These papers are about the results of a research, carried out in some humanistic faculties of the Universities of Lecce and Rome, on the attitudes, in Universities, towards women's and gender studies (W&GS) and on the importance given to gender differences in curricula and research. We have also explored the symbolic universe of representations in order to identify the specific cultural patterns through which women's theoretical production moulds in some of the Professors' thought.

The aspects which we intend to analyse are only a few, compared to the whole quantity given by the acquired data:

• Is women's theoretical elaboration already part of the conceptual and cultural experience of at least a part of the academic world or are women a "cultural minority", using Iris Marion Young's expression? Consequently, what consistency, what grade of visibility does "gender culture" have in Universities today?

The concept of minority, though referred to numerical data, is currently applied in literature to all those social groups having some forms of disadvantages. In this perspective, Young (1990) considers women a "cultural minority", insofar as they suffer cultural imperialism, that is that form of oppression by which the dominant meanings in society obliterate the specific perspective of the oppressed group, the very moment this is represented through stereotypes and named as the Other. In other words, cultural imperialism implies that the experiences and culture of a dominant group are universal and, becoming the norm, re-conceptualize the difference as inferiority and deviance. If it is true that feminism was able to break the unity of knowledge and augment the points of view, on the other hand the infiltration of it in Institutions, particularly in the crucial ones of the production of knowledge, does not seem an acquired fact, not only in quantitative terms, but also in terms of its effects and of its both material and symbolic influence.

In fact, the relations of women with Universities reflect a wider problem, that is the relation of women with Institutions, as material and symbolic structures. According to Rosi Braidotti (1990), the concept of authorization is, in this, crucial, implying legal, symbolic, material and psychic factors, which contribute in the construction of the knowing subject: the issue is still the women's "right" to have theoretical subjectivity and their position within the contemporary Institutional discourse.

Italian feminism is particularly ambivalent towards Institutions, which they have always strongly resisted, thus creating, in the University world, a situation rarely equalled in other countries.

A first level of visibility in the women's theoretical elaboration, in the Academic world, is implemented through those cultural devices consisting of researches and courses. Thus, we have chosen to analyse the teaching and research activities of Professors, examining whether there were courses or studies having, as specific subject, issues concerning women and/or which highlighted gender differences. It is obviously a "wide" parameter, which includes theoretical contents and approaches totally extraneous to the critical perspective of W&GS; on the other hand, this allowed us to have a glimpse of how feminist theoretical perspective was assimilated or "distorted" in the average Professor's "common sense". Let us now consider rapidly some data, specifying that no meaningful differences were registered between men's and women's answers.

The percentage of the Professors who specifically focused their teaching activity on women issues varies around 30%. The percentage of those who highlighted, in their disciplines, the sex difference is higher and is about 70%. Yet, the second data can be tricky, as out of this percentage only 24.5% gave particular attention to this aspect, while the rest considered and dealt with it as one of the many aspects of the general theme in their disciplines.

In short, we can say that for about 30% of the interviewed Professors gender difference is by no way considered in their disciplines, for another 30% it is "exposed" to the maximum level of visibility and for the remaining 40% it is "covered" and obscured in the "grey zone" of the neuter.

But, how is gender difference dealt with? The subjects of the courses offer some hints for considerations. We can specify that the more overtly political issues (women's history and policy, women's inflexion of knowledge and practice) are a prerogative of a small minority of women. Man Professors normally use two types of approach: the portrait of single women who were active in the history of culture (scholars, women of letters, scientists, etc.) and the study of women's social roles in contemporary society; woman Professors prefer historical analysis which illustrate women's conditions and role. The mixed area is that of psychology, focused on the investigation of women's psyche.

The intellectual maturity of Professors dealing with gender issues seems, in the whole, still at an initial level. Margareth McIntosh's pattern is particularly useful to illustrate our case. McIntosh (1988), with an example taken from historiography, identifies five possible courses, each corresponding to a phase: 'history without women', 'women in history', 'women as problems, anomalies, absent and victims of history', 'women's life as part of history' and last 'reconstruction and redefinition of history comprehensive of all human beings'. The second phase courses, in which we want to include the subjects of our research who, for example, investigated the women who had a relevant role in history, include the analysis of some famous women, without however changing the traditional historical pattern, the epistemological assumptions of the discipline and the implicit criteria of the research.

