Qhen you discover – it happens to every little girl – that being in the world as a woman will entail a series of disadvantages (less freedom, risk of violence and abuse, lower wages, a lot of unpaid work) it is not strange that you try to escape by trying to live as if I were a man. Second wave feminism, the 1960s and 1970s, was largely about fighting for parity and equality: “neutralize” oneself to escape the disfavor of female difference.
Feminism, the various phases of the movement for women’s freedom
The classification into waves is very American and controversial because it introduces breaking points in the continuity of a great and centuries-old movement for freedom. But let’s stick to the convention. The first waverooted in the principles of the Enlightenment, it focused on social rights and legal equalityfrom universal suffrage to the right to education and teaching, to work and property.
The second wave instead keeps the body at the center and “the personal that is political” (Carol Hanish): sexual and reproductive freedom, legal and safe abortion (law 194 is from 1978), fight against male violence. And also civil rights: divorce (1970), reform of family law for the legal equality of spouses (1975). While only in 1996 and after long struggles the law will recognize rape as a crime against the person and not against morality.
But thereand claims about work and career they will soon end up taking over the scene (and continue to hold it firmly). Above all when you become a mother the equal scaffolding collapses on you. So perhaps emancipation and equality are not the way, perhaps the operation to be devised is another.
The thought of difference: discovering “the unspeakable fortune of being born a woman”
The Belgian philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray said it like this: “The exploitation of women is based on sexual difference. Its solution will come only through sexual difference.” Therefore female freedom and strength are produced in the conscious assumption of difference, not in the escape from difference. If anything, it is about discovering and practicing “the unspeakable fortune of being born a woman” (Luisa Muraro).
The thought of difference is a golden thread that starts from figures such as the fourteenth-century poet Christine de Pizan follows the history of women in a karst way to come to light in thinkers like Luisa Muraro or Carla Lonzifor which “the man is not the model to which the process of self-discovery by women can be adapted” and “equality is what is offered to the colonized in terms of laws and rights”.
Italian feminism against gender stereotypes
Original Italian contribution, the thought of difference distinguishes between the reality of being a womanwith its own autonomous symbolic representation, and gender stereotypes (imposed roles) that regulate female existences. It’s about freeing yourself from stereotypes, not from being a woman.
The new transfeminist wave of the 90s
But after the 90s, with the new transfeminist wave, what had been kicked out the door – stereotypes – comes back through the window. The reality of the body loses consistency. Being a woman – or man – becomes a simple perception. If a little girl doesn’t play with dolls, if she behaves like a “tomboy”, so-called affirmative therapies (puberty blockers, hormones, surgery) can free her from the “wrong body”. The free choice of sex becomes a paradigm for the freedom of all.
In 8 cases out of 10 today it is girls who identify as male to escape oppression. The genealogy is clear: if the emancipated women “disguised” themselves as men and the anorexics reduced the body to its minimum terms, here the work makes use of more sophisticated and radical means. The goal is always the same: to escape the “house on fire” of one’s female destiny, participate in male privilege. The web is full of photos of girls proudly showing off their double mastectomy scars. In the USA you can undergo top surgery (breast surgery) starting from the age of 13.
The “feminism” of the sexually fluid subject
Transfeminism or liberal feminism is no longer just for women and holds a fluid and disembodied subject at its center. Woman – or man – is anyone who perceives themselves as such regardless of the sex they were “assigned at birth”. A feminist is anyone who fights to free themselves from this “attribution”, therefore from the reality of the body.
From the transfeminist push, laws like the Ley Trans in Spain – o the most recent Self-Determination Law in Germany – which allows gender change starting from the age of 12 with a simple self-declaration at the registry office.
The body no longer matters: for having stated that it does matter, that women should be called women and not “menstruators”, the creator of Harry Potter JK Rowling has been through a lot, from threats on her doorstep to the podium of queen of the Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).
Against the sexual binary: the era of Butlerism
There is a gigantic American boy who identifies himself as Lia Thomas and who has been winning every women’s swimming competition for years, but opposing it is transphobic. It is forbidden to claim spaces reserved for women, changing rooms, shelters, prison hospital wards. The sexual binary (male and female) does not exist, the spectrum of free gender identities is infinite.
The kick-off belongs to the young girl Judith Butler, lesbian butch (i.e. with accentuation of masculinity, ed.) and professor of philosophy in San Francisco. His Gender Trouble (1990) stunned an audience much wider than the usual audience for philosophical essays and today we live in all respects in a “real butlerism”.
If feminism spoke of gender as an oppressive construction, Judy went further: even sex is constructed. There is no anatomical objectivity, sex is an imposed norm. Being a woman has nothing to do with the female body and must include other subjectivities in an intersectional way.
Intersectionality, a disadvantage for women
Intersectionality is also a battleground between difference/radical feminism and liberal transfeminism. The black American feminist was the first to use the term (1989). Kimberlé Crenshawjurist and civil rights activist. In a recent interview with Time Crenshaw tried to reiterate that intersectionality is «a lens, a prism, to see the ways in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.”
In order to understand each other: Compared to a white woman, an African American simultaneously experiences more forms of oppression, a sort of cumulative damage. But today the term has been totally re-signified with paradoxical effects: for example that a wealthy, queer white male can be “more feminist” than a poor black woman.
If lesbians are accused of oppressing non-binary males
Observe the English journalist Julie Bindel: «In the UK, dozens of working-class lesbians, many of them of colour, are accused, mostly by privileged white students, of oppressing white males who identify as “non-binary”, “asexual” or trans. We are accused of being bigots or ‘not true feminists’ because we refuse to put the interests and feelings of people born male above the needs of women and girls.”
Intersectionality understood in this way is therefore entirely to the detriment of women and divides them. The question of the French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges (1791) continues to make sense: «Will women always be divided from each other? Will they never form a single body?
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