Abstract
Since this paper is part of a symposium on feminist phenomenology, I choose to focus on the role of experience in the feminist framing of ideals like friendship and love. My thesis is that an uncritical use of experience will lead only to ideals that continue to reflect unexamined and unacceptable assumptions of our society. My strategy is, first, to discuss how an uncritical appeal to experience is problematic for settling various practical and philosophical issues and, second, guided by that discussion, to analyze specific appeals to experience in support of views of friendship and love, one from an acknowledged anti-feminist and the other my own.
A version of this paper was presented to the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Research Symposium on Feminist Phenomenology. I thank Linda Martin Alcoff and Diane L. Fowlkes for their careful readings and critiques of an earlier draft and Charlene Ball and Elizabeth W. Knowlton for listening to and commenting so helpfully on a later draft.
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References
Arthur Schopenhauer, “From `On Women,”’ in Visions of Women, ed. Linda A. Bell ( Clifton, NJ: The Humana Press, 1983 ), 270.
John Stuart Mill, “From The Subjection of Women,” in Visions of Women, 293.
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Margery L. Collins and Christine Pierce, “Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre’s Psychoanalysis,” in Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation, ed. Carol C. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky ( New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976 ), 118.
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Carol Anne Douglas credits lesbian feminism with the development of awareness “that opposition or being opposite is not a requirement of erotic love, and, in fact, works against one’s possibilities of really knowing the other.” Love and Politics: Radical Feminist and Lesbian Theories (San Francisco: ism press, inc., 1990), 203. However, it is important to note that this awareness has roots in Plato and was developed quite vigorously by Charlotte Perkins Gilman when she bemoans the fact that women and men are reared with nothing in common, even their play as children being structured to prepare them for completely different sorts of work and activities. She notes that when a woman and a man marry, they do not work together either in the home or in society. Their totally different backgrounds as well as their being on different economic levels ill fits them even to play together. Perhaps that is why men’s stories of love—their other main interest in addition to war, according to Gilman—always end with the conquest (“From Women and Economics,” “From The Man-Made World,” in Visions of Women, 394, 4001) and why, as Letty Coffin Pogrebin observes, sex and sports are discussed by men “in much the same way.” Among Friends.’ Who We Like, Why We Like Them, and What We Do With Them (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 262. Maybe there is little more to say about the couple’s relationship.
Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon amp; Schuster, 1993 ), 110.
lbid., 15, 26–27.
Ibid., 188.
Marilyn Frye, “The Problem That Has No Name,” in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory ( Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1983 ), 45–48.
Bloom, Love and Friendship, 29.
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 32, 34, 354.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 19–20.
Ibid., 108. Z’Ibid., 106.
Ibid., 108, 110. 23Ibid., 113.
Ibid., 138–39. 25Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 147–48.
Ibid., 207, 276, 395–96.
Ibid., 424–25.
Ibid., 484, 498, 500.
Ibid., 508–9, 524.
Ibid., 547–51.
Ibid., 551.
C.S. Lewis, “Friendship—The Least Necessary Love,” in Friendship: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Neera Kapur Badhwar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993 ), 41.
Lillian B. Rubin, Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives ( New York: Harper amp; Row Publishers, 1985 ), 58.
Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, `World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2, no. 2 (Summer 1987 ): 3–19.
Marny Hall, “`Why limit me to ecstasy?’ Toward a positive model of genital incidentalism among friends and other lovers,” in Boston Marriages: Romantic but asexual relationships among contemporary lesbians, ed. Esther D. Rothblum and Kathleen A. Brehony ( Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993 ), 44–55.
See Laura S. Brown, “The Boston marriage in the therapy office,” Boston Marriages: Romantic but asexual relationships among contemporary lesbians, 88–89.
Pepper Schwartz, Peer Marriage: How Love Between Equals Really Works ( New York: The Free Press, 1994 ).
Rubin observes that in her interviews she found far more men than women identifying their spouses as their best friends. Intimate Strangers: Men amp; Women Together ( New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990 ), 129–30.
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Bell, L.A. (2000). Friendship, Love, and Experience. In: Fisher, L., Embree, L. (eds) Feminist Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9488-2_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9488-2_11
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