Conference Program

In recent years, the term "patriarchy" has urgently returned to public debate, for reasons that are clear to everyone. But what are the deeper meanings of this term today? There is certainly an often overlooked and underestimated patriarchy in the dynamics of care and family relationships, where hegemonic representations of the relationship between masculine and feminine shape them. These hegemonic representations are not always easy to detect, including those that allude to a generic “equality” effectively modeled on the masculine order as well as to a “complementarity” that is, upon closer inspection, only a combination of stereotypes.

The aim of this contribution is, first of all, to address some of these neglected forms of hegemony within affective relationships, also referring to recent research on adolescence (Istat 2025; Save the Children, 2025, 2026; Vinciguerra 2024; Pasta-Santerini 2025; Toffanin, Gius, Cremonesini 2026). Furthermore, since in pedagogical perspective it is necessary to design innovative educational paths to overcome hegemonic logics in the direction of reciprocity, the contribution intends to argue how this overcoming requires a deepening of the philosophy of education that helps to rethink embodiment, fragility, and dependence. These can be meant as human co-existentials in a phenomenological sense (Heidegger 1976 – Fink 2018), that characterize our human condition and that, however, are today deformed by widespread neoliberal ideologies that reinforce logics of domination and oppression. On the other hand, new logics of mutual recognition are to be implemented.

In this perspective, to deconstruct hegemonic and patriarchal logics, the contribution proposes a parallel reading of the texts of Rita Laura Segato, bell hooks, and Eva Feder Kittay. Although their theoretical paths are different and distinct, their common effort is to address the rethinking of human embodiment as the first tool for struggle and overcoming the various forms of patriarchal hegemony in contemporary society.