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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA CRUZ
RE-THINKING RADICAL FEMINISM: OPPOSITION, UTOPIANISM AND

THE MORAL IMAGINATION OF FEMINIST THEORY
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction

of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
by
Kathy Miriam
March 1998
The Dissertation of Kathy M iriam is

approved:
1
Professor Teresa de Lauretis, Chair
Professor Barbara Epstein
Professor Susan Gillman
Dean of G raduate Studies
UMI Number: 9825604
Copyright 1998 by
Miriam, Kathy
All rights reserved.
UMI Microform 9825604

Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.
This microform edition is protected against unauthorized

copying under Title 17, United States Code.
UMI
300 North Zeeb Road
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Copyright © by
Kathy Miriam
1998
iii
Table of Contents
Abstract iv
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
Part I: The Oppositional Im agination of Fem inist Theory

Chapter One: The Power of Radical Feminist Theory 20
Chapter Two: Pornography is the Theory.. . : The Force of Reality

and Representations of the (Post)feminist Intellectual 93
Chapter Three: Resistance or Ressentiment?: Moral Imagination and the

Consciousness of Feminist Theory 143
Part II: Fem inism 's Utopian Im agination
Chapter Four: Some Uses and Abuses of Disenchantment: Re-Thinking the

Utopian Imagination of Lesbian-Feminism in a Queer Era 194
Chapter Five: Escaping the Class of Women: Lesbian-Standpoint

as a Feminist Plot 268
Bibliography 331
Dissertation Abstract
Re-Thinking Radical Feminism: Opposition, Utopianism and the Moral Imagination of

Feminist Theory
Kathy Miriam
My dissertation argues for a reconstructed radical feminism that critically thinks

back to ideals that were central to the U.S. women's liberation m ovem ent but
have been de-v alu ed as "outm oded" in the process of fem inism 's
institutionalization. Radical feminism remains significant for its critique of
gender as a category of hierarchy and its projection of social formations beyond
systemic male dominance. As critical scrutiny of what-is and vision of what
ought-to-be, radical feminism is distinguished by its moral imagination, namely,
its particular dialectic of opposition and utopianism. The concept of moral
imagination provides a frame for my internal critique of radical feminism and for
my assessment of a retreat from radical feminism in contemporary feminism. I
examine current feminist debates that expose a dilemma: how to maintain
opposition without sliding into a victim discourse a n d /o r how to sustain utopian
insight w ithout lapsing into philosophical idealism. Contem porary feminist
intellectual culture in its disavowal of radical feminism and particularly as
influenced by the U.S. import of European poststructuralism, shows signs of a
retreat from utopian and oppositional thought. My analysis shows how some
intellectuals, representing w hat I refer to as a post(fem inist)structuralist
perspective, invoke poststructuralist categories to neutralize the normative force
of feminist theory—its force of critique and vision. I criticize this perspective
because it reduces the moral imagination to moralism and refuses vision as
im practicable. As an altern ativ e to opposition, this p o ststru ctu ralist
postfem inism can only offer sem iotic play. In this sense, postfem inist
intellectuals reverse Antonio Gramsci's formula for political thought showing an
"optim ism of the intellect" and a "pessim ism of the will." H ow ever, an
absolutist opposition a n d /o r utopianism in radical feminism projects feminism
altogether outside of social pow er and thus cannot account for how it m ight
articulate w ith other political struggles. The answer, I argue, is in a materialist
radical feminism; drawing on the w ork of Colette Guillaumin, Carole Pateman
and others, I argue for the necessity of a materialist critique of patriarchal power
as it intersects with other institutions and th at grounds a feminist utopian
imagination in political praxis.
Acknowledgments
This dissertation is dedicated to m y first mentors, Mary Daly and Janice G.

Raymond. Their profound influence on m y thinking and on my political, ethical
commitments will make it all but impossible for me to ever sever the two terms
"feminist" and "intellectual" even as I "re-think" radical feminism in ways that
occasionally depart from their own projects.
I would like to thank the members of my committee: My considerable
intellectual debt to Teresa de Lauretis, m y dissertation director, will be obvious
to my readers; her encouragement of m y project in its crucial, early stages and
her scrupulous reading of my work over the years pushed me to hone m y
rhetorical style and thereby sharpen m y critical arguments. Barbara Epstein
provided emotional and intellectual support that has sustained me through
difficult moments; her example of politically committed scholarship and rich
historical wisdom sets a standard I can only hope to aspire to. Susan Gillman, a
third reader, was available to me at crucial moments of the w riting process,
serving as a careful listener who encouraged me to talk through m y arguments.
Stephen Heath was a reader in the first stages of this project and he engaged m y
w ork w ith seriousness and insight; I will always consider our conversations
among the highlights of my studies in the History of Consciousness Program.
I owe a special thanks to Billie Harris and Alex Armstrong of the History
of Consciousness Board. And w ithout the skills and thoughtfulness of Sheila
Peuse this dissertation w ould have been impossible; she helped guide me
through the obstacle course of the bureaucratic business of academic life w ith a
kind heart and sharp, practical wisdom.
I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude to w riting teacher extraordinaire,
Roz Spafford; as the first reader of the first few chapters of this dissertation Roz
helped me to conceptualize my project and clarify m y prose at a formative stage.
My parents made it possible for m e to complete graduate school with their
generous financial support. My brother Billy, a m usician and true organic
intellectual, sets a standard of creative discipline an d intellectual engagement
that continues to inspire my own work.
The following friends have sustained my m em ory of feminism in a
postfeminist era: I owe an incalculable intellectual and political debt to Bonnie
Mann, philosopher, radical feminist and activist; the intellectual and political
friendship which kindled this dissertation in its formative stages is a relationship
from which my work will never recover. Elise Ficarra's loving friendship has
made my life more delightful; our conversations throughout the years have kept
me in touch w ith the first ecstatic moments of discovering feminism; her crystal
clear m ind keeps me politically honest and analytically precise and her creative
poet's soul keeps my creative spirit burning. Irene Reti's friendship and
intellectual and political integrity have been a prim ary source of re-membering
radical feminism for me; her loving devotion and fun companionship has kept
me going. I owe a special thanks to Irene for her caring, careful assistance as a
proof reader in the final stages of this project. De Clarke has been a generous,
playful friend whose stimulating and challenging intellectual discourse I am
always hungry for; I owe De a special thanks for helping to make my prose more
readable over the years. Sandy Goodman's friendship has leavened m y spirit in
bleak moments; her fighting spirit, shrew d intellect, and dogged everyday
feminist activism sets an example of boldness w hen cowardice is often easier.
Ellen K. Scott's integrity as a feminist activist and scholar remains im portant to
me; our intellectual and political collaboration and her w arm heart guided me
through the early stages of m y graduate school years. Gail Dines, a helpful
reader of m y work, and long-time radical feminist acquaintance is a new friend
who makes me hopeful about the prospects for politically grounded intellectual
work.
Katy G eraldine's feminist idealism—in the best sense of idealism—and
hum or were bright spots during difficult times in my personal and academic life;
her love and belief in me restored me, body and soul, in incalculable ways during
an im portant period of my graduate school years. I relied on Debbie Rifkin for
her extraordinary insights into teaching, emotional support and keen listening
skills; at im portant moments she helped me think through my central arguments
and always provided delightful companionship. Lori Klein has been another
extraordinary friend whose w isdom and integrity has inspired me and who has
been generous w ith resources and lots of fun. I thank all these women for
providing me w ith the love and resources that have gotten me through these
vears and enabled me to do mv work. j
John Sanbonm atsu has been a cherished intellectual com panion and
friend. A colleague in the History of Consciousness Program, John has been a
persistent and thorough reader of this dissertation; his astute feedback and his
unwavering excitement about my project, as well as our wonderfully stimulating
conversations have kept me keeping on in ways that I will be forever grateful for.
Other friends and colleagues that I w ant to acknowledge as contributing
to this process at various stages are Lisa Horan, Jamie Lee Evans, Lisa Rudman
and Diane Nelson for their feisty feminism; Ger Moane for ecstatic conversation;
my N ortham pton Study/A ction Group in the late eighties set the major political
context for m y writing; Karen Davis, Mary John and Yu Mi Yang, were crucial
influences in m y first years of graduate school that definitively shaped my
intellectual direction; M aureen Sullivan devoted hours to providing me with
astute professional advice; Jocelyn H oy was another careful and supportive
reader of my work; the women's Salon in Santa Cruz provided artistic respite
from the labors of theory. I also thank Gloria Melnitsky, Abby Bogolmony,
D'vora Tirschwell, Gloria Anzaldua, Kamari Clarke, Joan Schuman, Mara Galvez
and Sandra Meucci for being there w hen I needed them in each of their special
ways.
1
Introduction
I want a women's revolution like a lover.

