metaphysics to the (flesh and blood) mother.6
In the face of those who abuse religion and motherhood in the interests of misogyny, patriarchy, and inequality, Cavarero’s heterodox reading restores importance to the oft-subordinated role of motherhood. It reinclines the maternal and the religious toward another ethic. It reanimates a tradition that valorizes natality and maternity, from Arendt to Irigaray, as a political resource for thinking relationality, inclination, and vulnerability.
A reader may think the image chosen by Cavarero is still too stereotypical: that it reinforces rather than troubles the sexual stereotype of women as caring and maternal. In response, note that her methodology of stealing from within the very tradition that oppresses developed out of her engagement with Italian feminist movements both within and outside of the academy. In tracing the trajectory of Cavarero’s project and placing it in the context of Italian feminism, we may better come to understand the stereotyping at play here.
Cavarero and Feminism
Known for its strident stance on sexual difference, female separatism, and militancy, Italian feminism can seem confusing and at times even contradictory to an Anglo-American audience. Similarly to the sexual difference theory emerging in Anglo-American feminism in the 1970s and ’80s, Italian feminists mobilized sexual difference to intervene in major philosophical debates and sought to use it as a tool to free women from their entrapment within these debates, enabling the construction of an alternative symbolic order apart from phallogocentrism.
References to sexual difference today typically evoke the essentialism/constructivism feminist debates of the ’70s and ’80s, which emerged from a prior debate between “liberal” and “difference” feminism. In schematic terms, liberal feminists argued that women were formally equal to men and should have the same rights as men. In contrast, difference feminists, including feminist women of color, emphasized that women are different from men and should not have to be the same to warrant equal status. For many feminists, this then triggered discussion regarding the status of this difference—were women different in essence or just through social construction? In contrast, Italian feminism could be understood as sidestepping this debate by instead seeking to develop a position that refused either pole of the essentialist/constructivist binary.7
Indeed, il pensiero della differenza sessuale (sexual difference theory)8 was shaped less by the opposition to liberal feminism that influenced the development of feminism in the U.S. and rather more by its response to the traditional split between conservativism and communism in 1970s Italian politics as well as a new post-Marxist leftism still imbued with misogyny. Invitations for women to join with men politically, despite purportedly being on equal terms, ended up dominated by male perspectives.9 As a result, the target of sexual difference theory was not primarily liberal equality feminism, as was the case for American sexual difference feminism, but any notion of politics based on a notion of equality as sameness. This was because equality as sameness reinforced the same old gender hierarchies. As a consequence, Italian feminists were particularly attuned to the problem of male bias presented as a supposed neutrality. To be able to oppose this, and inspired by the work of Luce Irigaray, Italian feminism had to assert that there was something that was not man, that was typically referred to as “woman.” This something, inasmuch as it was not man, could be understood, in Gisela Bock and Susan James’s words, as “a primary, originary female difference [which] has, in all areas of social life, been homologized or assimilated to a male perspective which hides behind a mask of gender neutrality in order to subordinate women.”10 This was an understanding of sexual difference that was neither based on the claim that there is a female essence that we can know nor simply repeating the sexist and patriarchal imaginary of women as different and lesser. Instead, it provided an assertion of female difference as different in a positive sense, in a way that did not need men to create the conditions for women’s existence or self-understanding.
The argument for sexual difference asserted that the sexed female body is not only something that is perceived to operate within and to significantly affect our contemporary world, but is an irremediable aspect of existence. This is why Cavarero stresses that sexual difference is “given.” Whether we like it or not, our bodies are sexed: to exist as an embodied being is to exist as a sexed being, even if the meaning and significance of this “sexedness” is affected by normative conceptions of sex/gender. Cavarero expresses this through her primary distinction, borrowed from Hannah Arendt, between who we are and what we are.11 Our sexedness is integral to who we are—to our embodied uniqueness—whereas the meaning and significance of this sexedness describes what we are; what we could otherwise call our “identity.” But in either case, what is crucial for both Italian sexual difference theory and Cavarero is that our sexedness is a necessary part of our existence. There is no neutral terrain that we can inhabit free of our sexedness, and neither is our sexedness merely a discursive inscription on the otherwise inert matter of our bodies.
Cavarero acknowledges that it may appear as if both sexes find themselves in the same quandary. If we pose sexual difference as secondary and nonessential, then it would seem that women and men alike find themselves already spoken, defined, and controlled in the social sphere. Yet, like many other feminist thinkers, Cavarero emphasizes that any idea of a neutral, non-sexed identity is actually already a space taken by Man. The neutral image of the human is always already male. If women are to appear, they can be neither male nor neutral; women find themselves obscured by a presumed neutrality that also operates at the level of their sexedness. Those designated women are subordinate to either Man or to the so-called neutral being. Consequently, Italian difference feminism asserts that to resist the fact that the space of neutrality is already taken by Man, women have to find a way to appear as women but to refuse to do so in the way that has always been demanded of them—as a subordinate. For sexual difference feminists, it is only by asserting something called sexual difference that, in Cavarero’s words, we open up “the possibility of the woman to speak herself, think herself, and represent herself as a subject in the proper sense of the word.”12 Thus because woman as a nonessential being risked overlooking the exploitation of women, sexual difference theorists preferred to risk the essentialism that will always accompany their assertions of difference. However, it is worth acknowledging that sexual difference theory does not need to assert difference as an essence in any ontological sense. It can simply provide a focus on who women are at any point in history,13 understood predominantly as the experience not of a concrete essence of what it is to be a woman but just what it is to be that which is separate, that which is not man. As Fanny Söderbäck notes, “The crucial point … is that all individuals are sexed, not that there are or should be only two sexes.”14 Thus, difference feminism seeks to acknowledge our inability to escape the body, even though difference is not intended here as a ground.15
Indeed, although Cavarero’s work, especially her early work, has often appeared to take an essentialist position, she clarified in a 2008 interview with Elisabetta Bertolino that where she has treated the body as an essence, this was done so strategically.16 This may appear as a change of approach but is less surprising when we realize that even in her earlier work Cavarero was uneasy with the limitations of an abstract understanding of “woman.” This was signaled by her concern that any position of strong or positive sexual difference that seeks to define what woman is may lead to the opposing problem of mirroring the subjection of woman that is affected by man.17 As Diana Fuss suggested in her assessment of Spivak’s “strategic essentialism,” such a strategic approach could be seen as a “ ‘risk’ worth taking,” since although strategic essentialism can be dangerous “in the hands of a hegemonic group,” it can, notwithstanding, be a powerful tool for subalterns to subvert and displace current power relations.18
Despite her unease with essentialism, and particularly pertinent for the dialogue in this volume, Cavarero’s sexual difference theory did initially establish itself in opposition to both liberal and what she referred to as “postmodern” philosophy, specifically represented by the work of Judith Butler.19 Cavarero’s concern was that both liberal and postmodern feminists unwittingly used the metaphor “woman” from a male perspective and thus ended