Teresa de Lauretis

Teresa de Lauretis (born November 29, 1938, Bologna, Italy) was an Italian author and academic who was a Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her areas of interest included semiotics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary theory, feminism, women's studies, lesbian and queer studies. She also wrote on science fiction. Fluent in English and Italian, she wrote in both languages. Additionally, her work has been translated into 16 other languages. 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. De Lauretis's account of subjectivity as a product of 'being subject/ed to semiosis' helps to theoretically resolve the tension between agency and structure. She utilized Umberto Eco's reading of C.S. Peirce to establish her notion of the semiotics of experience, bringing corporeality back into the discourse on subjectivity. Her semiotics encompasses language, visual images, and non-verbal practices. Her (Peircean) 'habit' or 'habit-change' is often compared to Bourdieu's notion of habitus. De Lauretis coined the term 'queer theory' in February 1990 at a conference at UC Santa Cruz. Although she coined the term, she abandoned it three years later as it was adopted by mainstream forces and institutions. She suggested that queer studies should be studied separately from lesbian and gay studies, and that queer theory challenged norms that enforce inequalities regarding social identities such as gender, sexuality, class, and race.