I lust for it, I want so much this freedom...
Monster —Robin Morgan
I was 18 years old when I recited Robin Morgan's poem "Monster" in its
entirety to a college audience. The words had a physical charge. I lust for it, I
want so much this freedom. . . It was 1977; I had discovered feminism in one of
those last fleeting moments before the words women's revolution had congealed
into jargon—or "discourse." Like other feminists I lived even then with the fear
that "it" "[would] not really come," as Morgan p ut it in another poem in the
same collection:
We fear. We know it will not really come
through
personal solutions,
organizing the workers,
picketing, voting, speaking, writing,
living with men, not living with men
sleeping with women, not sleeping with women,
having panels, speak-outs, speak-ins,
2
speak-ups, marches, street theater,

learning karate,
or eating natural foods.
We know it will not really come

even from doing all these things
sincerely, for years,
until, as elder eminent revolutionary
feminists, we can pass the flaming
matchstick
on to younger sisters.
—"Excuses For Not Moving"
If Teresa de Lauretis is right that "the only guarantee any theory can give
about itself is to expose itself as a passionate fiction" (Practice xiv), then the
present dissertation is no more b u t also no less than a matchstick flicker of the
passion that spurs m y personal trajectory as a radical feminist activist and
theorist, namely, a passion to re-ignite a feminist movement for widesweeping,
uncompromised transformation of the current social order. For one premise of
my work is that, although motivated by the desire for a satisfying narrative of the
world, feminist theory is also driven by desire to understand and change the world
and thus is hopefully more than the sum of its contingencies as a historically
(socially, psychologically) determined fiction. The poiver of radical feminism—its
consciousness —and perhaps its soul—its theoretical, ethical, political imagination
as oppositional and utopian —is in its capacity to provide a critique of social reality.
What is radical feminism7.1 I do not intend with the term to designate a
unified, monolithic a n d /o r homogenous theory or set of practices. Radical
^For the history o f US. radical feminism a n d /or contemporary women's liberation m ovem ent see
Echols, Daring to Be Bad; Koedt et. al. Radical Feminism; Morgan, Sisterhood is Poiverfal and Going
Too Far; Evans; Bunch Passionate Politics; Susan Stein; Freeman; Hoagland and Penelope. For a
3
feminism has developed in different cultural locations, both within and outside
of the United States, and with varying political stakes. Within the United States,
radical feminism first developed as a specific wing of the Women's Liberation
Movement. In the early to mid-seventies, radical feminist political tactics varied
but generally tended to avoid legislative reform and to embrace either or both of
anarchist, theatrical "zap" tactics—dem onstrating at the 1969 Miss America
Pageant—and the building of grass roots organizations—such as rape-crisis
hotlines and battered women shelters; karate and self-defense classes; wom en's
centers; literary presses; and political newspapers.
In the late seventies and early eighties, U.S. radical feminism came to
focus on either developing a counter-culture a n d /o r launching cam paigns
against sexual violence. The latter cam paigns took place at both a grass roots
level and at the level of legislative, social policy change. The radical feminist
focus on pornography and prostitution as central institutions of male dominance
was a watershed moment in second-wave feminist history—a moment that in
many (though not all) cases led to a perm anent identification of the category
radical feminist with the anti-pornography critique and the subsequent dissociation
from—or disavowal of—the category "radical feminist" by former self-identified
radical feminists (see Willis).
This dissertation situates itself unapologetically w ithin historical U.S.
radical feminism and thus with its present incarnation as anti-pornography and
anti-trafficking critiques and activism. However, rather than preserve the
category, I seek ways to extend radical feminist theory by assessing its moral
imagination: Historical radical fem inism 's dual focus on building a counter
critique of Echols see Miriam, "Dream of a W oman-Identified Woman in which Sisterhood is Still
Powerful."
4
culture and critiquing sexual violence suggests a dialectic of thought that

philosopher Sabina Lovibond, in her stu d y of Wittgenstein, names the moral
imagination: a dialectic of critical scrutiny of existing institutions and positive
vision of new, possible structures and ways of life. The concept of the moral
im agination provides a central conceptual frame for me to re-think radical
feminism in order to think through several predicaments where the course of
feminist theory in its relation to praxis— the praxis of women's liberation—has been
frozen. What do I mean by re-thinking radical feminism?
The original inspiration for framing m y project as one of re-thinking
radical feminism came from a conference on "rethinking marxism" in which the
organizers and plenary speakers expressed a desire to complicate and extend
marxism in light of recent predicaments in theory and culture, rather than
jettisoning its central premises.2 With the phrase re-thinking radical feminism I
distinguish my project from postfeminism-, I w ant to extend rather than go beyond
the central premises of radical feminist analysis. This requires that I engage in an
internal critique of radical feminism's ow n passionate fictions. H ow has a
satisfying narrative of sisterhood served to smooth over the cracks and fissures in
ideology where women are divided from one another by brutal inequalities? Re
thinking radical feminist ideals (e.g. sisterhood) is a form of memory as well as
critique: As Walter Benjamin wrote about history, the point is not to grasp it the
"way it was," b u t to take hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of
danger. A fugitive memory that flashes up for me in a critique of "sisterhood" is
one of hope for women's solidarity. My hope is that feminists take hold of this
memory at a moment when most women are "caught at the crisis" (Amott) of
2Plenary. "Marxism Now: Traditions and Difference." Conference: Rethinking Marxism,

University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Ma. Nov. 29-DEC. 1,1990.
5
current global (dis)order—a moment when the exploitation and domination of

women serve the intersections of capital, male power, and white supremacy in
ever more refined ways. This is a moment, in other w ords, w hen we need a
materialist, political, radical feminism.
The theory that we need is one that can provide a radical account of male
power as it intersects with other social institutions. I argue that the sources for
this re-energized radical feminism are within historical radical feminism as well
as drawn from other intellectual traditions. When I draw upon radical feminism
itself, my main sources come from the theory as it has developed in three cultural
contexts—the U.S, in the context of second wave women's liberation movement,
the UK where it was called "revolutionary feminism," and in France and Quebec
where it developed as "materialist feminism."3 In all these cultural contexts,
radical, revolutionary and material feminism were terms that distinguished a
radical feminism from either or both marxist and liberal versions.4 In this
dissertation I will m aintain the term radical feminism for theory th at while
culturally and (sometimes) politically various can be identified by a few common
denominators, namely, a critique of gender and "sex difference" as categories of
hierarchy, a critique of sexuality as a central site of w om en's oppression,
a n d /o r—m ost contested among different versions of radical feminism—a
redefinition of "woman" as a site of new powers and possibilities.
3The main exception to my focus on these cultural contexts is m y discussion of the work of
Australian feminist Carole Pateman, presently teaching and writing in the United States.
4Materialist feminism in France and Quebec also distinguished itself from a "philosophy of
difference" associated with the work of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and others who engaged a
primarily psychoanalytic feminism and/or who focused on ecriture feminine. See Juteau and
Laurin for this perspective on the developm ent of feminist theory in the United States, Britain,
France and Quebec. It is interesting to compare their taxonomy of fem inism s w ith the standard
taxonomy dted in the U.S, based on Allison Jaggar's formulation, where "radical feminism" is
associated with psychological and/or cultural accounts of wom en's oppression and a materialist
radical feminism altogether elided.
6
Re-thinking radical feminism aims at a materialist theory th a t will be

