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ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Eroticism is exciting...life would be a drab routine without at least
that spark. That’s the point. Why has all joy and excitement been
concentrated, driven into that one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of
human experience, and all the rest laid to waste? There’s plenty to go
around [within] the spectrum of our lives.22
Soon, other feminists began to articulate the relationship between a
narrow understanding of the erotic and an impoverished quality of everyday
life within patriarchy. Critical of a process of socialization that teaches women
to vicariously enjoy the pleasure of men and children, the movement
demanded a broader range of social passions, both personal and political.
Feminists began to expand the definition of the erotic, accommodating a new
spectrum of sensual and social demands.
The feminist quest for a ‘social desire’ ran parallel to the critique of male
defined desire and rationality as feminist theorists explored the psychological
construction of the liberal male subject. Questioning ideas of male desire and
behavior, theorists critiqued such institutions as ‘romance’, tying the concept to
the problem of male domination in general. For Firestone, romantic desire
constituted “a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their
condition, a cultural tool to reinforce sex-class,” a form of “gallantry” that keeps
women from recognizing their subordinated position “in die name of love.”23
In turn, feminist ethicists such as Carol Gilligan and Mary Belenky began to
challenge the rationality of the liberal subject. For these thinkers, a male
approach to epistemological questions, precludes ethical ways of knowing
often characteristic of women and others marginalized from the public sphere
of liberal capitalist society 24
As these theorists unraveled the male subject of liberal capitalist society,
they uncovered a subject who possessed a rationality reduced to cool
instrumentality,
an individualism reduced to
egoistic autonomy,
and a
competitive impulse coddled to the point of infantile aggression. Such a male
subject, they reasoned, to function effectively within a repressive capitalistic
society, required a dispassionate and unempathetic psychology: a detached
posture conducive to a tolerance for competition.23 Accordingly, feminists
reasoned that it was women’s marginalization from capitalist practice that
allowed them to maintain degrees of ‘relationality*. Within the female subject,
these theorists uncovered a psychology more relational than autonomously
egoistic, more empathetic than competitive: an understanding of selfhood
derived from women’s socialized role within the relational world of the home.
Excluded from the realm of entrepreneurial competition,
maintained, women had retained vital aspects of their humanity.
these theorists