminism, intellectual history, feminist philosophy and sexual ethics.
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