necessarily motivated by an imagined sisterhood not yet real-ized in the present,
a sisterhood that is ethically and politically efficacious, thus real. At stake in my
internal critique and in m y elaboration of a materialist, political, radical feminism
is the moral imagination of feminism as oppositional and utopian. Accordingly, m y
dissertation is divided into two parts. In p art 1 1 focus on radical feminism as an
oppositional imagination beginning w ith chapter 1 w here I elaborate on the
strength of radical feminism as a social critique .
The enduring theme of radical feminist critique as such is male poiuer.
Here I argue for the salience of this category of pow er against recent trends
where a feminism mostly influenced by Foucault has aimed at "going beyond the
oppressor/oppressed." This chapter argues that the coupling of Foucault and
feminism has sometimes constituted a "marriage into respectability,"5 in which
case poststructuralism becomes postfeminism. I thus distinguish betw een
theorists who use Foucault to extend feminism and those w ho invoke
poststructuralism to neutralize a radical critique of male power; in the latter case
we have a postfeminist agenda that aims to go "beyond" a critique of male
pow er as if such critique were outmoded. I call this use of poststructuralism,
post(feminist)structuralism, a term that remains central to my project as a whole.
In contrast to post(feminist)structuralism, I consider the work of feminists who
use Foucault to account for postmodern technologies of gender (de Lauretis)—
technologies, institutions, structures, mechanisms that en-gender pow er and that
can be theorized in their intersection w ith other formations of pow er such as
■’The editors of Feminism and Foucault admit that their project can be questioned as "yet another
attempt to authorize feminism by marrying it into respectability?" (Diamond and Quinby,
Feminism and Foucault ix).
7
colonization, bureaucratization and com m odification (Mohanty; Alexander;

Connell).
At the core of this chapter, I re-think radical feminism by foregrounding
powerful instances of materialist critique w ithin radical feminism itself. I engage
a comparative reading of Carole Pateman and Colette Guillaumin, each of w hom
theorizes male power in terms of men's systemically organized and legitimized
access to women's bodies. Nancy Fraser's critique of Pateman's book, The Sexual
Contract, provides a useful foil for my defense of this account of power and for
m y critique of post(fem inist)structuralism . Fraser claims that im personal
mechanisms of m odem power—such as state and m arket structures—require
feminist theorists to go beyond Patem an's master/subject m odel of m ale
dominance. I argue that, on the contrary, the materialist feminism of Patem an
and Guillaumin shows that these same mechanisms generate new and efficient
forms of m en's "mastery"—m en's appropriation of w om en's bodies, or sexage
(Guillaumin) in public/collective as well as private modes.
This chapter reads Patem an's w ork as a contribution to the critique of
liberalism that marks one essential difference between radical feminism and
other forms of feminism. H er account of the sexual contract show s that
contractarian (or "libertarian") ideology is pivotal to the maintenance of m en's
"sex right" (Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality") today—as it is to other forms
of domination and subordination. The ideology which legitimizes m arriage,
employment and prostitution as contracts, shows the genius of a social model that
legitimizes consent to subordination. My close reading of Fraser's critique of
Pateman shows the extent to which the difference between liberalism and radical
feminism explodes over the issue of prostitution: For Fraser, prostitution is based
8
on a fantasy rather than the actuality of male pow er over women. Hence my
project theorizes the "essential difference of radical fem inism "(M ann),
distinguishing between a model which aims at explaining sexual exploitation as
one central site of women's oppression and a model for which the category of
sexual exploitation has minimal significance for explanations of w om en's
oppression.
While chapter 1 outlines contending accounts of power, the chapters that
follow elaborate on the thesis that the radical feminist account of power suggests
a specific moral imagination w ithout which feminist theory cannot sustain its
essential difference as a radical transfiguration of social thought generally. I
argue that this is the case even w hen its moral imagination is the source of
radical feminism's own predicam ents—its internal obstacles to a politically
efficacious theory. I thus need to elaborate further on this concept: W hat do I
mean by moral imagination and its dialectic of critical scrutiny and positive vision?
Mary Daly's distinction between "exorcism" and "ecstasy" as necessary
stages of feminist critique and vision seems to have permanently imprinted my
ow n critical imagination (see Gyn/Ecology). A related concept is Janice
Raymond's "two sights-seeing" w hich means asking, “how do women live in the
world as men have defined it while creating the world as women imagine it would be?"
(Passion for Friends 205, italics in original). I w ould put it somewhat differently:
how does feminism at once critique—and politically confront—the "given" of
patriarchal social reality and invent a "radical social otherness" (Benhabib). This
"dual vision" (Raymond) m ight im ply an inescapable "contradiction," as de
Lauretis remarks about feminist theory; she notes "the twin and opposite pull
exerted on any progressive or radical thinker by the positivity of political action,
9
on one front, and the negativity of critical theory, on the other" ("Technologies"
36). This contradiction suggests Gramsci's prescription for radicalism: pessimism
of the intellect and optimism of the will, and it reflects a certain loss of ontological
certainties—"the political situation of theory today" (Karen Davis 5) after the fall
of the Subject, capital S, of Revolution in both marxist and feminist contexts.
Rather than imply a division of labor between positive politics and
negative theory, the point is that radical thought is sustained through a dialectic
of critical and positive impulses. This dialectic enables a connection between
theory and praxis: for theory lacking politics as "the art of the possible" loses its
edge as critique (a major point of my critique of post[feminist]structuralism) and
a politics w ithout the negating force of theory loses its oppositional edge and its
vision. The dialectic of positivity and negation is inextricably connected to "a
dialectics of inside and outside" (Moscovid). The question is how to configure a
tension in theory where the "subject of feminism" is positioned both w ithin and
outside of dominant ideology, thus itself inescapably contradictory (de Lauretis,
"Technologies," "Eccentric"). I argue that this is a question of moral imagination,
as well as epistemology. With the term moral I call attention to the emphatic
normative dimension (Benhabib's phrase) of feminist critique, or in other words, to
the "soul" of feminist theory as a theory of how the world ought to be.6 For a
theory w ithout this moral imagination is soul-less indeed and fails as critical
thought—hence my main objection to postfeminism as a retreat from the moral
imagination of feminism. In sum, I use the term moral imagination to discuss how
fem inist th e o ry (and postfem inism ) imagines (configures, conceives,
6I am inspired here by Lisa Brush's way of framing current debates as a "struggle for the soul of
feminism."
10
conceptualizes) tensions between positive and negative impulses and between

inside and outside in terms of opposition and utopianism.
Chapters 2 through 4 concern themselves with specific predicaments in
feminist theory and culture where the m oral imagination oscillates betw een
extremes of opposition and utopianism, and thus leads to some form of idealism.
By idealism I mean an ideology which redefines social change in term s of
transformations of individual or community will, spirit, or intellect rather than as
a political praxis of transforming m aterial reality. Radical feminist idealism
implies either or both of two possible extremes: an opposition to pow er that
becomes ressentiment—the subject b urrow s into a m oralized state of
powerlessness as its only leverage against pow er—or, alternatively, a utopian
dream of escape to a rarefied, amazonian elsewhere. Postfeminism, on the other
hand, represents a third extreme in its retreat from the moral im agination
altogether and in the process it supports its own extreme, post-utopian idealism.
In chapter 2 1 focus on postfeminist idealism by assessing the predicament
of pornography for feminist theory. My analysis follows upon chapter l's
argum ent that contract/libertarian ideology constitutes a key discursive and
institutional mechanism of (post)modem patriarchal power. Here I re-frame the
pornography debate to ask, how "pornography," as a category of analysis, has
been implicated in academic legitimizing mechanisms, particularly in the use of
poststructuralism for a libertarian defense of pornography. The core of this
chapter engages a close reading of a 1990 essay by Judith Butler where she claims
for pornography a "force of fantasy" and, therefore, a "utopian" status. I argue
that her position signals a new theoretical development, namely, the conjunction
of libertarianism and post(feminist)structuralism, and as such epitom izes a
11
particular dialectic of inside an d outside: A t one an d the same tim e her

