Feminism, Law and the Power of Transformative Narratives

As Y.N. Harari wrote, the power of narratives lies in their ability to simplify social complexity, and to make human cooperation fluid: ‘Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination’ (Harari, 2015, 25). Precisely because of their function, such narratives, once disseminated, give rise to social constructs and norms that, as long as people believes in them, and precisely by virtue of that belief, exist and live in the social. The three essays collected for this focus of Athena are linked together not only by a common interest for the feminist thinking in relation to various aspects of law, but also and above all by the fact that they all modulate, under different aspects and with different nuances, the theme of the essential relationship that exists between the strength and resistance of the dominant moral, political and legal structuring, in relation to the feminine, and the logically preceding establishment in society (at a latent even more than declared level) of correlative ‘narratives’.