The Deepening Darkness; Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future
- Release Date: 18/12/2008
- Country of Issue: United States of America
- Category: Academic and professional books
Why is America again fighting an unjust and limitless war? In this era of unprecedented economic inequality and diminished human rights and values, why is America’s political discussion distorted by religious fundamentalism, the fear of gay marriage, and the specter of outlawed abortion?
The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (Cambridge University Press; December 18, 2008) traces the roots of this tension by joining Carol Gilligan’s renowned expertise in developmental psychology with David Richards’ impassioned research into ethical resistance to injustice.
In a moving collective voice, Gilligan and Richards find a tension between repressive power and liberated emotional and erotic bonds, born in the Roman Republic and reproduced through the course of every subsequent political arrangement.
At the heart of this duality is the twisting of private desire into a crime against the state, and a construction of gender that replicates the state’s war against dissent and transgressive sexuality. Men are told the only way to assert their masculinity is to channel the state’s anger upon a perceived enemy: unregulated women, religious and ethnic others, and other men who challenge dominant norms.
Borrowing Arundhati Roy’s phrase “Love Laws” – those laws dictating who should be loved and how and how much – Gilligan and Richards show that resistance to those laws is a resistance to the very logic of the patriarchal oppression that poisons our culture. Desire and love freely chosen among equals are quite literally the heart of the democracy we can and must nurture.
ENDS
About the Authors:
Carol Gilligan
Carol Gilligan is the author of the landmark book In A Different Voice (1982). Her most recent book is the acclaimed novel Kyra, published in 2008.
David A. J. Richards
David A. J. Richards is the author of many books including The Case for Gay Rights (2005), Disarming Manhood (2005), and (with Nicholas Bamforth) Patriarchal Religions, Sexuality, and Gender (Cambridge, 2007).
Gilligan and Richards are available for interviews.
The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future by Carol Gilligan and David Richards will be published by Cambridge University Press on December 18, 2008 $29.99 | 368 Pages | ISBN: 978-0-521-89898-0
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