La critica femminista al linguaggio neutro della teoria: Adriana Cavarero.

This essay discusses Adriana Cavarero’s feminist critique of the neutral language of philosophy and her theory of sexual difference. The notion of sexual difference – as originally developed in the work of Luce Irigaray – is crucial to Adriana Cavarero’s philosophy: the human is never neutral, but always sexed, and in this perspective, femininity, or women’s identity, needs to be rethought outside of its role and position within the patriarchal order. By insisting on the elementary given of the sexed body (sessuazione) in its relationship with thinking and language, sexual difference feminism aims at producing a different symbolic order that does not erase women or subsume them under the falsely neutral term ‘man’. Sexual difference, claims Cavarero, is both a material and symbolic dimension that needs to be named, signified and rendered politically active.