In their 2023 book Soeurs, Pour une psychanalyse féministe [Sisters, A Plea for a Feminist Psychoanalysis], psychoanalyst Silvia Lippi and philosopher Patrice Maniglier introduce a sororal psychoanalysis that aims to overcome the oppositions between the psychic and the social, the intimate and the political, the unconscious and the collective, and to contribute to imagining a world rid of the imaginaries of masculine domination. Theirs is an attempt to redefine the field after #MeToo – not to deconstruct psychoanalysis, but to reconstruct it by listening to what is being said by those who challenge its phallogocentric, homophobic, heternormative biases. To start psychoanalysis anew is ultimately to attempt to do something with the unconscious, i.e., what is meant to remain unknown and can therefore never be anticipated.

This event will focus on unconscious sisterhood, a concept Lippi and Maniglier introduce to describe a type of social link that is opposed to the phallic model of brotherhood. Unconscious sisterhood is not limited to the relations between persons already identified as women; it rather originates directly from various traumas that form what Lippi and Maniglier term a ‘shared symptom’. In elaborating these concepts, our speakers will explore a definition of womanhood that is radically political and relational — one critical of Lacan’s notorious definition of woman as mystic, which condemns women to remain silent, isolated, and apolitical.

Simone Brioni is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the literary and cinematic representation and self-representation of migrants, and the legacy and memory of Italian colonialism. On these topics, he wrote four documentaries: The Fourth Road (2009; with/about Kaha Mohamed Aden), Aulò (2009; with/about Ribka Sibhatu), Maka (2023; with/about Geneviève Makaping) and Beyond the Frame (2023). Publications in this area also include The Somali Within (2015), Scrivere di Islam (co-authored with Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, 2020), The Horn of Africa and Italy (co-edited with Shimelis Bonsa Gulema, 2018), and L’Italia, l’altrove (2022).

Vulnerability has emerged as a crucial term to describe the human condition, especially in light of the pandemic. Its etymology can be traced back to the Latin term ‘vulnus’, which denoted both a ‘generic wound’ and the ‘infringement of a right’. This semantic ambiguity still persists in current interpretations of vulnerability, with some understanding it as an ontological concept (namely vulnerability as a shared human condition) and others as a political and legal category that identifies specific groups or individuals who are exposed to discrimination. While the universalistic account of the notion fails to bear witness to the unequal distribution of precarity as it affects certain lives, the particularistic approach risks reproducing and even fostering the isolation and marginality of groups and individuals identified as needing protection. In this latter approach, one fails to account both for the agency of such subjects and groups as they resist those conditions and for the systematic and structural connotations of certain forms of violence.

However, many feminist theorizations claim that vulnerability, in its embodied and relational connotation, is still a helpful tool for mapping the present since it allows one to grasp how forms of resistance emerge. Taking this perspective entails many critical questions:

What would it mean to understand vulnerability as a situated condition linked to relationality and interdependency, rather than as a state that pertains to certain subjects? How should politics, institutions, and law take care of vulnerable lives? Can vulnerability be theorized, politicized, and ‘juridified’ in a manner that takes into consideration the diverse and plural ways in which everyone is exposed to it? In what senses does this concept necessitate an understanding that is derived from situated knowledge, such that the concept does not remain a theoretical abstraction? In order to address such urgent issues, this symposium aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between feminist and gender studies, political philosophy, post- and decolonial studies, critical theory, legal studies, and social sciences.