Ines Testoni, Il terzo sesso. Perché Dio non è maschio e altre questioni di genere, 2023

Since its emergence, the human species has been drastically divided in two – indulging in religious, linguistic, cultural and social false pretences and beliefs over the millennia. On the one hand there are the men: strong and resilient bodies, heroes and gods to be enslaved to. On the other, women: weak and fragile bodies, handmaids to serve. This primitive logic ended up being assumed as transcendent law, attributing to nature and God the responsibility for what was instead a mere human male project. Religions and false myths have constructed men predisposed to war on the one hand, and women devoted to obedience on the other. With “The Third Sex”, Ines Testoni examines the origin of this gender schism, the systems of power that have established it, and above all the idea of subalternity that has conditioned and bent – and continues to condition and bend – the lives of women from all eras and continents. After dismantling the stereotypes linked to the ‘weaker sex’, following in the wake of the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil, the author sets out her theory of the ‘third sex’: to live in tomorrow’s world, it is necessary to overcome male/female binarism, sexual and linguistic distinctions, and to recognise oneself as an individual capable of living and balancing within oneself the instances of both sexes. To inhabit a new, fluid and plural one.