THE NATURE OF SOCIAL DESIRE
79
social change. As is often the case, a focus on ‘necessary ends’ tends to bring
revolution into a more authoritarian mood as the goal of abolishing need is
used to legitimize the implementation of authoritarian methods.
A women’s liberation movement responded to the authoritarian and
instrumental tendency in the New Left, uncovering a wider revolutionary
project, one that integrated need with desire and ends with means. In addition
to fighting for ‘freedom from’ economic oppression and male violence, women
in the movement began to fight for a new articulation of desire. This new
desire was framed as ‘freedom to’ pursue a range of sensual, creative, and
political satisfactions, emerging from a sensitivity to the qualitative dimensions
of social and political life.
TEe
Psychology Of
DesIre: TowarcI
A
Soc'iaI Eros
While giving rise to a ‘cultural feminism’, radical feminism also ventured into
such arenas as feminist sociology and psychoanalytic theory. By (lie late 1970s,
feminist critiques of Freudian theories flourished, critiques that explored the
implications of patriarchy for the construction of understandings of desire.
Feminist sociologists and psychoanalytic theorists such as Nancy Chodorow
and Jessica Benjamin were among the many whose writings had tremendous
implications for a feminist reconstruction of desire.1^ In particular, these
theorists examined the transformation of the qualitative dimensions of women’s
psychology, unsettling liberal and individualistic understandings of desire.
The search for a new understanding of desire reflects the quest for a
qualitatively better way of being that these new theorists hoped would be
more
cooperative,
non-hierarchical,
and
supportive
of
women’s
self-expression. Theorists explored the possibility of a feminist Eros, what I call
a socio-erotic, a continuum of social and sensual desires endowed with ethical,
personal, and political meaning. While traditionally the word ‘desire’ has had
both sexual and social meaning,
the word ‘erotic’ has maintained an
exclusively sexual definition. By attributing a social meaning to the ‘erotic’,
theorists translated understandings of satisfaction and pleasure into non-sexual
realms such as work and friendship, endowing, ‘the erotic’ with the vernacular
qualities of everyday life.
/
In 1970, Shulamith Firestone articulated an understanding of the erotic
that included a broader range
of specifically social passions.
In her
groundbreaking book, The Dialectic of Sex- The Case For Feminist Revolution,20
Firestone called for a wider demand for everyday pleasure, challenging “the
concentration
of
sexuality
into
highly
charged
objects,
signifying
the
displacement of other social/affection needs onto sex.”21 In a spirit akin with
the Situationists, Firestone called for a re-invigoration of desire within an
otherwise deadening everyday world: