This research touches upon the idea that sexuality is a fundamental dimension of human subjectivity. Its entry point is the study of the dildo, understood as an affective artifact endowed with material agency, which serves as both a case study and a theoretical object. Through a material archaeology of the dildo since modern times, a research hypothesis is unfolded whereby our understanding of sexual subjectivity – which is usually thought within the heterosexual matrix of two genders corresponding to two sexes – is reoriented in a queer direction and according to an embodied, situated, performative and ecological framework. In considering the dildo both as a tool intertwined with sexual practices and as “an operator of the sexual plasticity of the body and the possible prosthetic modification of its contours and identity”, the research intends to develop a phenomenological theory of sexuality able to overcome the dualistic remnants implicit in the sex/gender distinction. 

The work aims to demonstrate the heuristic effectiveness and epistemic gain of phenomenological feminist literature through the notion of the living body. Phenomenology as a philosophical reflection on corporeality is indeed at the basis of the 4E paradigm of cognition, which is addressed especially with reference to the fourth “E”, for its conceptualization of the ways in which subjectivity transcends the organic boundaries of the skin and is contaminated and co-constituted with the world.