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Enacting Pleasure

Artists and Scholars Respond to Carol Gilligan’s New Map of Love

In her book In a Different Voice, psychologist Carol Gilligan proffered the controversial idea that a psychology of male development could not suffice as a psychology of all human development, both male and female. Since the publication of that revolutionary book and her later work The Birth of Pleasure, which argued that the pleasure of love is a common human denominator often repressed in a hierarchical culture, Gilligan has been recognized by some scholars as a pioneer of feminist thought and vilified by others as an essentialist and a proponent of gender difference.

In Enacting Pleasure, a distinguished group of artists and scholars explores the personal and political implications of Gilligan’s account of pleasure and the human psyche. The contributors to this volume come to Gilligan’s work with a wide-range of perspectives—from those who view her ideas as Eurocentric, heterocentric, Freudian, or anti-Freudian to others who see it among the most advanced theories in neuroscience and human biology as well as a blueprint for progressive politics. As a whole, this diverse collection stands as a meditation on the role that love plays in psychology, art, and politics.


278 pages | 2 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2011

Enactments

Psychology: Social Psychology


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Table of Contents

An Invocation
      Peggy Cooper Davis
The Psychobiology of Pleasure
Meaning-Making, Open Systems, and Pleasure
      Edward Tronick
The Evolution of Cooperation
      Michael Tomasello
Gilligan’s Challenge to Freud: Tribute and Deconstruction
      Terri Apter
Methods for Recovering Pleasure
Reading for Resistance: Iphigenia
      Tova Hartman
Reflections on the Listening Guide: A New Method of Psychological Analysis
      Niobe Way
Listening to the Heartbeat of the Classroom: Bringing the Listening Guide to Teaching and Learning
      Miriam Raider-Roth
The Methodological Costs of Exclusion
      Kendall Thomas
Looking Behind the Curtain of Gender in Couples Therapy
      Terrence Real
The Places to Look for Pleasure
Feminine Resistance in Apuleiu’s Rome
      Eva Cantrella
Looking in Hard-to-See Places
      Peggy Cooper Davis
Shakespeare as Outsider
      Tina Packer
Reimaging Beauty
      Wendy Steiner
The Form of Pleasure
Narrative as Possibility
      Anthony G. Amsterdam
The Arguments and Argots of Pleasure
      Kenji Yoshino
The “I” in the Clearing
      Patricia Foster
The Politics of Pleasure
Love and Pleasure as Political Liberation
      Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison and the Politics of Desire
      Carmen Gillespie
Love, Law, and Politics
      Peggy Cooper Davis
“Say It:” Toward a Politics of Love and the Marvelous
      Robin D. G. Kelley
Love, Manhood, and Democracy
      David A. J. Richards
The Fear of Reckless Pleasure
How do You Solve a Problem like Medea?
      Ruby Blondell
Tragedy and Pleasure
      Simon Goldhill
Odes to Pleasure
Legacy
      Patricia Foster
Vox Erotica
      Kristin Liinklater

Notes on Contributors

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