argum ent secures pornography as "utopian" and constitutes a disavowal of an
"elsew here" to pornography. This is a dangerous situation for theory, for
"w ithout 'utopia', w ithout the possibility of negating an order beyond the point
that we are able to threaten it, there is no possibility at all of the constitution of a
radical imaginary" (Ladau and Mouffe, Hegemony 190). Yet Butler proposes that
there is no position from which to critique pornography, that the critic of
pornography (such as Andrea Dworkin) is ultimately bound to the terms of what
sh e c r itiq u e s — th e p o r n o g r a p h e r 's te rm s . I suggest th a t
post(feminist)structuralism thus reverses the Gramscian formula referred to above
in that it clings to an optimism o f the intellect and pessimism of the will. Getting
outside of pornography is impossible, therefore resignifying pornography as
utopian becomes the only option. Despite its anti-hum anism , this theoretical
stance conjures a "utopia" where only the intellectual as abstract individual could
possibly feel at home—in a pornography (as a category) of theory.
One premise of Butler's argum ent is that identification w ith /as the victim
is conceptually impossible as the position from which to critique victimization;
that is to say, in offering a critique one claims subjecthood, a claim that
(according to her logic) precludes the victimization that is daim ed. In chapter
three I turn precisely to the imaginary where identification w ith—and as—the
victim is the contradictory yet essential subject-position of the feminist critique of
sexual violence. As theory and praxis, critique and sodal movement, the radical
fem inist opposition to sexual violence is prem ised o n the possibility and
desirability of solidarity—a collective identification with victims as the basis of
collective outrage and political will.
12
The central predicam ent exam ined in chapter 3 is expressed in the

question, how can feminists at once claim and contest victimization? At once
inside and outside ideology, consciousness, especially as consciousness of
victimization, is a paradox (Bartky; de Lauretis, "Eccentric"; MacKinnon, Theory
of the State). One approach to this predicament has been an impasse in feminist
theory where we focus either on violation or on sexual self-determination (Russo).
Does the oppositional im agination of radical feminism, w ith its focus on
violation, elide tensions betw een inside and outside and get snared by a
narrative of ressentiment? Here I engage Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals to
analyze ressentiment as a psychic minefield that any oppositional imagination
might trip into when it construes the "enemy" as wholly exterior to itself, and
denies its own complicity in power. However, I distinguish a postfem inist
assessment of "victim feminism" from the internal critique of "victimism" (Barry)
that has issued from within radical feminism itself.
In the first case I analyze Wendy Brown's use of Nietszche and Foucault in
her "postm odern exposure" of feminist consciousness-raising as a form of
ressentiment and do some exposing of my own: I expose a connection between
postfem inist academ ic discourse (e.g. Brown's argum ent) an d p o p u lar
postfeminist disavowals of "victim feminism" in their shared retreat from the
moral imagination of feminism. In both academic and popular discourses, a
shared politics of postfeminism reduces the emphatically moral imagination of
feminist anti-violence radicalism to ressentiment. However, I also build on radical
feminist analyses of the w ay that the movement against sexual violence has been
coopted by a culture of confessionalism: this culture has com modified and
sensationalized (through the mass media), as well as bureaucratized (through
13
criminalization and social-service models of intervention and treatment) and

psychologized (through a therapy and recovery model), the social reality of
women's victimization. In short, ressentiment is socially re-produced, through ever-
refined mechanisms of the dom inant culture as well as issuing from internal
predicaments of feminism as an oppositional imagination.
If ressentiment—or victimism—is one extreme of the moral imagination
that does not sustain a tension between inside and out, or between critique and
affirmation, the other side of the coin is a utopian idealism which projects the
subject of feminism altogether outside of (a reified concept of) "the patriarchy."
Thus w ith chapter 4 I move into p art two of the dissertation, the utopian
imaginary of feminism's moral imagination.
Lesbianism and feminism continue to be coupled by a dom inant cultural
imagination that casts feminism, w ith its critique of normative femininity, as a
transgression of "nature" itself. W hen the dominant culture tars feminists as
"lesbians," the charge betrays the recognition that normative femininity is linked
to the institution of heterosexuality, not to mention the fear that feminism is a
threat to that institution. This sam e fear lurks behind the claim that radical
feminism is utopian and therefore impossible, a claim that assum es the
inevitability of normative heterosexuality and the impracticability of alternatives.
In part two of my project of re-thinking radical feminism I examine lesbian as
feminism's "magical sign"—the ambiguous sign of a utopia th at has been
disenchanted as the result of various social forces.
Chapters 4 and 5 consider the concept of utopia as a frame through which
to examine feminism's imagined relation between theory and praxis. While at
one time many of us held to some variant of the precept, feminism is the theory,
14
and lesbianism, the practice (Ti-Grace Atkinson), the history of U.S. lesbian
feminism reveals an ambiguous relation between utopian lesbian identity and
actual political praxis. On the one hand, I argue that lesbian fem inism 's own
idealist imagination renders a radical feminist/lesbian praxis impracticable. On
the other hand, a central motivating question for this internal critique is, whether
the utopian imaginary at stake for lesbian feminism should be retained for a new,
materialist radical feminist critique and praxis.
With the term lesbian fem inist I refer to a new social subjectivity that
em erged in the late seventies an d early eighties in the U.S as a result of a
confluence of historical factors including the women's liberation movement, the
gay liberation movement, Left counter-culture, and radical feminist ideology. In
the late seventies and early eighties, U.S. lesbian feminism constituted itself
through a reverse discourse th at aimed at making the threat of the "lavender
menace" a promise of rebellion.7 However, the force of its moral imagination as a
negation of normative heterosexuality was neutralized by lesbian feminism's
affirmative moment as vision of a woman-identified culture. Its idealism led
lesbian feminism to define its praxis exclusively as culture/com m unity building,
and to retreat from praxis as political contestation of dominant culture.
Once again, I frame my internal critique in terms of radical feminism's
ambivalent if not contestatory relation to the political, cultural trends that have
displaced it. In chapter 4, two developments are central—identity politics and
queer counter-discourse and theory. On the one hand, lesbian lost its magical
7In Daring To Be Bad, Alice Echols describes the "Lavender Menace action" of 1970, w hen a group
of 40 lesbians disrupted scheduled proceedings at the Second Congress to Unite W omen and
pushed the Congress to adopt a set o f resolutions advanced by "The Lavender Menace: Gay
Liberation Front Women and Radical Lesbians" (214-5). The phrase "lavender menace" was
appropriated from Betty Friedan who had coined the phrase to warn that lesbians were
undermining the women's movement (212).
15
coherence as an effect of a new politics of identity in the eighties—a politics that

