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Carol Gilligan. The Birth of Pleasure. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Twenty years ago, Carol Gilligan published her landmark book In a Different Voice, a text that revolutionized moral development theory and which remains an oft-cited text, especially in the fields of psychology and education. Given Gilligan's successes, it is somewhat surprising that The Birth of Pleasure has failed to garner a similarly enthusiastic response. The lack of critical acclaim may rest in the fact that Gilligan's newest book is less a radical departure from her previous scholarship than a rearticulation of it. The Birth of Pleasure returns to familiar territory, the landscape of girlhood and the geography of voice. Children's and adolescent literature scholars seeking new insights about psychological development or a reworking of familiar heterosexual romance plots will be disappointed. What The Birth of Pleasure does provide is a glimpse into how Gilligan's work leans on a conflictual theorization of adolescent girlhood. Gilligan's own voice consistently infuses the text in a way that suggests The Birth of Pleasure exists as less a scholarly study than an ode to one woman's girlhood. This review provides a brief overview of Gilligan's project and focuses in particular on the tensions that surround the theorization of adolescent girlhood within The Birth of Pleasure.
Gilligan separates The Birth of Pleasure into three overlapping sections, which are never explicitly distinguished from each other and seem tied together solely by the author's own reflections about heterosexual romance. For example, Gilligan fills the book with musings such as, "Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains when we love, life grows" (235). One of the recurrent themes in the book centers around the notion that patriarchal society demands subjects to enact gendered roles that ultimately lead men and women to replay tragic heterosexual scripts. In The Birth of Pleasure Gilligan concerns herself with the induction of subjects into the confines of patriarchy as a way to expose and rewrite familiar scripts.
Using the language of loss and recovery, Gilligan searches for evidence of a self before pain, a time before patriarchy when pleasure ran unfettered. She writes that in her work she was searching for...