Braidotti was born in a small town in northeastern Italy. The oldest of three children, she attended high school in the nearby city of Udine, where she studied Latin, Greek, and literature. Her parents decided to emigrate to Australia in 1970, and Braidotti – utterly heartbroken – had to bid farewell to her grandparents, cousins, and friends, and boarded a ship heading to the unknown.
She didn’t speak a word of English and started studying it during the forty-day voyage to Australia. Following a number of boring layovers and somewhat exciting adventures, Braidotti and her family eventually settled down in a not-so-welcoming Italian neighbourhood in the outskirts of Melbourne. Here, Braidotti would try as hard as she could to settle in and stitch together a new way of living; such a harsh uprooting at her young age did cause her a great deal of pain but would later allow the seeds of her “nomadic philosophy” to be sown.
Braidotti graduated in 1977 from the University of Canberra, where she received the University Medal in Philosophy along with the University Tillyard Prize. She later moved to Paris, attending Sorbonne University on a scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in Philosophy, successfully graduating in 1981. Paris was a melting pot not only of people with wildly different backgrounds, but also of unique events taking place and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities; the years Braidotti spent there were crucial for her philosophical education, as well as her personal development: she met people like Foucault, Barthes, Simone De Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and most notably, Gilles Deleuze, with whom she laid the foundations for a long-lasting academical alliance and friendship. In Paris, she also came into contact with the feminist movement and psychoanalytical theories, both proved to have had a profound influence on her ideas.
In 1988, just 34 years old, she obtained the chair in Women’s Studies – the first one in Europe – at the prestigious University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands. In 1995, she founded and managed the Netherland National Research School of Women’s Studies, a position she then held for ten years. These are the years that saw Braidotti as a pioneering figure in women’s studies in Europe, the person behind the creation of European networks like ATHENA and NOISE, and one of the most important theoretical feminists. Her works, such as Patterns of Dissonance, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, and Posthuman Feminism, left a permanent mark in academia. In 2005, she was appointed Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and new head of the Centre for the Humanities of the University of Utrecht.
Thanks to a new Dutch law, on March 8th, 1998, Braidotti was able to marry her life-long partner Anneke Smelik, a Visual Arts Professor at the University of Nijmegen, now retired. The two got married surrounded by their families and friends from all around the world in a touching ceremony, followed by a lively party.
Braidotti is an Italian and Australian citizen, but made her home in the Netherlands. She is a prominent figure in the European and international cultural framework of the late 20th and early 21st century; an original and eccentric thinker, with a focus on feminist theory, epistemology, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis. She has always been able to follow a rigorous approach to her studies, while cultivating openhearted personal relationships with friends and lovers.
Translated by Arianna Premoli.