SEXUALIZED SPACES IN PUBLIC PLACES: IRIGARAY, LEVINAS, AND AN ETHICS OF THE EROTIC

A bstract .  Discourse pertaining to the erotic is absent in our current educational culture. In this essay Shaireen Rasheed elucidates how Luce Irigaray, through her discussion of the erotic, has challenged the conception of language and otherness that underpins modern education. In undertaking a comparative analysis of Irigaray's work on the erotic and Emmanuel Levinas's account of Eros, Rasheed emphasizes that the implications of Irigaray's critique suggest not only a reevaluation of Levinas's "Phenomenology of Eros," but a revaluation of the role of the sexualized body in philosophy. Rasheed concludes by urging educators to think ethically about what discourses of difference mean in the classroom. A pedagogy contextualized within an ethics of the erotic attempts to develop pedagogies to link ideas, practices, and values in order to create discursive spaces where the unutterable could be articulated, where so-called marginalized images could be represented, and where efforts could be made to rethink forms of subjectivity and relations within the oppressive confines of the always heterosexualized classroom.