There are questions that resist the wear and tear of time, recovering cyclically in the public debate without losing intensity. Among the most persistent, that relating to the concept of female – on how to codified, represented, regulated or reduced – continues to consult society, institutions and languages. What does it mean today to be a woman? And who defines the symbolic contours, the social limits and ways through which this condition is interpreted and recognized?
The female – historically overdated and frequently the subject of heteronomous definition – has been for centuries shaped by external glances, inscribing in cultural, religious and discursive devices functional to the conservation of power structures. But what happens when these frames begin to crack?
The panel “borders of the female between culture, power and representation” was articulated around these issues, held in Piazza IX Aprile, as part of the 2025 edition of Taobuk – Taormina International Book Festival, in collaboration with Eni. To moderate the meeting was Massimo Sideri, editorialist of the Corriere della Sera, who opened the work by recalling the macrotem of the “border” – common thread of the entire edition of the festival – as a transversal and powerful reading key also compared to the female question: a discursive space that has always been marked by tensions between visibility and cancellation, symbolic centrality and effective marginality.
To introduce the debate, Valentina Pitrone, responsible for Brand Advertising & Projects of Eni. The cultural anthropologist Macrina Marilena Maffei has provided a solid historical-anthropological excursus, highlighting how the construction of the female “otherness” sinks its roots in ancient symbolic models, still operational. He recalled, in particular, an emblematic passage from the Trojans of Euripides, in which Queen Ecuba – a figure of power par excellence – declares that he has never climbed a ship. An affirmation that, beyond its narrative evidence, restores the image of a confined female subjectivity, excluded from the space of a political action that would be due to it. An absence that is bodily and institutional together.
Bello, writer, writer, poet and activist Nicaraguanse, has moved the focus on geopolitical current affairs, denouncing the growing climate of regression taking place in many areas of the world. After decades of conquests obtained with difficulty, he observed, women find themselves facing a new wave of conservatism that aims to restore subordination models. An involution that concerns not only the rights, but the imagination itself.
On the artistic side, the director and screenwriter Maria Sole Tognazzi retraced the stages of her authorial path, explaining how the choice to put female characters at the center was born from a narrative urgency but also to a political awareness. Starting from the film “Traveling”, he gave birth to autonomous, complex female figures, often sun by choice. Women who are not “the wife of”, “The partner of”, “The daughter of”, but exist as such, bearers of desires, limits, conflicts. A path continued with “Petra”, the Sky series inspired by the literary detective of the same name, which represents a new protagonist model, refractory to stereotypes and not reconciled with the dominant imagination.
Closing the circle between present and cultural origins, Anna Maria Urso, ordinary professor of classical philology at the University of Messina, analyzed the mythological roots of the female representation in Greek thought. He recalled how, since ancient times, the woman has been designed as a limit: Pandora inaugurates the era of loss; Plato defines women as imperfect reincarnations of man; Aristotle categorizes them openly as “subspecies”. However, as Urso pointed out, even in the myth there are figures that break this structure: Clitennestra, which makes the floor an instrument of subversion; Medea, who breaks the boundaries of the rule at the price of monstrosity. “The theater – he said – a place of reflection”. A final tribute was addressed to Antonella Ferrara, founder and president of Taobuk, recognized as a central figure in the construction of a festival that – with lucidity and courage – continues to question the nodes of the contemporary through the gaze of women. (gi.lanz.)