Is a Female and Feminist Symbolic Revolution of the Law Possible?

The female and feminist symbolic revolution of the Law has begun as “autonomy of the law and autonomy in the law”, as Lia Cigarini wrote in 1995. The autonomy of the law is symbolic autonomy: it means knowing that, for a woman, justice and law do not coincide although they may coincide. The woman with symbolic independence judges the Law and adheres to it if it coincides with her female and maternal sense of justice. If it does not coincide, she looks for autonomy in the Law through using the multiple practices that feminism has invented, such as breaking with the false neutrality of the Law, the female lawyer/plaintiff who seeks affidamento in the practice of the process, sexuating crimes against women so that the penal principle of equality is not applied between the sexes (typifying feminicide, for example, or rape as a war weapon), the cases against the State and its concrete agents for not complying with due diligence, the reversing of the burden of proof in cases of male violence against women, achieving the definitive “No means no” with no other need for proof in cases of rape and sexual abuse, breaking the silence of incest or its hiding under the name of “sexual abuse”, protesting the inclusion of incest committed against the mother in her childhood in the historical memory laws, etc. The autonomy of the law and the autonomy in the law are inseparable. Because without autonomy of the Law, a woman gets lost, she loses her symbolic horizon, she loses her sense of self and her desire in the stormy sea of the male legal clauses, sentences and sophistry accumulated against her and without her over centuries. As Audre Lorde wrote, it is the case that, “the tools of the master will never dismantle the master’s house; they will let us beat them provisionally at their own game, but they will never allow us to bring about real change.” To achieve autonomy of the Law and in the Law, I propose, tentatively, to use, by analogy, the method invented (2005) for the writing of History by the women who make up the Comunità di storia vivente (Community of Living History) of the Milan Women’s Bookstore (Libreria delle donne di Milano): Marirì Martinengo, Luciana Tavernini, Laura Minguzzi and Marina Santini.