THE FIVE FINGERS OF SOCIAL DESIRE
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racism reflect what happens when the social desire for ‘nature’ encounters
moments of ecological injustice.
The second finger of social desire, associative desire, may assume an
oppositional dimension when we resist forces that obstruct cooperation.
Resistance to oppressive institutions such as racism, sexism, and capitalism,
which counter the desire for mutual recognition, is bom out of associative
oppositional desire. In turn, social experiments in intentional communities, or
worker-collectives, represent examples of associative oppositional desire.
Attempts to share, barter, or cooperate when such activities are discouraged or
prohibited, demonstrate the relentless socio-erotic opposition to the institution
of capitalism. In addition, when people risked their lives to work the
underground railroads or to hide slaves in the U.S.; when a battered woman
runs to a phone booth in the middle of the night to call a friend; when a poor
woman gives her neighbor money for food, such acts represent expressions of
the desire to oppose through association, pushing past institutionalized sources
of separation, isolation, and alienation.
The third finger of social desire, differentiative desire, may become
oppositional when we are confronted by systems of authority that demand
expedience and conformity. Oppositional differentiative desire is the push to
differentiate our own desire from the desire of those in power. Within the
context of hierarchy, differentiative desire takes on a new impulse. Rather than
differentiation
within the
context
of a
greater
cooperative
collectivity,
differentiative desire becomes the desire to differentiate from the ideas,
institutions, or individuals in power.
Sabotage, often misinterpreted as self-defeating behavior, can represent a
vital act of self assertion. Just as men may misinterpret women’s sexual desire
as
‘irrational’,
they may misinterpret women’s
oppositional
desire
too,
misperceiving women’s resistance as ‘incompetence’. In Lesbian Ethics, Sarah
Lucia Lloagland discusses Donna Deitch’s documentaryWoman to Woman, in
which a working class housewife describes feelings of Lustration and
helplessness in regard to her life and work within the home.17 At one point in
the interview, the woman gets a gleam in her eye, lowers her voice, and asks
the interviewer, ‘Have you ever bought something you don’t need?” Confessing
to the interviewer that she often buys cans of beans she has no intention of
using, just to waste her husband’s money, she concludes, ‘You have to know
IQ
you’re alive; you have to make sure you exist.”
This desire for agency or self-determination is an act of oppositional
differentiative desire. This desire is expressed in a spectrum of sabotage
activities ranging from burning dinners to hiding the master’s tools on the
plantation. As Hoagland points out: