Love, Manhood, and Democracy
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Description
Carol Gilligan and I met some eight years ago, in 2002, when we began with Jerome Bruner, to co-teach a seminar on gender issues in democratic societies at the New York University School of Law. Since that time, Gilligan and I have co-taught the seminar successfully in various one- and two-semester formats every academic year. We probably will continue, as I tell Gilligan, until death do us part. Our teaching collaboration drew its power and appeal for each of us from our discovery of a remarkably fruitful intersection of our research and writing interests. When we began to teach together, I had just finished and published my long study of various American resistance movements in Women, Gays, and the Constitution: The Grounds for Feminism and Gay Rights in Culture and Law (1998), and Gilligan was beginning work on The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (2002). Neither Gilligan nor I had previously known each other or each other’s work. We were astonished at the complementarity of our interests as we used my recently published book and Gilligan’s past books, articles, and ongoing work on The Birth of Pleasure as the basis for our co-teaching. Gilligan discovered in my work a history of American social movements in which gender-subversive, resisting voices (explicit and implicit in all her work) were central to the recognition of basic human rights under American constitutional law. I found in Gilligan’s work a personal and political psychology that clarified the motivations for these movements—the psychological grounds for resistance to deep structural injustices. My training is in moral and political philosophy and law, and my books over the years had always been interdisciplinary, drawing not only on political philosophy and law but also, increasingly, on history. Conversations with Gilligan suggested to me that I needed to be even more multidisciplinary, not only taking on developmental psychology but also using works of art as a way of exploring and understanding what holds patriarchy in place and what motivates resistance to it. Conversations with Gilligan lead to my writing three books, Tragic Manhood and Democracy: Verdi’s Voice and the Power of Musical Art (2004), The Case for Gay Rights: From Bowers to Lawrence and Beyond (2005a), and Disarming Manhood: Roots of Ethical Resistance (2005b), all of which I wrote for Gilligan’s eye and ear and first presented in our seminar (“Gender Issues in the Culture and Psychology of Democratic Societies.” New York University School of Law, New York, Spring 2002). Both the subject matter and the method of these works developed from the closer study of resistance movements in light of my collaborative discussion with Gilligan. In what follows, I describe how engagement with Gilligan’s ideas deepened my understanding of the social movements described in Women, Gays, and the Constitution and the conception of manhood and democracy that I developed in the more recent work.
Source Publication
Enacting Pleasure: Artists and Scholars Respond to Carol Gilligan’s New Map of Love
Source Editors/Authors
Peggy Cooper Davis, Lizzy Cooper Davis
Publication Date
2011
Recommended Citation
Richards, David A. J., "Love, Manhood, and Democracy" (2011). Faculty Chapters. 1914.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1914
