the Fourth UN International Conference on Women (Beijing, 4-15 September 1995), such as
'empowerment', translated either as 'potere' (power) or 'autoritä' (authority).
7 In the introduction to the volume Beyond equality and difference, Bock and James feel the need
to explain that the essays by Italian authors 'require special comment, since they have not only been translated from one language to another, but at the same time been removed from their cultural background into a context where the special qualities o f Italian feminism are not widely appreciated' (1992:5). For a discussion of the notion o f essentialism, see de Lauretis (1990a:255- 270).
8 'Sottosopra' is a pamphlet which comes out o f the Libreria delle Donne di Milano when women feel they have to communicate some new insights. It is a widespread practice in Italy to refer to the different issues by the color o f the title, rather than the year o f publication. The 1983 pamphlet
was the 'Green Sottosopra'; the following one, which came out in 1987, was the 'Blue Sottosopra'.
The 1996 one is the 'Red Sottosopra'. It is a collective authorship, although in the 'red' issue
names of the authors appear on the last page. The move from collective authorship to individual names is a recent one in the Italian context.
two subjects. As Bono and Kemp write, 'Dual subjectivity admits the partiality of both male and female positions (that the world must accept man's difference as well as woman's) and provides a radical starting point for the Italian feminist theory’ (1991:1). Thus, speaking of embodiment of the subject from this perspective does not entail a clear-cut distinction between sex and gender, a division which has been more marked in earlier Anglo-American feminist debate.
As Grosz (1987) argued, a sex/gender split risks the reinstatement of a corporeal/mental dichotomy. Thus she advocates a theory of the body which differentiates itself from a biological reading. The body should be approached 'from the point of view of its being lived or experienced by the subject’ (1987:9). But as she rightly points out, even male thinkers, such as Foucault, who have questioned the dichotomized understanding of corporeality and subjectivity, have not questioned 'the implications of acknowledging the sexual specificity of different bodies' (1987:9). Challenging a monolithic representation of the body entails regarding it as a contested site in power relations. From a feminist position, to reconceptualize the corporeal means to recognize that a male body cannot be taken as the only way to inscribe corporeality into the social, but rather 'entails recognizing the existence of two kinds of body' (1987:9).
'Sexual difference' thinking does not advocate any 'intrinsic moral superiority of women’ (Eisenstein 1984) or any idea of ’woman’ being the opposite of ’male’ in respect of attributes and values (e.g. irrational versus rational), but a world in which women can ’be in place’ in the negotiation of things. ’Woman’ and ’man’ are culturally bounded but omnipresent categories. Sexual difference discourse moves beyond a critique of the definition of equality with its stress on the idea of a neutral individual: the citizen. This discourse does not oppose equality as such but rather the notion of equality inscribed in the paradigms of western thought and philosophy. Sexual difference discourse challenges the universal, neutral scheme of the western individual and addresses the ’re-construction’ of a new female subjectivity (Cavarero 1992).
Difference does not entail inequality. It is difficult to grasp differences apart from hierarchical difference, that is, to disentangle the effects of patriarchical power from the manifestations of sexual difference. I believe that gender relations need to be historicized, that ’strategies for change’ must involve a radical transformation of society. As women we should thus engage in the real world to change it. But we will be able to acquire freedom, not by confining ourselves to a norm which in patriarchal discourse is male (Weedon 1987:2), but by a new project of practice that sees women as the negotiators: not an ungendered, neutral
universe of equal women or women with a common destiny of oppression, but rather a new symbolic order built by women for (not 'on behalf of) women living in a real society made up by women and by men.
Here I should introduce another difference in meaning, that of the use of 'homosexuality' in the Italian feminist debate and in the Anglo-American debate. In Italian feminism 'political homosexuality' entails separate spaces of production of knowledge and political action; it does not imply a withdrawal from the society at large or a refusal of relationships with men. II pensiero della differenza sessuale challenges the notion of equality and thus the system of representation predicated on one subject, and advocates the visibility of women in the social world as engendered subjects.9 I am interested in a new symbolic representation of ourselves where the measures of our being in the world are given not by men but by women; where women become the transactors between myself and society (Diotima 1990). The notion of affidamento [entrustment] (see Muraro 1991a [1985]; de Lauretis 1990b:8: Schor 1994:xv)10 has characterized the Italian debate, a debate in which the practice and theory of sexual difference are seen as part of the same process.
Entrusting oneself is not looking to another woman as in a mirror to find in her a confirmation o f what one actually is, but it is offering and asking from female human experience the means of signifying its true and great existence in the world (The M ilan W omen's Bookstore Collective 1990 [1987]: 149).
There is no ungendered social subject who will wish for and effect the end of all discrimination; if the social translation o f the hum an value o f being a woman is not done by women it will be done by m en according to their criteria (The M ilan Women's Bookstore Collective 1990 [1987]: 146).
The risk of essentialism, a critique of which this thought has been accused, has been well addressed by de Lauretis in her introduction to the English translation of Non credere di avere dei diritti. She emphasises that il pensiero della differenza is predicated on:
the paradox o f a woman, a being that is at once captive and absent in discourse, constantly spoken o f but o f itself inaudible or inexpressible,
9 But see the new book of Diotima (1995) and especially Muraro’s article on the shift from focusing on the tension between sexual difference and equality to focusing on the tension between sexual difference and identity (Muraro 1995:125 and 126).
10 Nevertheless, taken out of the Italian context and out of a practice, the notion of 'affidamento'
displayed as spectacle and yet unrepresented; a being w h ose ex isten ce and sp ecificity are sim ultaneously asserted and denied, negated and controlled (de Lauretis 1990b: 12).
She also acknowledges the specificity of the intellectual and historical context in which this thought developed, quite different from those of other European countries. Bock and James (1992) also acknowledge that this 'distinctive conception of sexual difference, as a condition not of gender equality but of women's liberty' compared to other feminist trajectories 'owes something to the differences of national culture' (1992:5). Italian feminism has developed mainly outside of the universities. There are no 'Women's Studies', although there are women whose feminist engagement informs their academic agendas. Theoretical research is carried out and circulates through a diversity of women's groups.11 Italian feminism had to confront a very strongly demarcated political establishment: a long-standing conservative Christian Democratic government and a strong traditional Communist Party, the largest in western Europe, along with a very lively, male-oriented, leftist movement. But even the most progressive socialist forces did not address the 'woman question' apart from class struggle. Equality, even in its more progressive form, therefore meant homologization (e.g. assimilation) with men and their agendas. Throughout the 1970s ’double militancy’, an expression which designated the tensions of being engaged at the same time in a feminist group and in an organized party or political movement (see 'Introduction' in Bono and Kemp 1991, esp. p .ll), was a crucial question. As Bock and James remark, in this socio-political context Italian feminists 'developed a sophisticated range of theoretical insights and political practices centred on their distinctive notion of female difference' (1992:6).
Another important element to understand the specificities of the Italian debate is the relation to psychoanalytic theory. Although the Italian movement was not confronted with a strong, dominant psychoanalytic school, as was the case in France, nevertheless the centrality of the 'symbolic' in Italian feminist thought owes something to the questioning of psychoanalytic theory. In fact the French group 'Psychanalyse et Politique', known as 'Psych et Po', has been very influential in Italy through the Libreria delle Donne di Milano [Milan Women's Bookstore Collective]. The women who advocate il pensiero della differenza
11 Bono and Kemp indicate in the diversity of the composition o f women's groups engaged in