The Space outside the Room

Notes on “The Space of Women” (2022) by Daniela Brogi

Abstract

This article discusses the notion of space as it relates to the condition of women in history, society, culture, and literature. The concept of space has been widely used by 20th-century feminist theorists as a key metaphor to warn against the marginalization of women from cultural and power discourses. Alternatively, through the idea of a “politics of location”, spatial metaphors were used to highlight the diverse contexts and perspectives pertaining to each individual woman, which must be taken into consideration in contemporary multicultural feminist debates. This article aims at exploring how the notion of space was reframed by Italian scholar Daniela Brogi in her recently published essay Lo spazio delle donne (2022), which precisely revolves around the metaphor of space, and which represents a multifocal take on the condition of women in Italian culture and society and proposes new ways to deconstruct widespread patriarchal logics, as well as new lenses to look at women’s experiences with a view to encouraging opportunities for intercultural growth.