Teresa de Lauretis

De Lauretis was born in Bologna on 29 November 1938. She received her doctorate in Modern Languages and Literatures from Bocconi University in Milan before coming to the United States. She joined the History of Consciousness with Hayden White, Donna Haraway, Fredric Jameson and Angela Davis. She held visiting professorships at universities worldwide including ones in Canada, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Austria, Argentina, Chile, France, Spain, Hungary, Croatia, Mexico and the Netherlands. She lived in San Francisco, California, but often spent time in Italy and the Netherlands. De Lauretis died in San Francisco, at the age of 87; the date of her death is reported variously as 2 February or 3 February 2026. ==Work==

De Lauretis's account of subjectivity as a product of "being subject/ed to semiosis" (i.e., making meanings and being made by them) helps to theoretically resolve and overcome the tension between human action (agency) and structure. She made use of Umberto Eco's reading of C.S. Peirce to establish her notion of the semiotics of experience. She brought corporeality back to the discourse on the constitution of subjectivity, which has been conceived mainly in linguistic terms. Her semiotics is not just the semiotics of language but also the semiotics of visual images and non-verbal practices. Her (Peircean) "habit" or "habit-change" is often compared to Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Michel Foucault's analysis of the body excludes the consideration of the specificity of the female body that many feminists have criticized. Supplementing the failure, gender should be one of the effects of technology, which renders the basic intelligibility of the body, and that turns to De Lauretis's "technology of gender". De Lauretis coined the term "queer theory" although how it is used today differs from what she originally suggested by the term. She coined the term in February 1990 at a conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose proceedings were collected in a 1991 special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. She suggested that queer studies should be studied separately from lesbian and gay studies. De Lauretis stated that "queer theory challenged norms" that enforce inequalities regarding "social identities" such as gender, sexuality, class, and race. ==Honours, awards and grants==

• Guest of honour, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina (2014) • Doctor honoris causa, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina (2014) • IHR Humanities Research Fellowship (2007) • Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa, University of Lund, Sweden (2005) • UCHRI Resident Faculty Fellowship, University of California, Irvine (2003-2004) • Guggenheim Fellowship (1993) • NEH Fellowship for University Teachers (1992) • Conference Grant, Humanities Division, University of California, Santa Cruz (1990) • Conference Grant, Research Council of Canada (1884) • Research Fellowship, Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee (1982–83) • Grant in Media Studies, National Endowment for the Arts (1977–78) ==Bibliography==