exposed the lesbian subject as m ultiply situated in race, class and culture—as
"hybrid" rather than transparent and unified (Lugones). From the vantage point
of this intervention it seem ed that "lesbian" had sometimes functioned to
obscure its multiple social determ inants, to serve as an escape valve from the
complexity of social struggle. By the sam e token, this dream of escape was a
dream of absolutist opposition, one th a t obscured the complicitous relation
between oppositional subjects and the w orld they opposed. When opposition is
absolute, politics is precluded—insofar as politics is defined as an engagem ent
w ith a w orld beyond one's self and community. Without politics praxis becomes
redefined as ethics at best, or, at worst, as therapy, a matter of patching up and
healing one's own community. C hapter 4 frames this predicament as lesbian
feminism's embrace of an expressivist ideology (Phelan Identity Politics ), w here
personal expression becomes the equivalent of political action. I also argue that,
although identity politics "decentered lesbian feminism" (Arlene Stein), it has
often replaced lesbian expressivism w ith an ethnic/racial expressivism.
Enter queer counter-discourse in the late eighties and nineties w ith its
poststructuralist critique of identity an d , I argue, its postfeminist critique of
lesbian feminism: This chapter argues that queer culture attempts to uncouple
lesbian from feminist—to spring "lesbian" free from its curmudgeonly m other
fem inism , and to liberate queem ess an d sexuality from the constraints of
identity. In the process, queer cu ltu re/th eo ry forfeits the ethical, political and
epistem ological insight at stake for a utopian lesbian imaginary—its radical
negation of male power as organized through the institution of heterosexuality. I
argue that queer theory is postfeminist insofar as, despite its "denaturalization"
16
of gender and (hetero)sexuality, it disavows a critical analysis of heterosexuality

in its relation to male dominance, patriarchy and capitalism.
In chapter 4's critique of the queer disenchantm ent of lesbian feminism I
examine contrasting forms of idealism: In lesbian feminism one sees a conflation
of political praxis and ethics: personal inter-subjective relations displace political
action. In queer culture one sees the conflation of poesis (making) and praxis
(doing)8: performance displaces participation and citizenship dissolves into a
vast field of semiotic play. In other w ords, whereas an expressivist lesbian
feminism makes ethics its praxis, queer culture makes style and performance its
ethics, and thus aestheticizes praxis. In both lesbian feminism and queer culture
we have forms of idealism that signify lesbian or queer as an escape from
material reality. Q ueer idealism, however, offers a utopia (of protean identity
and sexuality) th at has no critique of existing pow er relations and, on the
contrary, sanctifies its complicity with a (sexual) commodity culture with the claim
that it is "resignifying" (Butler) power.
What remains, in chapter 5, is to theorize the utopian imaginary rejected
by queer discourse and ideal-ized by lesbian feminism: can the utopian
imaginary of lesbian feminism be retained for a radical feminist materialism
while rejecting its idealist constructions of subjecthood, identity and community?
Chapter 5 assesses key radical feminist/lesbian writings for their utopian notion
of the lesbian subject: My close readings of A drienne Rich, Marilyn Frye,
Monique Wittig and de Lauretis show that all these writers share an implicit
premise—that revolutionary or radical theory implies a new epistemological
standpoint of struggle and critique. I examine the theory of the lesbian subject as
8See Arendt (Human Condition ) and Benhabib for a discussion of the conflation of poesis and
praxis that (according to Hannah Arendt) characterizes the m odem era.
17
a legacy and revision of the marxist theory of the revolutionary subject, or w hat
Lukacs called "the standpoint of the proletariat." This chapter assesses whether
and how the utopian notion of a lesbian standpoint can be retained in light of
certain dilemmas for theory and praxis created by any theory of epistemic
privilege.
Does radical lesbian theory of the subject assume a new empirical subject,
one endowed with special properties and powers? Like in chapter 4, this chapter
shows that the question of the utopian subject foregrounds the question of a
theory/praxis relation: How do we imagine the relation between actual and
normative subjects—in the latter case, our passionate fictions, utopian identities?
Again, a crucial interplay of the negating and affirmative impulses of feminist
theory and praxis is at stake in my assessment. I examine here the central
claim—and strength—of the theory of the lesbian subject, namely, that lesbian
implies a new position of critique from which to demystify the "nature" of
heterosexuality as reification. This position of critique, I argue, is necessary to
any feminist critique insofar as feminism is a negation of patriarchal reality.
However, utopian lesbian theory runs aground on its affirmative impulse: when
positing lesbian as a new subject, this theory has often led to the assumption (or
has been interpreted as meaning) that empirical, lived lesbianism is a guarantee
—a foundation—of special epistemological powers. Marxist theory has faced the
same predicament: I engage an intertextual reading of critical marxist and radical
fem inist/lesb ian theory to foreground a central dilem m a for utopian
lesbian/fem inist thought—a conflation of the normative subject with actually
existing empirical individuals.9 In a marxist context, the normative concept of the
9I draw here on Benhabib's discussion of this conflation in m arxist/H egelian "philosophy of the
subject."
18
proletariat as revolutionary subject gave rise to a "Stalinist nightm are" Ja y )

where "class" became a brutally prescriptive category wielded by a vanguard
party over actual subjects in the nam e of the empirical reality of class. To w hat
extent does our confusion of the normative with the actual in a lesbian/fem inist
context contribute to regulatory mechanisms of social control w ithin o u r
communities? Is it possible to theorize a subject of feminism as defined by a
tension between the normative and the actual, a product of both ethico-political
will and of fantasy and existing desires?
Is any theory of lesbian (or class) as a unified subject doom ed to
essentialism at best and a dam aging prescriptivist politics/ethics at worst? Re
thinking radical feminism in its utopian impulse—or re-thinking the utopian
impulse of radical feminism—raises the question of how to re-imagine political
unity in a way that takes the complexity of—and obstacles to—"sisterhood" into
account. Poststructuralism has exposed the subject's predicament as situated,
contingent and unable to transcend—w ith any special insight—the p ow er
relations that configure it. Again a parallel between feminism and marxism
helps frame the question that follows from this predicament: After the fall of the
unified subject from its teleological progress in /as the Subject of history, is our
only recourse—as post(fem inist)structuralists and postm arxists claim — a
discourse model of the subject? To answer, this chapter engages and critiques
two postm arxist theories: I assess Rosemary H ennessy's attem pt to retain
standpoint in a theory that synthesizes a materialist approach to critique an d a
discourse model of a subject of feminism that is dislodged from any empirical
referent in "women's lives" (her quotes); I also examine Laclau and M ouffe's
influential, Foucaultian analysis of a social imaginary without a revolutionary
19
subject an d without a teleology of struggle—an imaginary defined by a rupture

between "subject position" (empirically existing subject-positions such as "class
position") and liberatory politics (normative political subjects and identities).
The question for me becomes how to theorize a unified, rath er than
monolithic, subject? This chapter advances the thesis that a discourse m odel of
the subject (at stake for Hennessy and for Laclau and Mouffe), in its avoidance of
essentialism preserves an impasse in feminism between em pirical essentialism
and em pty formalism.10 Chapter 5 argues that re-thinking the imaginary of a
lesbian subject position helps to clarify this impasse and the crisis in the social
imaginary of feminism that the impasse reflects: The crisis is that a w om en's
revolution that never came leaves a void in the feminist imaginary where theory
is split from praxis—and from w om en's lives (without quote marks)— a void
now filled by the idealist projections of feminist and postfeminist imaginations.
10I allude to a similar im passe in philosophy critiqued by H egel, discussed by Benhabib, Critique,
Chapter 1.
20
CHAPTER 1: THE POWER' OF RADICAL FEMINIST THEORY
PART I: Beyond Radical Feminism?

