ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
112
Acts of sabotage can function to establish that self, to affirm a
woman’s separateness in her own mind. It may be more important to
the woman who burns dinners to remind herself (and maybe her
husband) that he cannot take her for granted than it is for her to rise
socially and economically.. .And it may be more important to the
slave that she affirm her existence by thwarting the master’s plan in
some way than it is to secure safety in a situation in which believing
she is safe is dangerously foolish. If a woman establishes her self as
separate (at least in her own awareness) from the will of him who
dominates by making certain decisions and carrying them out, then
those choices are not self-defeating, since without them there would
be no self to defeat. 194
Differentiative desire lies at the heart of oppositional desire. Through opposing
the power which oppresses us, we differentiate ourselves from that power,
asserting our independent desire for freedom. Often, the cost of differentiative
oppositional desire is our own physical defeat, a sacrifice that challenges an
exclusively materialist interpretation of social resistance. Predicating social and
political resistance on material necessity alone can never account for the ways
in which die subjugated often forgo their own physical security, safety, and
even survival, in order to maintain an integral sense of selfhood and
community.
The fourth
finger
of desire,
developmental
desire,
assumes
an
oppositional dimension when confronted by obstacles to self-development on
an individual, social, or community level. Social hierarchy functions to stay the
development of those at the bottom. This ‘pressing down’ on individual and
social development takes place on levels that are physical,
emotional,
intellectual, spiritual, ethical, and creative. For instance, within many capitalist
cultures, women are de-skilled technologically and intellectually, instilling a
lack of confidence and competence in abilities that should belong to both
sexes. Within liberal capitalist societies, knowledge regarding such areas as
sexuality, health, and technology is often stolen from women and other
oppressed peoples to be hoarded and controlled within centralized institutions
such as hospitals, universities, corporations, and governments.
In
the
crisis
today
over intellectual
property
rights,
First World
corporations steal and patent seeds cultivated over thousands of years by
indigenous peoples in the Third World. The goal of such capitalistic exploits is
to centralize the cultivation and distribution of seeds, de-skilling local farmers
in the process. Unless interrupted, such action threatens to erase not only local
agricultural knowledge but the communal and historical development of
agricultural knowledge itself.20