Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Print.
We have seen that desire is a polyvalent structure, a movement to establish an identity coextensive with the world. Hegel’s discussion of labor begins to show us how the world of substance becomes recast as the world of the subject. Desire as a transformation of the natural world is simultaneously the transformation of its own natural self into an embodied freedom. And yet, these transformations cannot occur outside of an historically constituted intersubjectivity which mediates the relation to nature and to the self. True subjectivities come to flourish only in communities that provide for reciprocal recognition, for we do not come to ourselves through work alone, but through the acknowledging look of the Other who confirms us (58).