New Mothers: Market, Bodies, Life

Abstract

Another Mother. Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminist, edited by Cesare Casalino and Andrea Righi, is dedicated to Gender Studies. As is well known, Gender Studies revolutionized the culture and the way of thinking and structuring society, offering new theoretical tools to decode the current world, and new categories to read the distinction between man and woman: starting from a representation of gender as a cultural construction, in opposition with the traditional biological distinctions between male and female. Indeed, those studies led in the eighties to a strong emancipation turn. Starting from the critics to biological determinism, in relation to social expectations, roles and cultural models, Gender Studies aimed to reformulate gender and sexual-orientation-based identities. In a second time this goal was perceived through the deconstruction of a binary vision, homosexuality / heterosexuality, highlighting its performative aspect. As shown by Luisa Muraro, the performative structures the relationship between mother and child. It is an exchange of teaching and learning, a pedagogical “give-and-take” which defines and establishes language. With the words of Muraro (2006): “We learn to speak from the mother, and this statement defines both who the mother is and what language is.”

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