Femininity at the intersection of differences: the intersectional perspective and forward-thinking approach of Franca Pinto Minerva

Abstract

This contribution is situated within the broader theme of women's trajectories in scientific and pedagogical research and aims to analyse the contribution that a leading figure in pedagogy such as Franca Pinto Minerva has made to studies on femininity, anticipating the most recent intersectional perspective. In addressing the theme of femininity, Franca Pinto Minerva sought to interpret it in its inherent complexity, as the result of intersections, encounters and hybridisations: between genders and generations, between contexts and cultures, between roles and professions, between the dimension of corporeality and the social dimension, between recognition and denial. This complexity has in turn always been nourished by the contamination between different fields of knowledge and disciplines, thus confirming
the very nature of pedagogy, understood, writes Franca Pinto Minerva, as a border science, the latter conceived “not as a line of closure and separation but as a place in which the adventure of crossing boundaries can be exercised” (2013).