Teresa De Lauretis (Bologna, 1938) is a poststructuralist feminist theorist who has made significant contributions to gender theory, queer theory, film analysis, and psychoanalysis. Professor Emerita in the Department of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she joined the faculty of the prestigious History of Consciousness Department in 1985, a department that included figures such as Hayden White, Donna Haraway, Angela Davis, and James Clifford.

In recent years, De Lauretis has focused on revising Freud's and Laplanche's work on the death drive, suggesting a "queerness of the drive." She has authored numerous essays and books on semiotics, psychoanalysis, film, literature, gender, and feminist theory. She was editor of the journal Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (1986), where feminist research and writing address the fields of history, scientific discourse, literary criticism, and cultural theory. Among his works are: Technologies of Gender (1989), Alice No Longer (1992), The Practice of Love (1994), Differences (2000), Queer Theory and Popular Cultures (2007), Figures of Resistance (2007) and the work presented as a Spanish translation in this publication Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (2008).