The emphasis on gender difference also seems to proceed along the binary of symmetry; the man/woman differences of knowledge, feeling, behaviour, language, education (and here the psychological and psycho-physiological disciplines play a big role) processes are analysed and described, yet nothing allows to catch the inequality which the gender concept, at least in its original formulation, refers to. There seems to be a prevailing generic attention to the social building of sex differences, which never mentions inequality and - Јoan Scott stated it 15 years ago (1986) - makes the issue acceptable on a political/institutional level for its 'scientificity'.

Let us now consider the answers of the interviewees to two items, in which they were asked to give their opinion on:

• the editorial lines or sections exclusively dealing with women's scientific production;
• the opportunity to create in Italy structures similar to the Departments of American Women's Studies.

In both cases their opinion tends to be negative, since there seems to prevail the viewpoint according to which both items imply a form of cultural alienation, sectarianism, marginalization and knowledge narrow-mindedness, as well as a limit to the transmission and diffusion of gender culture. They demand that the limit of specialization are abandoned, to converge transversally in the various disciplines and in the editorial production of general feature.

The pregnant vocabulary, the 'thick' words, are the ones about limit, border, restriction, closure, isolation, separation, sectarianism, specialization, sectionalism, marginalization, self-exclusion, self-referential, selection, discrimination, isolation, segregation, particularism, separation, split, conflict, fundamentalism, which are countered by words like opening, possibility, widening, overcoming, being transverse, co-operation, comparison, globalization, equality, joint nature, reciprocity, integration. Metaphors are used only in a negative sense: bunch, Indian reserve, race under extinction, apartheid, island, cultural harem, lobby, rare beasts, tropical fishes, protected species/category.

Though the risk of ghettoization is one of the 'classical' objection of both man and woman opponents of the women's studies in the dawning phase, today it is reproposed, after 30 years, with another meaning, which emphasizes the obsolescent feature of separatism, the refusal of being victimized, the widespread acquisition of the values and practice of feminism. In other words: the risk of the ghetto is no longer to be run because circumstances do not require it.

In short, to go back to the opening question: the level of visibility of the women's theoretical production is rather low, not because it is performed on the underground, semi-secret, level, but because it is unable to open a breach in the Institutional culture and in the gender symbolic order (the one, to be clear, which splits and makes a hierarchy of private and public) governing it. In this sense, the persisting (but on the way of being slowly overcome) segregation of women in the humanistic areas may be the confirmation and strengthening of that very order. It is not by chance that women's overpopulation of the humanistic areas coincides with the undervaluation of them; furthermore, as it happens also in other labour areas, women seem to replace men, and to be authorized to it , the very moment men leave. Our impression, which is limited to the universe we explored and seems to occupy a counter position to the inputs coming from the Italian reality, is that we are witnessing a phase of stabilization rather than of transformation; the fact that a new generation of woman scholars, coming through the female line, has not appeared yet, was certainly determined by the halt in the accesses which marked our system from the beginning of the 80s, but also from the 'weak' positioning of women within Institutions. We are not giving the data, already well known to everybody, and which are confirmed by our research, about the disadvantages of women's career in the 'men's professions'.

The next point, we would like to analyse, deals with an aspect which we consider crucible in our approach and which regards that hinge, between the cognitive and the social, producing representation, symbols, categorization:

• How, and through which cultural patterns, is women's theoretical production, which goes by the name of women's and gender studies, represented?

In these papers, we are going to outline a first and partial interpretation of a corpus of interviews to some University Professors on the issue of women's studies. We are not going to explain in details the methodology we used, the type of text analysis we carried out allowed us to elicit some lexical worlds, that is some " mental places used by the subject to build a point of view" (Reinert, 1993).

