Identità, plasticità, relazione. I modi del genere

The debate on the gender question has often been framed as a critical dialogue between essentialist and anti-essentialist positions. This essay attempts to rethink the question of gender by seeking to understand identity as heteropoiesis, as eccentricity by virtue of desire and plasticity. The aim is to develop a notion of gender that has its condition of possibility in a subjectivity, conceived as plastic and constantly deferred from itself, but also as capable of acts of “taking form” through which such a subjectivity offers resistance to its dispersion and alienation. Holding fast to the principle of the freedom of the self-determination of selfhood, gender then appears as a form of identity, but one that is plastic and relational.