Gender, citizenship, education. Asymmetric identities

Abstract

In the Seventies the new feminism explicited a certain evaluation of one’s self sexed by women. It strongly emerged that inequalities between men and women don’t derive from biological and natural diference of their bodies, diferently sexed, but they are the product historically determined of the social construction of two genders, voted in two diferent destinies, one public and the other one private, one of self afrmation and strength and the other one of submissiveness and weakness. Sex, as a whole of physiological characteristics aimed to identify women as agents of reproduction, as bodies devoted to motherhood, becomes the secular element of distinction between male and female, and sexual diference is used and instrumentalized to con- struct stereotypical and asymmetric gender roles. If sex diferentiates us from birth, however only the big symbolic and social reinforcement changes sexual diferences in other diferences where genders are included by stereotypes and prejudices.