Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

2006-09-15 14:45:19

I am Curious Blue, you are the awesomest. He found this early paper by Janet Halley and, from my quick skim, it seems to outline the basic positions in her book, Split Decisions. Now, what truly intrigues me is that she wants to examine the convergences and points of departure between queer theory and feminism:

In Part III, I analyze two examples of queer theory by men. These are close readings; by that means I attempt to find with some precision the trajectory of these postmodernizing, sex-positive, left analytics of sexuality and the precise points of their debt to and departure from feminism. The basic idea here is to travel deeply into the domain that could be called queer theory and to start the journey as far as possible from feminism; it seemed to me likely (and I think it turned out to be the case) that my two male authors — one a gay man, the other a straight one — would place themselves in relation to feminism rather than in it and would therefore make manifest some conceptual and/or political possibilities for Taking a Break from Feminism (and would also give me the pleasure of identifying publicly with them and disseminating their work).

This is something I’ve been reading about, too, but for lack of time…. Here, an excerpt on the late and early MacKinnon:

By far the most brilliant, comprehensive and forceful thinker about sexuality in American feminist legal theory for the last twenty years has been Catharine A. MacKinnon. Her formulation — which, for shorthand, I will call the “male/female model” — has become the paradigmatic understanding of sexuality in sexual-subordination feminism in the United States. The chief alternative source of descriptive and normative insights is cultural feminism. It took me a long time to understand how profoundly MacKinnon altered several of her basic positions between 1982-1983, when Signs published two articles by her that fully deserve the name “radical feminist,”5 and the mid-1980’s, by which time she was fully engaged as a feminist legal activist. As I show elsewhere, Feminism Unmodified, the 1987 volume on which most readers rely for a restatement of MacKinnon’s thought tout court, significantly modifies MacKinnon’s position as of 1983 on a whole array of crucial points.6 All the feminists who want to resist the influence of the Late MacKinnon should consider whether their own reasons for resistance appear as MacKinnon’s own position in the Signs articles. As I see it, many of them do. The Early MacKinnon argued that male dominance was not merely a social subordination of women by men, but an almost total capture of reality and knowledge themselves by male dominance and female subordination. Male dominance and female subordination did not merely rank the genders: they produced them (that is, the very existence of men and women may well derive from this domination), and, because they also produced the eroticization of domination by everyone so constituted, they also produced the consciousness by which we might apprehend these arrangements. Our very desire and our very modes of knowledge are inhabited throughout by the epistemology of this power structure. Men emerge as objective knowers, and women as known objects; and this turns us all on and is our basic grammar of action: man fucks woman, subject verb object. Feminism is a project in quest for women’s point of view, which, because it is already constituted as its subordination, is not only a profoundly deferred but also a deeply problematic starting place. On this understanding, male dominance was so complete that no aspect of gender could be distinguished, ultimately, from rape. MacKinnon did not claim that every act of heterosexual intercourse was a rape. Rather, she made the [*pg 11] much more interesting and subtle claim that, because of the constitutive role of male dominance and female subordination in producing all the existing people, in generating the very rudiments of our knowledge and desire, there is no one alive who can distinguish meaningfully between rape and not-rape. I call the result a male/female model because those terms map the entire field of analytic possibility for this feminism. Male power produces female subordination, which is gender, which is the eroticization of this hierarchy; all of this generates rather than arises from the conceptual and social difference between men and women. The model is highly convergentist: it causes MacKinnon to say that, if a man rapes a man, the latter has been sexually dominated and is therefore feminized. The homosexuality of the event does not elude, but must rather merge into the male/female model. All of this led the Early MacKinnon to embrace a critique of the state and of the law. The state and the law were, she proposed, male — not in the sense that men ran them, but in the sense that they fully recapitulated male ontological and epistemological powers and were in a sense therefore fully dependent on female subordination to be what they were. The state could not be used against something so constitutive of it as male power; and female subjectivity, which was a constitutive element of male power, provided no way out of the dilemma. Criminalizing rape would merely legitimate all the dominance in sexuality that escaped the definition of the crime; deciding particular rape cases on the basis of the woman’s instead of the man’s testimony merely recapitulated the subject/object, subjectivity/objectivity distinction of male dominance; asking trial courts to find that some acts of heterosexual intercourse were “rape” imputed to others a legitimacy feminism should deny them. Insight into equality and the political will to seek it could come only from consciousness-raising — the painful search for a transformation of consciousness achieved at the most micro level. It was not too long before MacKinnon significantly departed from some of these claims. She retained the structural view of male domination: it is horizonless; it produces men and women; it relates them to each other in gender, which is eroticized domination. But by the mid-1980s she claimed to know many, many things, and to know them because women’s point of view had disclosed them to her without distortion. Rape, sexual harassment, domestic abuse, pornography — all the lurid catalog of sexual nastiness — these are the core elements in male domination. Rights against them enforced by the state would be feminist. Women who disagree with any part of this line, MacKinnon was willing to suggest, have been co-opted by male consciousness. It is possible to deploy the Early MacKinnon against the Late.7