Hybrid Seminar – Caring Masculinity and Constitutional Resilience in Italy: What’s the Connection?
Thursday 19 November 2026, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm GMT, online and London, UK
Speaker: Prof Stefano Osella (Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong)
Chair: Dr Natalia Morales-Cerda (UCL Laws, GCDC)
About the talk:
What is the connection between hegemonic masculinity and the crisis of the rule of law? Why is transforming masculinity norms connected to preserving liberal constitutionalism? In the Sidney Seminar I will present my work in progress and examine these questions by looking at Italy as a case study. In Italy, traditionalist right-wing movements are becoming ever stronger. However, the jurisprudence of the Italian Constitutional Court can provide a bulwark against them. First, drawing on sociological theory and gender studies, I will identify the key elements of hegemonic masculinity. Second, building on political theory, I will discuss the connection between hegemonic masculinity and right-wing populism and authoritarianism. I will examine whether the norms of hegemonic masculinity may be a threat not only to equality (itself the beating heart of the rule of law) but possibly also to a liberal conception of the state. Third, I will show how the Italian Constitutional Court has transformed the ‘man’ from the authoritarian and violent head of the family to a more caring and egalitarian figure. The norms that define this new subject, I contend, have significant cultural and legal potential to challenge hegemonic masculinity. I argue that they may act as a barrier to the populist and authoritarian backlash. In conclusion, I will try to reconceptualize the gender jurisprudence of the Italian Constitutional Court not just as a more or less criticizable achievement in terms of gender equality, but as a form of constitutional resilience. The crisis of liberal constitutionalism is currently a transnational issue across the Americas and Europe. Traditionalist right-wing parties promoting hegemonic conceptions of masculinity can be found in many jurisdictions. The Italian case may therefore offer insights for addressing this challenge.
This seminar is part of the Sidney Seminar Series, organised by the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.
About the Speaker:
Stefano Osella is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Director of the LLM in Human Rights. Stefano has published widely in comparative public law and human rights law, with articles appearing in journals such as the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the German Law Journal, and the Human Rights Law Review. In 2026, he published his monograph Gender Diversity in Public Law: Between Recognition and Control with Oxford University Press.
Stefano earned his LLB and LLM in Law (Laurea Specialistica in Giurisprudenza) from the University of Turin, Italy. He went on to complete a Magister Juris at the University of Oxford and a doctorate in Law at the European University Institute, where he specialized in Comparative Public Law. Before joining HKU, Stefano held academic positions as a Hauser Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU School of Law, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale (Germany), and a postdoctoral fellow at Bocconi University in Milan (Italy).
About the Chair:
Dr Natalia Morales-Cerda is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism and Associate Lecturer at UCL Faculty of Laws. She holds a PhD in Law from UCL, where her doctoral research examined conceptions of political representation and their impact on constitutional democracy, drawing on the participation of women in the 2019–2022 Chilean constitution-making process.
Her research lies at the intersection of comparative constitutional law, democratic theory and socio-legal studies, with particular interests in constituent power and constitution-making, political representation, populism, and feminist legal theory. She has published on these topics, particularly in the context of Latin America, and has collaborated with governmental and civil society organisations on projects related to legal reform, reproductive rights and gender equality.
At UCL Laws, she teaches Public Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, and Gender, Law and the State. She also serves as an Associate Editor of the IACL-IADC Blog.
About the GCDC
The Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, based at the UCL Faculty of Laws, seeks to advance scholarly understanding of the relationship between democratic government and the rule of law in domestic, comparative, and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on identifying the supporting conditions for constitutional resilience in electorally competitive political systems. Read more about the group and its work.
Find more information and book your free place here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2026/nov/caring-masculinity-and-constitutional-resilience-italy-whats-connection
This event will be held online and UCL Faculty of Laws, Bentham House, Ensleigh Gardens, London, UK.