JUDITH STACEY
ON RESISTANCE, AMBIVALENCE AND
FEMINIST THEORY:
A RESPONSE TO CAROL GILLIGAN
Though I hung with students
who were supposedly radical and
chic, we did not discuss class...
Yet these class realities separated
me from fellow students. We
were moving in different directions. I did not intend to forget
my class background or alter my
class allegiance. And even though
I received an education designed
to provide me with a bourgeois
sensibility, passive acquiescence
was not my only option. I knew
that I could resist.
bell hooks, Talking Back
Given the paradoxes of modernity, there is little wrong, and
perhaps a great deal right, with
being ambivalent - especially
when there is so much to be
ambivalent about.
Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper?
In 1982, Carol Gilligan's extraordinarily influential book, In a Different Voice, challenged the false universalism in scholarly narratives about (putatively human) moral development that were rooted
exclusively in studies of the experiences and subjectivities of males.
An earlier version of this essay was delivered as part of the Tanner Symposium on Human Values at The University of Michigan on March 17, 1990.
Another paper presented at the Symposium, by Mary M. Brabeck, will
appear in a forthcoming issue of MQR.
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