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THE NATURE OF SOCIAL DESIRE
This discussion of women’s relational orientation was accompanied by
an exploration of expressions of ‘relational desire’. In 1978, sociologist Nancy
Chodorow wrote The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the
Sociology of Gender^ challenging the biological’ origin of women’s desire to
mother.
Exploring
the social construction
of a female
‘relational
self,
Chodorow suggested that the same socialization process that led girls to want
to become mothers also led girls to desire more ‘relationality’ in general.
Suggesting an idea of a ‘relational desire’, Chodorow shed light on a desire
distinct from a sexual desire for men, a desire for connection with women
friends, sisters, and mothers. While historically women’s desire had been
primarily defined as either an irrational and carnal desire for men or as a
self-less yearning to nurture children, Chodorow opened a window into a
world where women desired other women, expressing a desire that could be
constructive, relational, and social.
Chodorow was among the first to examine the very mechanisms by
which women develop the desire to care for others, challenging the assumed
primacy of the male figure in the formation of female desire. While Freud
asserted that little girls invariably desire to bond with their fathers, Chodorow
asserted that it is the mother that girls primarily desire: Whereas the mother is
the primary caretaker during the early years of a child’s life, she forms a primal
bond and identification with her daughter; and it is from this bond that the
mother becomes the prototype for women’s lifelong relationships with other
women. Thus, for Chodorow, while most little girls are socialized to become
genitally heterosexual, they often maintain a strong and primal desire to bond
socially with other women.
Feminist
•
psychoanalytical
„
theorist Jessica
Benjamin
also
explored
women’s desire, unsettling the liberal portrayal of desire as inevitably
individualistic and competitive. In her book The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis;
Feminism, and the Problem of Domination,27 Benjamin revealed a relational
desire between a mother and her newborn. According to Benjamin, early child
development can be seen as a dynamic development: a process potentially
marked by increasing degrees of mutuality and cooperation between mother
and child, a mutualism that may in turn lead to increasing levels of cooperation
and greater selfhood for both. Displacing the idea of an ‘innate’ capitalist
inclination for competition and hyper-individualism, Benjamin posited the
possibility that we are bom with the potential for social desire.
In
pursuit
of a
social side
of desire,
Benjamin
challenged
the
neo-Freudian theory of Margaret Mahler that portrays early child development
as an inevitable conflict between mother and child; a conflict marked by a
process of ‘individuation’ that entails that the child ‘negate’ its connection to its
mother by separating from her. In contrast to Mahler, Benjamin proposed that