For close to ten years now, I've been feeling myself turn away from the militantly critical theories I have contributed to articulate - feminist theory, gender theory, queer theory.

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.

First I want to situate myself as a white non-American woman, who came of age in a country which, although marked by rigid class differences, had virtually no internal racial differences and was relatively homogeneous culturally.

But one did not do feminist theory, as such, in those days, not only because male academic discourse did not recognize such a term, but especially because the women's movement did not either.

In fact, the obsessive thematization of sexuality and sexual identity in the U.S., in particular since the AIDS crisis, seems to bear out precisely what Foucault decried as the deployment of sexualiy in late capitalism.

The state of the world, of course, is constantly changing, and so is theory.

The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences.

Many Italians today refer to themselves as citizens of a Third World country, which they are in many ways, not simply economically.