Soggettività di genere e differenze. La "materia" dei corpi.

In this essay I try to confront, to juxtapose and, also, to clash the many positions that, within Gender Studies and the many facets of Feminist Criticism have redefined subjectivity along the lines of the ever problematic divisions between gender, sex and sexuality. By reading this very complex and broad debate through the lens of a semiotics of cultures, I attempt a critical revision of some of the feminist positions that re-articulate not only the form of a female subjectivity, but also those of the human and the non human, of the post-human. This implies a rethinking of the very category of matter and the ways in which it becomes the substance and the form of an embodied subject. I conclude with a very brief analysis of the work of Regina José Galindo, an artist who, through her performance and installations, creates peculiar “theoretical objects” that are, in themselves, able to elaborate and add new directions to the very theories of subjectivity I explore in the first part of the essay.