THE NATURE OF SOCIAL DESIRE
89
18. Decades after publishing Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Bookchin has come to reconsider his
earlier enthusiasm regarding the potential of a post-war generation to locate questions of
subjectivity within a truly oppositional and revolutionary trajectory. While dismayed by the
failures of the new social movements to transcend commercial cooptation, nihilism, and an
egoistic 'me-ism', Bookchin sees in much of today's expressions of anarchism a continuation
of this disappointing trend. For a provocative discussion of such issues, see Bookchin, Social
Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism An Unbridgeable Chasm (London: AK Press, 1995).
19. Beginning in the seventies, a school of feminist psychology emerged in dialogue with a
range of feminist epistemologists, ethicists, sociologists, and feminist historians of science.
Reconsidering discourses such as modern science and psychoanalytic theory, feminists
challenged notions of universal objectivity, rationality, and competition, offering insights into
the 'relational' subjectivity of women and other marginalized peoples. The reconstructive
vision that emerged from these forums focused primarily on re-orderings of social and cultural
institutions of family, education, and scientific production. See Jean Baker Miller, Toward a
New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid
and. the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper Colophon
Books, 1976), and Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self Voice, and Mind, eds.
Mary Field Belenky et al. (New York: Basic Book Publishers, 1986). Also see Carol Gilligan, In
a Different Voice.'. Psychological Theoiy and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982), Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). Also, two particularly good anthologies to emerge from these
discussions are Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing,
eds. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989)
and Women’s Consciousness, Women’s Conscience, eds. Barbara Hilkert Andolsen et ai. (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985). Both Evelyn Fox Keller and Donna J. Haraway have
contributed significantly to a new feminist approach to questions of scientific objectivity and
knowledge production in general. See Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
20. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist Revolution (New York:
Bantam Books, 1970).
21. Ibid., p. 67.
22. Ibid., p. 159.
23. Ibid., p. 147.
24. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice'. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Women’s Ways of Knowing: Tloe
Development of Self Voice, and Mind, eds. Mary Field Belenky et al. (New York: Basic Book
Publishers, 1986).
25. For a feminist discussion of ‘competition’, see Competition: A Feminist Taboo ? eds. Valerie
Miner and Helen E. Longino (New York: The Feminist Press, 1987).
26. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of
Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
27. Jessica Benjamin,
The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of
Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
28. Ibid., p. 155.
29. Ibid., p. 147.
30. Ann Snitow offers an intriguing, yet controversial discussion of the political context
surrounding lesbian feminism in the wider feminist movement. According to Snitow, lesbian
feminists broadened the concept of lesbian desire beyond sexuality for a few reasons. First,
she contends, lesbians sought to build acceptance within a larger, historically heterosexist
feminist movement. As a way to build bridges with heterosexual women in the movement,
she maintains, lesbian feminists defined lesbianism as but one expression of desire between
women, thus situating lesbianism within the scope of a greater ‘sisterhood.’ For Snitow, tliis
attempt was part of an even larger feminist project to reconstruct not only desire but society
as a whole on feminist terms. Second, according to Snitow, lesbian feminists often
de-emphasizcd the sexual aspect of lesbian desire in order to differentiate lesbian feminism