Lia Cigarini and the Freedom of the ‘Legislative Void’

This chapter outlines the work of Lia Cigarini, lawyer and feminist thinker, tracing her political practice, her work as a lawyer, and her theoretical production developed in line with Italian feminism of difference, intended as a movement of thoughts, bodies, and political discourses in which normative and descriptive fields intersect. The analysis of Lia Cigarini’s intellectual production revolves around a series of keywords that over time have opened up the semantic field of legal feminism: experience, separation, self-consciousness, desire, power, body, signification, authority, symbolic order, mother. These words not only constitute the fundamental vocabulary of feminism of sexual difference, but are also presented as possible keys to interpreting the relationship between law, rights, and female freedom.