Teresa Valentini

Teresa Valentini’s postdoctoral research, What Do They Mean When They Say I Can’t? Modernism, Impotence, and Gender Dynamics, aims to unveil the gendered power dynamics underlying the concept of impotentiality (as theorized by Agamben) in Italian literature and thought by women authors, from the modernist era through the late 20th century. Her work reconsiders dominant interpretations of impotence and impotentiality in contemporary Italian thought—largely shaped by male philosophers since the 1980s—and foregrounds the underrepresented contributions of women writers, theorists, translators, and activists to this debate. Their works offer alternative readings of impotentiality that resist both gendered and genre-based hierarchies, challenging entrenched binaries of activity/passivity, productivity/inertia, power/powerlessness, and theory/fiction. By tracing these alternative narratives, the project critiques the persistent and pernicious cultural and philosophical alignment of femininity with passivity and incapacity. At the same time, it reclaims impotentiality—as expressed through refusal, withdrawal, inertia, or non-compliance—as a possible subversive instrument of political and social resistance.