Towards a Deleuzo-feminist ethics of empowerment and freedom from logics of judgement

Abstract

This paper brings together themes from the varied texts of Gilles Deleuze in outlining a Deleuzo-feminist ethics that speaks to contemporary debates in education. Drawing on Deleuze's (1988) engagement with Spinozan ethics, Foucault's (1987) ‘practice of freedom’, the Nietzschean ‘doctrine of judgment’ and ‘system of cruelty’ (Deleuze 2001), and Bergsonian ‘fabulatory processes’ (Deleuze 1995), we explore the poststructuralist distinction between ethics and morality and its implications for feminist responses to neoliberal educational practices, identities and cultures. Following Gannon (2012a, 2012b) and others (e.g. Braidotti 1996, 2000; Colebrook 2000; Grosz 2000, 2002; Wyatt and Davies 2011), we mobilise Deleuzian accounts of subjectivity, corporeality and difference in reconfiguring the existential dimension of teaching as an ethico-aesthetic relationality. A Deleuzo-feminist ethics of empowerment promises: escape from systems of cruelty that mark, shame and blame; the politicisation of such systems; productive experimental alliances and an alternative mode of existence to that prescribed for the teaching and student body by neoliberal rationalisation and bureaucratic proceduralism.

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