LEARNING DESIRE Relational Pedagogies and the Desiring Female Subject in Lebanon

Abstract

While many scholars have cautioned against the possibility of defining, representing or containing desire (Todd 1997: 6; Goodheart 1991: 2), the assumption that the desiring subject is an individual has generally stood. Much scholarship in the United States, informed by liberalist political philosophy, has tended to link the identification and experience of a person's (female or male) authentic desires with the development of an autonomous, bounded, separative self. Even among scholars critical of the individualist construct of self and attuned to theorizing a more subject, or at least a female subject (Chodorow 1978; Flax 1993), relationality has given way to autonomy in discussions of desire. Cultural feminists, the most committed of feminist scholars of subjectivity (Gilligan 1982; Gilligan, Lyons, and Hanmer 1990; Ruddick 1989), have struggled to accommodate relationality to agential desire (agency being commonly equated with the autonomous self). The construct of relational individualism has been offered, in feminist therapeutic discourses, as a healthy balance between the perceived equally dysfunctional extremes of relationality and autonomy. In this therapeutic resolution, the emphasis is, nevertheless, on the female subject knowing her own desires as distinct from those of others (Radden 1996). Rich and extensive as the literature on desire and the desiring female subject has become (Deleuze and Guatarri 1984; Butler 1987, 1994, 1995; Dickey 1996; Goodchild 1996; Kaye 1992; Kristeva 1980, 1984; Lichtman 1982; Martel 2001;