A quarant'anni dall'uscita di Con voce di donna, il libro che diede il via a una rivoluzione, portando le voci delle donne alla ribalta e consentendo loro di essere ascoltate a pieno titolo, Gilligan ritorna sull'argomento di quel libro fondamentale riesaminandone le tesi centrali alla luce del presente e dei progressi della riflessione sul tema negli ultimi decenni. Oggi è possibile chiarire e articolare ciò che quarant'anni fa non si poteva vedere o dire: che la 'voce diversa', l'etica della cura, sebbene inizialmente percepita come una 'voce femminile', di donna, è in realtà una voce umana. La voce da cui si differenzia è una voce patriarcale, legata al sistema binario e alle gerarchie di genere. Laddove il patriarcato è in vigore o viene imposto, la voce umana è una voce di resistenza e l'etica della cura è un'etica di liberazione. «La voce dell'etica della cura è una voce umana e la designazione in termini di genere di una voce umana come 'femminile' è un problema. Sentire la 'voce differente' come voce umana significava liberarsi di una serie di ostacoli che impedivano di vedere che il sistema binario di genere - la costruzione delle capacità umane come 'maschili' o 'femminili' - non è solo una distorsione della realtà, ma anche una pietra miliare del patriarcato.» Un libro di psicologia alla portata di tutte/i che dice cose semplici ma importanti, che porge la mano e la voce a chiunque voglia ascoltare, donne e uomini. La voce umana è la voce del ventunesimo secolo.

Un'analisi del patriarcato che scopre e mostra all'azione meccanismi psicologici potenti e sotterranei. Nonostante decenni di attivismo sulle disuguaglianze di genere e sull'uguaglianza dei diritti, perché la discriminazione rimane endogena al sistema sociale e politico? Cos'è che rende il patriarcato così resiliente e resistente al cambiamento? Senza dubbio uno dei fattori che lo tengono in piedi è il fatto che alcune persone traggono beneficio dai vantaggi iniqui che il patriarcato conferisce loro. Ma basta questo a spiegarne la persistenza ostinata? In questo libro Carol Gilligan e Naomi Snider propongono una visione diversa, sostenendo che il patriarcato persiste perché ha una funzione psicologica. Imponendoci di sacrificare l'amore a vantaggio della gerarchia, il patriarcato ci protegge dalla vulnerabilità in cui amare ci pone e diviene paradossalmente un baluardo difensivo rispetto al rischio della perdita e dell'abbandono insito nell'amore.

'When Judy Y. Chu first encountered the four-year-old boys we meet in this book, they were experiencing a social initiation into boyhood. They were initially astute in picking up on other people's emotions, emotionally present in their relationships, andcompetent in their navigation of the human social world. However, the boys gradually appeared less perceptive, articulate, and responsive, and became more guarded and subdued in their relationships as they learned to prove that they are boys primarily byshowing that they are not girls. Based on a two-year study of boys aged four to six, When Boys Become Boys offers a new way of thinking about boys' development. Chu finds that behaviors typically viewed as 'natural' for boys reflect an adaptation to cultures that require boys to be emotionally stoic, competitive, and aggressive if they are to be accepted as 'real boys.' Yet even as boys begin to reap the social benefits of aligning with norms of masculine behavior, they pay a psychological and relational price for hiding parts of their authentic selves. Through documenting boys' perceptions of the obstacles they face and the pressures they feel to conform, and showing that their compliance with norms of masculine behavior is neither automatic nor inevitable, this accessible and engaging book provides insight into ways in which adults can foster boys' healthy resistance and help them to access a broader range of options for expressing themselves'--

Carol Gilligan, psicologa e ricercatrice americana, è nota per il successo di 'Con voce di donna. Etica e formazione della personalità', pubblicato nel 1987. Un testo che si è posto all'inizio di una rivoluzione dando voce ed espressione alla differenza che segna il sentire delle donne. Dopo più di vent'anni Carol Gilligan prosegue e approfondisce la ricerca precedente e mette in luce la dura resistenza che le ragazze adolescenti oppongono a un'iniziazione socialmente fissata e culturalmente definita che le vorrebbe assimilate al modello corrente di femminilità. Passive, sottomesse, pronte a dimenticare se stesse per non essere tacciate di egoismo, insensibilità e non diventare socialmente escluse. Per scoprire la voce più autentica delle ragazze Gilligan usa come sempre l'intervista e l'ascolto. Un ascolto molto particolare che non si limita alle parole, ma prende in considerazione anche il corpo, le esitazioni, gli occhi abbassati, i silenzi significativi. L'inclinazione a render conto delle relazioni, la vulnerabilità, l'empatia, la cura del vivente sono i valori che le giovani donne esprimono non senza fatica perché si contrappongono agli ideali di virilità, competizione e ricerca del proprio interesse che segnano i canoni riconosciuti. Introduzione di Federica Giardini.

Since the publication of her landmark book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan has transformed the way we think about women and men and the relations between them. It was ‘the little book that started a revolution’, and with more than 800,000 copies in print it has become one of the most widely read and influential books ever written on gender and human development.

In her new book Joining the Resistance Carol Gilligan reflects on the evolution of her thinking and shows how her key ideas were interwoven with her own life experiences. Her work began with the question of voice: who is speaking to whom, in what body, telling what stories about which relationships? By listening carefully she heard a voice that had been held in silence, and in the process realized the extent to which we – both women and men – had been telling false stories about ourselves.