Radical Feminist Theory
. . . the point of this essay is not to present

new facts, but to look at facts, which are
universally known to the social actors, from
a new angle.
"C onsum ption and the Family"
—Christine Delphy
In her (1978) study of housework in France, feminist theorist Christine

Delphy posed a question that remains key for feminist method. To counter the
ideology that housewives "do nothing" all day, D elphy asks, "W hat are the
transformations which continue to be invisible, what are the things which are not
thought of as being done?" to which she answers, "Those which correspond to
some of the operations covered by the term 'housework'" (Close to Home 84). As
D elphy argues in her critique of m arxist as w ell as classical sociological
discourse, w hat makes them invisible is the same social relation that makes these
operations possible. And what makes them visible again is an imagination that
can countenance the reality of power in this relation. The theme of this chapter is
the power of feminist theory, which I intend in a double sense: first, the force of
critique which, pushing against the invisible, looks at "universally known" facts
from a new angle, and second, elucidates the social meaning of relations between
men and women as relations of power. A premise of my argum ent for re
thinking radical feminism is my belief that feminist thought m ust continue to
take seriously what Kate Millett first posed as a key premise of feminism, namely
21
that "the relationship between the sexes be viewed in a political light " (Sexual
Politics 23). Millett's analysis of "sexual politics" was developed by theorists
such as Delphy and MacKinnon who, as the latter puts it, define "gender [as] a
social system that divides power, " and "therefore a political system" (Theory of
State 160). The definition of gender as a political system, is, I argue, a key
premise of feminist theory that "think[s] rigorously about the relation between
division and hierarchy" (Delphy "Rethinking Sex and G ender" 1, em ph. in
original), or, in other words, about the relation between gender/sex as discursive
formation and the constitution of political interests —men's—at stake in this
formation. My argument comes at a moment in feminist theory where this
concept of gender has lost considerable ground.
I write at a moment of impasse where radical feminist thought, on the one
hand, has only in some notable instances extended its analysis to take on a
broader and deeper social analysis of how male pow er and patriarchy articulates
with other social systems. On the other hand, however, my argument confronts
shifts in theory that have complicated power but too often at the expense of a
radically feminist imagination—an imagination capable of discerning those
operations of power w hich remain invisible. Beyond this impasse and
com pounded by it, perhaps shaped in part by it, is the daw ning of a "post
feminist" era. By "postfeminist," to which I will return below for more detailed
elaboration, I refer to a new form of anti-feminist discourse, one which has been
popularized and legitimized by the mass m edia a n d /o r as new forms of
"feminist theory" in the academy.1
1Examples of popular post fem inist discourse include Roiphe, Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia,
Rene Denfield, Naom i Wolf, and most recently Lehrman. Feminist critics of postfeminism who
cite these works and others include, Faludi, Kauffman, McDermott, Brush, and Ring. A fem inist
22
In a climate of both popular and academic postfeminism, a specter has

taken hold of North American (and European) feminist theory—the specter of a
feminism w ithout a w om en's movement, a w om en's movement w ithout a
liberation, and a liberation without a power struggle. In 1970 Ti- Grace Atkinson
quoted the words of Black militant Almanina Barbour: "The women's liberation
movement is the first in history with a w ar on and no enem y" (47). Almost a
quarter of a century later her words are doubly cautionary, especially for feminist
theory which (in the United States) has grow n increasingly skeptical of an earlier
feminism's moral outrage—its moral imagination as I see it. As a result, I argue,
the oppositional dimension of feminist thought as a confrontation with male power
has lost its edge, if not demeaned as "victim feminist," m oralist/absolutist,
extremist, essentialist, cultural feminist, separatist a n d /o r naive. Like iron filings
to a magnet, these key terms attach to the category "radical feminist" thought
whenever the concept appears as a category of feminist taxonomies, revisionist
histories, a n d /o r arguments about conflicts in feminism .2 The point of re
thinking radical feminism against the grain of such "interested stories" (King), is
not recovery of the (or any) category, untainted, b ut first, to elaborate the
political analysis of gender at stake in the category and second, to critique a
discourse which has produced and been produced by these stories, to investigate
w hat is at stake in these stories (to ask, what are the interests?).
In part two, the core of this chapter, I will draw on the work of a few key
theorists to elaborate a feminist theory of pow er that I argue is crucial for radical
social critique of male power in its peculiarly postm odern mechanisms and
theorization of postfeminism as a category of an ethnographic study o f contemporary women's

lives in Silicon Valley, California can be found in Stacey.
2Examples of these "interested stories" (King) of fem inism generally and radical feminism in
particular include Echols, Alcoff, Segal, Snitow, Kipnis, Weedon.
23
structures. I establish the terrain for this discussion in Part 1 by first, sketching a
radical feminist critique of gender as exemplified by D elphy's call for a
materialist feminism; second addressing key shifts in theories of gender an d /o r
patriarchal pow er th at challenge an d /o r are challenged by radical feminist
critique; and, third, briefly distinguishing these shifts—w hich might help move
theory forward—from a postfeminist account which evacuates the oppositional
force of feminism altogether. (This last section will be less developed here than
the first two sections as I return to the theme of postfeminism in more depth in
subsequent chapters).
Delphy's Materialist Feminism

"Materialist feminism," as it has been developed by radical feminists in
French speaking contexts, is a theory of gender in term s of a pow er relation
defined as "appropriation" (Guillaumin). M aterialist feminism, including
Delphy's work—which laid its groundwork—springs from a sociological vantage
point and seeks a "m aterial basis" of oppression. In one sense "m aterialist"
implies a focus on (women's) exploitation, and a prioritization of economics and
labor as its purview . In this way materialist feminism diverges from a marxist
feminism that relegates economics to capitalism and sexuality to ideology and
culture—a theoretical divide I will examine shortly. The question of pow er for a
materialist is, how is the labor of one group expropriated by another/others?
What are the social conditions o f/fo r this relation of exploitation? Yet, in
directing itself to w om en in particular, the conventional marxist category of
"material basis" is altered—hence the unique theoretical turn called materialist
feminism which means, in fact, materialist radical feminism. "M aterial basis"
24
begins to break dow n as a (conventionally economic) category, w hen the

"material basis" of women's oppression is discovered to be women's very bodies,
or, more accurately, men's use of women's bodies.
A ccording to Delphy the m aterial basis of patriarchy is m en's
appropriation of women's work, primarily domestic w ork or housework—a
social process independent of, if inextricable from, capitalism. As unpaid
workers, housewives (or women doing the "double shift") are exploited as
women, and m ost importantly, it is women's relation to men which determines the
(concealed) social condition of this exploitation. Delphy argues that the erasure
of this work as work ( its naturalization as "w om en's work") is bound to the
erasure of the political meaning of women's relation to men. Women are excluded
from the realm of value—specifically economic and by implication broader,
cultural and social value—by both conventional and marxist economic discourse
which refuses to count women's work in gender-specific economic terms. Thus
even marxist theory which "recognizes that domestic w ork is productive" (60)
accounts for exploitation only as a consequence of the nature of domestic work,
i.e. the type of tasks that comprise it. From this perspective, some radicals
support "wages for housework," a position that parallels feminist strategy in
other (non-economic) domains based on valuing difference (e.g. femininity as
nurturance) rather than on interrogating the relations of power which are
concealed by and allow for an ideology of (sexual) difference.3 Against this
"tactical error" in theory and strategy, Delphy writes,
Far from it being the nature of the work performed by women that
explains their relation to production, it is the relation of production
3In "Difference vs. Dominance" MacKinnon's critique of a "difference"-based approach to

wom en's inequality and her critique of Carol Gilligan parallels D elphy's critique o f wages for
housework. See Feminism Unmodified.
25
that explains w hy their work is excluded from the realm of value. It is

w om en as economic agents who are excluded from the (exchange)
market, not w hat they produce. (60)
With this turn of analysis, Delphy approaches the root of the problem in
both the theory and the situation analyzed (inadequately) by the theory, namely
the structure which excludes the possibility of its own analysis—the special
social relation between women and men. Thus Delphy points out that feminists
who dared go so far as to advocate "wages for housework" missed the radical
structure of the problem they were addressing. For in attem pting to re-value
women's work, these feminists invoke the same gendered, ideological distinction
between use-value an d exchange-value invoked by those theorists who
rationalize the non-value of wom en's work. In both cases, the explanation
assumes rather than interrogates a sexual division of tasks. In her criticism of the
wages for housework position, Delphy argues that it is a relation of power that
determines the value of women's work:
The reason w hy housework is not considered to be productive and
why it is not accounted is because it is done within the confines of the
home for free. . . . And this is not because of the nature of the services
which make it up, because one can find any and all of them on the
market; nor is it because of the nature of the people who do it, because
the same woman who cooks a chop unpaid in her home is paid when
she does it in another household. It is because of the particular nature
of the contract which ties the female worker—the wife—to the
household of her "master." (87-8)
Delphy is arguing here that no other social arrangement exists as the basis
of women's exploitation as women than that of women's subordinate relation to
men, a relation institutionalized in the marriage contract, and, moreover, that this
social relation is assumed by the theory that would, on another level, explicitly
26
deny it. Indeed, even radical discourse—marxism—presupposes and conceals

