Ethics of teaching critical: feminisms on the wings of desire

Identifies critical accounting researchers′ apparent indifference to the transformatory needs, wants and entitlements of accounting students. After expressing a lack of understanding about this phenomenon, reconstructs a variety of responses from researchers, as well as possible subtexts, to tease out a feminist ethical perspective. Believes this perspective to be useful in exposing some of the silences, inconsistencies and contradictions that need to be addressed in accounting education and research. Offers an explanation for accounting researchers′ reticence in transferring their critical research skills to their teaching – the superficial adoption of the tenets of critical practice, which in turn reproduces phallocratic models of moral philosophy. Students are seen as “generalized others”, and “an ethic of care” necessarily regarding students as fully sensate human beings as “concrete others” is silenced. Concludes that this is consistent with the silencing of emotion exposed by feminist theorists, and serves to perpetuate and reproduce patriarchal and phallocentric discourses in university and accounting education.