In her subsequent work Gilligan found that adolescent girls resisted pressures to disengage themselves from their honest voices, and by joining their resistance she opened the way for the development of a more humane way of thinking about personal and political relationships. For the central conviction of her work today – and the central thesis of this book – is that the requisites for love and the requisites for citizenship in a democratic society are one and the same. Both voice and the desire to live in relationships inherent in our human nature, together with the capacity to resist false authority.

Combining autobiographical reflection with an analysis of key questions about gender and human development, this timely and highly readable book by one of America’s greatest contemporary thinkers will appeal to a wide readership.

Since the publication of her landmark book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan has transformed the way we think about women and men and the relations between them. It was 'the little book that started a revolution', and with more than 800,000 copies in print it has become one of the most widely read and influential books ever written on gender and human development.

In her new book Joining the Resistance Carol Gilligan reflects on the evolution of her thinking and shows how her key ideas were interwoven with her own life experiences. Her work began with the question of voice: who is speaking to whom, in what body, telling what stories about which relationships? By listening carefully she heard a voice that had been held in silence, and in the process realized the extent to which we – both women and men – had been telling false stories about ourselves.

In her subsequent work Gilligan found that adolescent girls resisted pressures to disengage themselves from their honest voices, and by joining their resistance she opened the way for the development of a more humane way of thinking about personal and political relationships. For the central conviction of her work today – and the central thesis of this book – is that the requisites for love and the requisites for citizenship in a democratic society are one and the same. Both voice and the desire to live in relationships inherent in our human nature, together with the capacity to resist false authority.

Combining autobiographical reflection with an analysis of key questions about gender and human development, this timely and highly readable book by one of America's greatest contemporary thinkers will appeal to a wide readership.

In this daring, provocative, and insightful book, bestselling author and internationally acclaimed playwright Eve Ensler writes fictional monologues and stories inspired by girls around the globe. Moving through a world of topics and emotions, these voices are fierce, alive, tender, complicated, imaginative, and smart. Girls today often find themselves in a struggle between remaining strong and true to themselves and conforming to society's expectations in an attempt to please. They are taught not to be too intense, too passionate, too smart, too caring, too open. They are encouraged to shut down their instincts, their outrage, their desires and their dreams, to be polite, to obey the rules. I Am an Emotional Creature is a celebration of the authentic voice inside every girl and an inspiring call to action for girls everywhere to speak up, follow their dreams, and become the women they were always meant to be.

Among the girls Ensler creates are an American who struggles with peer pressure in a suburban high school; an anorexic blogging as she eats less and less; a Masai girl from Kenya unwilling to endure female genital mutilation; a Bulgarian sex slave, no more than fifteen, a Chinese factory worker making Barbies; an Iranian student who is tricked into a nose job; a pregnant girl trying to decide if she should keep her baby.

Through rants, poetry, questions, and facts, we come to understand the universality of girls everywhere: their resiliency, their wildness, their pain, their fears, their secrets, and their triumphs. I Am an Emotional Creature is a call, a reckoning, an education, an act of empowerment for girls, and an illumination for parents and for us all.


From the Hardcover edition.

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. The book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology (based on loss in intimate life) and resistance to it (based on the love of equals) to the Roman Republic and Empire and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. Democratic resistance in religion, psychology, the arts, and politics rests on free voices challenging patriarchal restrictions on the love of equals. In addition to examining why we are at war, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad.

From the ardently religious young woman who longs for the life of a male scholar to the young rebel who visits a strip club, smokes pot, and agonizes over her loss of faith to the proud Lubavitcher with a desire for a high-powered career, Stephanie Wellen Levine provides a rare glimpse into the inner worlds and daily lives of these Hasidic girls.

Lubavitcher Hasidim are famous for their efforts to inspire secular Jews to become more observant and for their messianic fervor. Strict followers of Orthodox Judaism, they maintain sharp gender-role distinctions.

Levine spent a year living in the Lubavitch community of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, participating in the rhythms of Hasidic girlhood. Drawing on many intimate hours among Hasidim and over 30 in-depth interviews, Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers offers rich portraits of individual Hasidic young women and how they deal with the conflicts between the regimented society in which they live and the pull of mainstream American life.

This superbly crafted book offers intimate stories from Hasidic teenagers' lives, providing an intriguing twist to a universal theme: the struggle to grow up and define who we are within the context of culture, family, and life-driving beliefs.

Carol Gilligan, whose classic In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now offers a brilliant, provocative book about love. Why is love so often associated with tragedy, she asks. Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns?

Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare's plays and Freud's case histories, to Anne Frank's diaries and contemporary novels. Groundbreaking and immensely readable, The Birth of Pleasure has powerful implications for the way we live and love.

Tra personaggi reali, interviste a coppie e bambini nelle scuole, e personaggi di finzione che vanno dalla mitologia greca alle tragedie di Shakespeare, dai casi clinici di Freud ai romanzi di Hawthorne, Proust, Toni Morrison e Michael Ondaatje, Carol Gilligan ci accompagna in un viaggio che è un'indagine appassionata delle relazioni umane, una dimostrazione lucida e insieme poetica del perché l'amore tra un uomo e una donna è cosi spesso rappresentato - e vissuto - in termini di perdita, sacrificio e dolore, e perché è possibile trovare il percorso che conduce alla felicità.

This is the little book that started a revolution. First published almost twenty years ago, it made women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond. Translated into sixteen languages, with more than three-quarters of a million copies sold around the world. In a Different Voice has inspired new research, new educational initiatives, and political debate-and helped many women and men to see themselves and each other in a different light.

Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women--their motives, their moral commitments, the course of their psychological growth, and their special view of what is important in life. Here she sets out to correct psychology's misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result is truly a tour de force, which may well reshape much of what psychology now has to say about female experience.