the "sexual contract" when, rejecting a gender-specific economic analysis of
women's relation to the production process, it insists on including women in the
class of their husbands. Delphy writes, "By pretending that women belong to
their husband's class, the fact that wives belong, by definition, to a class other
than that of their husbands is hidden"(72). Thus m arriage is used, in marxist
analysis, tacitly, to "take the place of the relations of production in the capitalist
system as the criterion for class membership in this system"(72). In sum , she
concludes, "The 'reintegration' of women into classes by defining them as the
property of their husbands has its objective precisely in hiding the fact that they
really are the property of their husbands"(73). In other words, by including
women as wives in a gender-neutral "class," marxism conceals and presupposes
the social reality of "wives."
The power of feminist analysis derives not only from its critique of social
reality b ut from a deconstruction of m arxist discourse whose refusal to
problematize the sexual division of labor is the mark of its own ideology of
sexual (in)difference (de Lauretis). Delphy's response to Michele Barrett and
M ary M cIn to sh 's refu tatio n of her w o rk fu rth e r fo reg ro u n d s the
epistem ological/political difference between radical fem inist critique and
"marxist feminism." Barrett and McIntosh, Delphy argues, are snared by a
contradiction which shows the same indifference as other marxists to the gender-
sex specificity of women's relation to the production process. On the one hand,
Barrett and McIntosh refute Delphy's analysis of housework by claiming that
housework is profitable for capitalism rather than men, driving the wage level
dow n for everyone. O n the other hand, they refute D ephy's analysis as
27
economist—as based in an economic analysis that occludes gender as ideological.

In D elphy's view, the contradiction is in a simultaneous em phasis on and
refutation of economic analysis, and derives from the fact that Barrett and
M acintosh analyze gender only in economic terms that refer to capitalism—in
contrast to patriarchy—while at the same time relegating gender and patriarchy
to the superstructural rather than economic. Delphy writes,
W hy . . .is the left. . . so scared of women exploring their economic
exploitation? Why do they do everything in their power to make it appear
th at w om en's oppression is restricted to the su p erstru ctu ral, to
"ideological factors"? W hat is the logic underlying the w ay in w hich
Barrett and McIntosh slide from one line of argument to another? W hy
tolerate this contradiction betw een the analysis of domestic labour as a
benefit for employers and the denial of the importance of this very
economic exploitation? (177)
This series of rhetorical questions w hich directs D elphy's reader to
examine the political meaning of relations between men and women also returns
us to the key methodological question spurring Millett's account of sexual
politics—whether the relationship between men and women can be regarded in a
"political light." This, in my opinion, is the key epistemological and ethico-
political question confronting fem inist m ethod today in the face of shifting
accounts of power. The D elphy/M clntosh/B arrett debate m ight serve as a
w atershed moment in the development of materialist feminism (in its divergence
from m arxist feminism) precisely because it underscores this question and
poses—from Delphy's side of the debate—a provisional answer.4 For Delphy
argues that the unwillingness in leftist discourse to examine the sex-gender
specific conditions of w om en's w ork is m otivated by an unw illingness to
4See Juteau and Laurin for this analysis of the debate.
28
scrutinize m en as key beneficiaries of this economic relationship. I call this

answer provisional because I want to emphasize that the power of feminist theory
in its radical critique of the (hetero)sexual contract is a starting rather than end
point of analysis. Ideally, analysis should be extended to account for how male
power articulates with other systems of power.
However, as a starting point, the radical feminist analysis of male power
engaged by Delphy and other theorists to be discussed below, calls for
elaboration in light of contemporary feminist contentions. In recent years, shifts
in feminist theory point to an effort to complicate the notion of power in a way
that "goes beyond oppressor/oppressed" (Mohanty 13; Bordo 23) to account for,
in C handra M ohanty's words, "the intersections of the various systemic
networks of class, race, (hetero)sexuality, and nation. . . that position us as
'w om en'" (13). The effect of this theoretical turn has been to bring an urgently
needed depth and political efficacy to feminist theory based on the goal of
women's liberation. However the effect has sometimes also been to minimize the
role of men as beneficiaries of power in these complicated social networks. I now
turn to an examination of some key features of recent shifts in feminist accounts
of pow er and the theoretical and political questions they raise, with the aim of
returning to the task of theorizing the concept of pow er at stake in Delphy's
argument as tenable and indeed urgent for a feminist theory of gender.
Foucault and Feminism

Beyond Oppressor and Oppressed?
Feminist philosopher Susan Bordo cites the influence of Michel Foucault
on feminist theory that has, in recent years, moved beyond "the limitations of
29
simple antithesis" in order to more "adequately . . . theorize the pathways of

modem power" (26). For, Bordo argues,
an oppressor/oppressed model [associated w ith an older feminist model]
which theorizes men as possessing and wielding power over women—
who are viewed correspondingly as themselves utterly powerless—[has]
proved inadequate to the social and historical complexities of the
situations of men and w om en... (23)
The sharp juxtaposition between Bordo's position here and that of Delphy's
insistence on "nam ing the m ain enemy"—as runs the title of one of Delphy's
essays—suggests a theoretical conflict that will be echoed in a debate between
philosopher Carole Pateman and Nancy Fraser over the question of going
"beyond the m aster/subject" as Fraser puts it in her objection to Pateman's
concept of male power. Taking Delphy's account of gender (as discussed above)
as, at the least, a methodological provocation,5 the question at hand for me is,
what are the implications of this fateful coupling—feminism and Foucault6 —for
a feminist theory of power that while restoring agency to women supposedly lost
in previous, radical feminist theories stressing wom en's victimization, "would
also continue to account for men's agency?
Foucault's critique
Foucault's account of power rejects both m arxist and liberal-juridical
(Hobbesian) models (Power/Knowledge [P/K] 88) and shifts the focus of theory
from a centralized, repressive, sovereign authority to a notion of pow er as
operating at micro-level of everyday life. As Somer Brodribb puts it, "[Foucault]
5I borrow here from Biddy Martin's suggestion that feminism ought to use Foucault's theory as
providing m ethodological provocations rather than imperatives (Feminism, Criticism 17).
6The authors of a book by this title wonder whether their project is "yet another attempt to
authorize feminism by marrying it into respectability?" (Feminism and Foucault ix).
30
urges us to cut off the head of the king; that is, to refuse a substantive, singular
locus of power w hich descends from a centre" (46). Pow er "from below" is
diffused through m ultiple discourses w here knowledge and pow er fatally
intertwine in /as "truth regimes." Power, according to this account, rather than
w ielded by specific agents, exerts itself through system s of classification,
regulation, surveillance and (also a major effect of the first three) normalization—
all of w hich distinguish power as disciplinary . From this perspective, Foucault
argues, theory
should be concerned w ith power at its extremities. . .[where it ] invests
itself in institutions, becomes embodied in techniques, and equips itself
w ith instrum ents an d eventually even violent means o f material
intervention. (P/K 96)
In this way, Foucault re-directs the political theorist's attention from
pow er as a repressive force to pow er as productive. Thus he reverses the
traditional concern with how pow er is legitimized via some "artificial body"—
like H obbes's' Leviathan or Rousseau's "general w ill"—and redefines the
problem for political theory as one of understanding th at "m yriad of bodies
which are constituted as peripheral subjects as a result of the effects of power"
(P/K 98, emphasis in original). Subjection can now be understood as "the
constitution of subjects" (97) through micro-processes of norm alization which
prom ote se//-surveillance. Foucault's society is a disciplinary society without
disciplinarians—as philosopher Sandra Bartky puts it—a model w hich has
specific implications for a feminist account of male power.
31
En-gendering Foucault and Repressing Power: Gender-Trouble Redux

