In a green corner of Biblioteca Baratta, quaint yet surrounded by street art, journalist Giulia Siviero leads a tightly-packed audience through her Trame femministe. Never didactic or presumptive, Siviero’s feminist pedagogy jumps from Virginia Woolf to Doris Lessing before landing squarely with 20th century Italian thinkers such as Carla Lonzi and Luisa Muraro.

More pressingly since Woolf’s Three Guineas, Siviero contends, the feminine subject posed a dilemma: To live up to the masculine despite being a woman, or to live as a woman? Equality on one hand, difference on the other, this dilemma has a kind of cyclicality to it. From the times of Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft to those of the post-war social contract, the feminine is relegated to the private. If anything, domesticity only became shinier with consumerism and its army of dishwashers and vacuum cleaners. In response, the equality ideal put forth by state feminism aims at parity between the masculine and the feminine, extending to the latter civil rights first and market-based ones later.

The tradition that formed Siviero’s thinking, difference feminism, provokes the Festival’s reader to look behind and beyond equal opportunities, whether we seek them at the voting booth or while climbing the rungs of the career ladder. Carla Lonzi puts it forcefully in Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s spit on Hegel): “Equality is a matter of the law, difference is existential”. The feminine delineates alternative living practices to those of the masculine. Difference feminism exalts care over power, peace over war; here, Olivia Laing’s invitation to “let peace seep into everything” resonates from just a few hours earlier. In a slightly different take from Luisa Muraro, it’s the sexual contract, not just the social contract, that needs overcoming.

"What’s new with feminism?" asks an audience member eager for an update. Siviero turns critical. Where state feminism has turned a blind eye to class by promoting equality for privileged women able to “lean in”, some strains of difference feminism have begun elevating “biological womanhood” to exclude – often demean and fight against – the realities of trans and queer people. As a counter, Siviero points to intersectional feminism. The new frontier for difference feminism moves away from its Eurocentric and Anglophone epicentres “to the margins”. Like South America: think Veronica Gago and the various iterations of Ni Una Menos. An intersectional “reckoning with difference” sheds a light on the multiple entanglements of gender, race, class, and other axes of oppression. Don’t ask yourself how migrant women can best integrate, for example, but foreground their challenges, their voices, their livelihoods.

Siviero’s pedagogy is a call for action. Following the path traced by Sara Ahmed, Giulia Siviero “kills the joy” that can obliviously permeate the liberal pursuit of equality. Centring the feminine, and paraphrasing Woolf, we all “should master living” – best if “otherwise”.