Body and Sexuality Between Nature and Culture . .

Abstract We are born male or female and become men or women: on this “transformative” process in all the few historical and among all peoples, men have built “narratives,” social imaginaries, myths, customs, and institutions. These narratives have informed and made possible man–woman relationships and practices at all levels of social reality. In the founding myths of the world, of becoming, of birth and death, the coexistence of the male–female dyad is recurrent, of opposing and/or complementary principles rooted in biological difference, understood as a data directly accessible to experience. Just as it is an evident fact, directly accessible to experience, that there is no childbirth without a woman, there is no birth without pregnancy, there is no conception without the union of an egg and sperm. But this natural, biological “evidence,” which can also be inscribed in man's sexual instinct to reproduce, has given rise to narratives that have read, interpreted, given meaning to this evidence, making it accessible to experience and knowledge: such evidence has become a “social” reality. Moving on the level of social “reality” means moving on an exclusively cultural level, on a symbolic level: social reality is created by culture, within which even the biological data (which belongs to the world of nature) becomes a social construction: not in the sense of “invented,” but in the sense of “interpreted” and lived.