"Oltre lo specchio: politiche e poetiche degli studi di genere e delle donne"

Starting from Virginia Woolf’s claim for the recognition of women’s writings in the history of culture, the essay engages the main debates in women’s/gender and postcolonial studies in order to foreground what they share: the recognition of women’s aesthetics and the re-writing and continuous destabilization of the literary canon by introducing the so-called ‘other’ cultures. Of crucial significance is the argument that gender studies is above all a methodology, or better a crux of interactive methodologies that dialogue with a variety of disciplines and literary traditions. The essay discusses the main theoretical debates in relation to the key themes in women’s studies: the politics of the body, the relationship between identity and difference/otherness, the global and the local, hierarchies of power and forms of resistance. In this light, the intersection between methodologies of feminisms and postcolonial theorizations demonstrates how gender studies is a complex arena for critical thought and a continuous challenge to mainstream cultures.