We are going to propose the four universes of meaning identified separately, successively we will connect them in a whole reading scheme:

• the first cluster, which we defined as "the memory of her", is the place of the recovering and research of the women's universe traces in texts, in literary and documentary production; the analysis of the mechanisms through which one "becomes a woman" in the contexts of the read and written word, in the double role of the object and the subject in the very representation, but also the searching for the definition of the female in contents and perspectives. The dimension of this lexical world, to which are predominantly associated subjects of female sex, is that of reflection, of elaboration, of analysis, of intellectual work, of critical distance, in a sense; the anchorage to individuality seems to hint at an activity in solitude, in a regime of 'solitarity', to mention one of Rita Caccamo's distinctions (1987) on the conditions of intellectual work. The reference space is mental, internal, rather than linked to a specific context.
• the second cluster, which we labelled as sex/gender, recalls the relationship between the natural universe, markedly biological, of sex difference and the social, cultural, political order; what type of relationship is there between these two dimensions? The interpretative hypothesis is that the translation of the natural differences into the social level convoys a difficult passage, the source of problems, conflicts, tensions between the two sexes; if we consider that to these two clusters are mainly associated Professors who have never dealt with themes or issues directly or indirectly associated to gender difference, this lexical grouping seems to refer to the fact that women's political acts, feminism and its theoretical effect, have somehow subverted the natural order of things, the one through which from sex (biological conformation) ensues, with no interruption, gender ( male and female social roles) - it is the 'peg' idea of sex, as Linda Nicholson defined it (1994) -. If we use a Durkheim reading scheme as Mary Douglas did, the subversion of the natural order can also be referred to the level of Institutions; in this view, the subversion of the natural order which, for analogy, gives legitimization to the institutional level, implies a de-legitimization of the feminist subject.
• the third cluster coincides with the double space of the double presence, that system of complex belongings which defines the contemporary women's condition, caught in the weaving of housework and production, but also the breaking of the gender symbolic order produced and acted in transversal experiences. Here again is the tangle of necessities and possibilities, of tie and choice, of conflict and scission that so many studies have well evidenced. To this cluster are prevalently associated Professors who declared to give courses on issues regarding gender differences.
• the fourth cluster enclose the esprit of an Academic Body, whose reference to the professional context is very strong and whose intellectual work is oriented to exploration, to discovery, to innovation and is practised in group, according to a 'coterie' like style, opposed to the one emerged in the first cluster. To this group are prevalently associated male subjects.

Let us now understand the relation among these different cultural patterns, through the projection of the clusters in a factorial space. (cf. transparency)

If both clusters 1 and 4 refer to the dimension of intellectual and cultural elaboration, they differ for a different inflexion of the production of knowledge; the first oriented to the definition of a sexed identity (who is the knowing subject?), the second inserted within the institutional logic. Since in cluster 4 there are no terms naming the subjects, the quadrant of legitimization is also the quadrant of neutralization, marking the symbolic 'disappearance' of both men and women and their being substituted by roles and functions (researchers, colleagues).

Both clusters 2 and 3 refer to the level of behaviours, of everyday life, to the sphere of action, of relations, of practices, of politics. While 2 is in the sphere of the definition of the acting subject's identity and his/her foundations, the universe of the double presence is mainly involved in the overlapping and contradicting of roles and in the mesh of Institutions (wedding, family, school, maternity).

In short: the representations of the women's studies emerging from this survey do not seem to assign the women's theoretical production a space within the University world able to produce a change; in fact, both 'subversion' and 'conflict' belong to the political action rather than to the coding of knowledge. On the contrary, the latter seems to inflect along an 'intimist' line, in a totally interior space, as a personal need to reflect and grow up; where, instead, theory is the main function that the Academic Institution performs, the sexed point of view seems to collapse to the neuter.

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CACCAMO R. (1987), Il filo di Arianna. Ricerca sulle professionalità creative, Angeli, Milano

MCINTOSH M. (1988), L'istituzionalizzazione dei women's studies e della ricerca sulle donne negli Stati Uniti, in G. Conti Odorisio (a cura), Gli studi sulle donne nelle università, Napoli, ESI

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YOUNG I. M. (1990), Justice and the politics of difference, Princeton, Princeton University Press