Call for Papers n. LXV/1 – Philosophy to the Test of "Gender". Difference, Fluidity, Relationship
- Redazione | Il Pensiero
- Mar 27
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 28
Deadline: September 15, 2025
The editorial board of the philosophy journal «Il Pensiero» selects original contributions in the form of essays and reviews for the issue dedicated to the topic:
Philosophy to the Test of Gender. Difference, Fluidity, Relationship
Deadline for submission of contributions is September 15, 2025; response will be communicated possibly by January 12, 2026. The articles may be in a language chosen from Italian, English, French, Spanish, German. Submissions should not exceed 45.000 characters, including spaces and footnotes, and should be accompanied by abstracts and 5 keywords (in the language in which the article is written and in English, maximum 1200 characters including spaces for each abstract).
The issue is scheduled for release in March 2026.
Editors: Rosaria Caldarone e Rosa Maria Lupo – University of Palermo
The theoretical challenge of the issue entitled Philosophy to the Test of Gender. Difference, Fluidity, Relationship is linked to the idea that philosophy is able to indicate forms of non-conflicting relationship among different gender identities. In these types of relationship, difference does not hinder but rather lays the foundations for a hospitable “equality” towards modes of subjectivity resisting any form of male/female polarization.
The words of the subtitle – difference, fluidity, relationship – aim to indicate, without contrasting them, important conceptual junctions of thought linked to “gender” which, however, today often seem to come into conflict. Instead, the title (Philosophy to the Test of Gender) aims to emphasize the opportunity to re-examine the entire structure of philosophy – starting from the question of gender – which today can no longer be neglected, due to the urgency of current ethical, social and legal issues. On the other hand, philosophy willingly allows itself to be questioned by virtue of its being: since its Platonic origin, philosophy shows itself as «a tension determined by Eros» (M. Heidegger, Was ist das – die Philosophie?) which involves bodies and their sexuation on the path to wisdom.
According to Judith Butler, “gender” can be thought of as a deconstruction of “sex” and, therefore, as a recoding of the “natural”. Such a deconstruction highlights the negotiable and constructed character of gender. In the face of this thesis, what the issue aims to investigate is whether the deconstruction of “sex” exercised by “gender” can be considered the only one possible and, hence, whether the notion of gender difference can still be evoked in the era of “Gender Equality” in order to question gender. If we assume that the “other sex” – an expression that has marked an excessive homogeneity between “other” and “heterosexuality” in history and culture – beyond its gender connotation, is always the sex of the other person identified by desire, in all its mysterious multiformity, we encounter the notion of fluidity right at the heart of desire. By its very nature, desire itself never stiffens and remains in a circle marked, in turn, by a constitutive plasticity, just as plastic is, after all, the form of the relationship, according to the fundamental lesson that comes to us from philo-sophia: desire enters into a relationship with that which, being eternal, stable, unmodifiable (the immobile divine), defuses the dimension of possession, capture, manipulation; in this way, desire brings distance into the relationship, not as a sign of domination, but of freedom and, therefore, of responsibility and choice.
The issue aims therefore at analyzing the categories of difference, fluidity, and relationship, also in their reciprocal links, with particular reference to the contribution of philosophy. To this end, essays may address the birth, the historical context, the application or the crisis of these categories, their artistic representations, their effects on our linguistic habits and practices, on our worldviews and on our very ways of inhabiting intersubjective relationships.