Thinking differently: Italian feminism beyond essentialism

In her most renowned work – The Symbolic Order of the Mother – the Italian philosopher Luisa Muraro urges women to resist living within an improper dimension, namely the one they experience within the paternal symbolic order. In her attempt to completely avoid such a life, she prescribed to women the necessity, or rather the duty, of loving their mothers or learning to do so. However, this duty is here questioned as a risky and once again normative move, reaffirming the essentialist nature of second-wave Italian feminism. My aim is to demonstrate how, in fact, it is within Italian feminism, and more precisely in the writings of Carla Lonzi, that we can find an alternative approach. This alternative does not conceive of difference as something given in terms of content, but rather as the possibility of living in a dimension of authenticity, where subjectivity is capable of articulating its own desires and principle of pleasure.