Cecilia Soresina, PhD at the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, recounts the event 'Mutant Bodies, Women, Time and Care'.

On International Women's Day, the Equal Opportunities Service and the Institute of Italian Studies at USI promoted an initiative entitled Corpi mutanti. Donne, tempo, cura (Mutant Bodies. Women, Time, Care), dedicated to female bodies and non-conforming subjectivities, which are still exposed to cultural, social and political norms that condition their representation, recognition and forms of care.

For the event, held on 10 March, three speakers were invited who, although coming from different research fields, addressed closely connected issues from complementary perspectives: Gloria Origgi, philosopher at the CNRS in Paris and author of La donna è mobile. Filosofia della menopausa (Giulio Einaudi editore, 2025); Alessandra Sarchi, a writer whose work is characterized by a constant attention to the theme of the body, particularly the disabled body; and Gloria Dagnino, a researcher at the University of Udine, who is currently focusing her studies on female ageing in cinema.

The evening was preceded by three workshop-style sessions of critical reading open to the public, involving students, doctoral candidates and members of the USI academic staff. Rather than offering pre-established answers, the programme was conceived as a space for shared reading and discussion, from which questions to be addressed to the speakers could emerge. Participants were free to respond to the selected excerpts by drawing both on their personal experience, understood not as a private or secondary element but as a political act, and on their academic and intellectual background.

The first session, led by Federica Frediani, focused on selected excerpts from La donna è mobile. Filosofia della menopausa, approaching the climacteric as a transformative experience from which to question female identity. The second, led by Cecilia Soresina and Sara Sermini, proposed a reading of texts by Alessandra Sarchi — La notte ha la mia voce (Einaudi, 2017), the short story La tana, included in the collection Via da qui (minimum fax, 2022), and Buchi neri (Industria & Letteratura, 2025) — in order to reflect on the relationship between the body and disability. The final workshop allowed participants to refine the questions to be addressed to the guests.

In particular, several themes shared by the three speakers were identified as especially urgent: the need to rethink desire starting from the distinction between the desirable subject and the desiring subject; the necessity to question the conditioning of the gaze in the formation of our identity; and the power of imagination and the arts to challenge binary frameworks and open new possibilities for self-representation and relationships.

In line with the path that preceded it, the meeting on 10 March proved to be a fruitful opportunity to further explore many of the issues that had emerged during the moments of collective reading. In her talk entitled Esperienze trasformative, Gloria Origgi reflected on the processes of transformation affecting the female body and on how they may become an opportunity to rethink our relationship with reality. Alessandra Sarchi, in her contribution L’alterità del luogo che abitiamo, il nostro corpo, addressed — starting from an idea by Roland Barthes — the theme of the body as a threshold, as a place of relation and testimony. Finally, Gloria Dagnino presented Cinema e invecchiamento: una questione di genere?, an analysis of women’s ageing in cinema, beginning with a quantitative survey of the underrepresentation of female characters over fifty in European cinema between 2014 and 2023, and then offering a deeper reflection on the phenomenon of the monstrification of women in cinema.

In the final part of the evening, the questions prepared collectively helped further clarify the role of imagination and the arts in rethinking our position within contexts that regulate and discipline the body, the need to return to questioning temporality and desire in a society still marked by logics of productivity and efficiency, and the urgency of building a form of empathy that is not mere identification, but rather an understanding of others’ experiences and claims.

Above all, the dialogue with the speakers highlighted the need to critically question the practices that shape our ways of studying, our gaze, and our relationship with others, with the aim of rethinking, in a more attentive and conscious way, how we inhabit the present.