Foucault leads feminists to shift our focus from an account of gender in
terms of m en's social control of women to gender as, primarily, a category of
normalization, allowing for, to quote Judith Butler, a construal of "femininity" as
"a mode of enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so
many styles of the flesh" (Gender Trouble, qtd. in Bartky 65). On the one hand this
shift allows for a theory of (post)modem mechanisms of normative femininity
but on the other hand, the category of men's agency and interests seems to
disappear in the process. Bartky, for example, argues that Foucault helps
feminists theorize pow er in terms of "disciplinary practices that produce a body
which in gesture and appearance is recognizably feminine" (65), for example
regimens of beauty and dieting which re-produce "docile" and "pleasing"
feminine bodies. Such "disciplinary techniques," she points out, "aim at a
regulation which is perpetual and exhaustive—a regulation of the body's size
and contours, its appetite, posture, gestures, and general com portment in space
and the appearance of each of its visible parts" (80). But these techniques
imply—so she interprets Foucault—the "rule of no one," suggesting that the
"m odem face of patriarchal pow er" is, in fact, faceless. The anonym ity of a
disciplinary society w ithout disciplinarians, Bartky claims, only exacerbates
power in that it "creates the impression that the production of femininity is either
entirely voluntary or n atu ral" (75). While Bartky's use of Foucault here
strikingly foregrounds the increasingly "impersonal" and thus, in m any ways
m ore insidious ch aracter of (post)m odern m echanism s of w o m en's
subordination, she is strikingly silent w ith respect to the other half of the
equation, namely, how male domination is thereby effected.
32
For example, Bartky cites the dissolution of ecclesiastical power and a shift
from a regime where the power of church and household "conjoined" to formally
invest individuals w ith the control of, for example, "recalcitrant women," to a
regime where "the production of a properly embodied femininity is dispersed
and anonymous," and power "invested in everyone and no one in particular"
(79). Her argum ent glosses over the question of how m en's interests were
constructed, maintained or diffused in this historical process. "[Women's] self
surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy" (80 emphasis mine) she writes,
and not, evidently, to men. But surely men m ust have an interest in this
obedience. If, as Bartky puts it, the disciplined feminine body is "a body
designed to please or to excite," (80) to whom is it designed to please, if not men?
Yet Bartky argues, "Since it is women who practice this discipline on and against
their ow n bodies, men get off scot-free" (80), a position which raises a problem
for a theory of power. Is it the system or the theory—Bartky's use of Foucault—
that lets men off the hook?
Bartky's account seems to erase rather than complicate m en's agency in the
social process she analyzes. This move—in my opinion, a theoretical confusion
with political implications—might derive from a more general problem with the
category of gender in theory marrying 7Feminism to Foucault. Stating this
problem in the form of a question returns me to a theme in the D elphy/Barrett
and McIntosh debate, namely, the theme of ideology in accounts of gender: To
what extent do feminist uses of Foucault represent a shift from theorizing gender
in terms of power to a focus on ideology—how subjects are constituted—while
7One can imagine other ways to appropriate male theorists than to marry them, for example,
"thefts of language" (Ostriker) or mimicry (Irigaray) might provide better m odels for that aspect
of fem inist theory which (as MacKinnon once put it in a speech) uses everything it can get its
hands on.
33
(at one and the same time) depriving ideology critique of its critical force, i.e. its
relation to (other) material operations of pow er at stake in gender-as-ideology?
This shift is probably epitomized in the w ork of Judith Butler who goes beyond
Bartky w ith her account of gender (as normalization) that omits theorizing
patriarchal power altogether.8 B utler's theory of g en d er—w h ich is
fundam entally a gloss on Foucault—importantly theorizes how subjection-as-
norm alization is produced and gendered through an ideological grid that she
terms the "heterosexual matrix."9 However, her theory also helps inaugurate a
cleavage in the category of gender where an account of how gendered subjects
are constructed through normalization becomes dissociated from an account of
gender as the normalization of hierarchy. That is to say, an emphasis on pow er as
norm alization comes to eclipse an account of how gender im plies the
normalization o/(male) power.
W hile a Foucaultian notion of productive pow er em phasizes the
constructing of subjects, "'constructed' seems to mean influenced by, directed,
channeled, as a highway constructs traffic patterns" (MacKinnon, Theory of the
State 131). Catharine MacKinnon criticizes those theories which emphasize the
construction of sexuality yet beg the question of what sexuality is constructed of
and who does the constructing. For example, she argues, theories that privilege
capitalism discuss capitalism as shaping and controlling b u t not creating
sexuality and in theories that show
8Indeed Butler's performative account of gender tends to grant a positive, even utopian valence
to the sam e "styles of the flesh" that Bartky reads (more astutely, in my opinion) as marks o f re
reproduced docility. I w ill elaborate this critique of Butler in chapters 2, "Pornography is the
Theory," and 4, "Uses and Abuses of Disenchantment."
9The term "heterosexual matrix" is obviously indebted to Monique Wittig's concept of the
"heterosexual contract" (1980). (see The Straight Mind).
34
sexuality [as] a construct of discourses of pow er, gender is never one of

them; force is central to its deploym ent b u t through repressing it, not
through constituting it; speech is not concretely investigated for its
participation in this construction process. (Theory of the State 131)
A nd criticizing the sam e model th a t Bartky takes as persuasively
descriptive, MacKinnon objects to a notion that "Power is everywhere therefore
nowhere, diffuse rather than pervasively hegemonic" (131). In a similar vein,
political sociologist R.W. Connell directly criticizes Foucault's notion of the state
as an apparatus which regulates sexuality, noting that "it is not at all clear in this
approach w hy the state regulates to the extent it does, unless it is sim ply
prurient" for, he argues, Foucault does "not account for the constitution of
interests in sexual politics" (127 emphasis in original). This omission stems from
Foucault's desire to shift from an ontological inquiry into the nature of power to
the question of how it works ("Two Lectures" P/K ). Yet, as Brodribb puts it,
"While the project of asking not what is power, b u t how it is exercised, is an
im portant and necessary one, Foucault's only answer to "what is pow er" is that
'it moves'" (46), and, not, for example, who benefits?
Feminism or This is Not Foucault: Naming the Difference

The Foucaultian focus on normalization as it has traveled to feminist
theory threatens to elide the "discursive difference" between feminism and
Foucault. I cite Teresa de Lauretis here whose critical appropriation of Foucault
for theorizing a "technology of gender" opens possibilities for theorizing
(post)modem mechanisms of men's "sex right," rather than minimizes radical
feminist theory. De Lauretis, for example, notes the difference betw een a
35
feminist analysis of violence undertaken by W ini Breines and Linda Gordon and
a Foucaultian discourse analysis of violence:
it is feminism, the historical practice of the women's movement and the
discourses which have emerged from it—such as the collective speaking,
confrontation, and reconceptualization of the female's experience of
sexuality—that inform the epistemological perspective of Breines and
Gordon. (Technologies 34)
This difference explodes where Foucault's "technology of sex" effectively
dis-inters sexuality—as a site of state regulation—from gender. In my view this
move, which splits gender and sex, is a theoretical foundation of the shift in the
feminist theory of gender (referred to above) from an explanation of pow er to a
concept of ideology. The political stakes of this shift come home in Monique
Plaza's criticism of Foucault's proposal to de-sexualize the crime of rape.
Foucault's aim, de Lauretis points out, was
an effort to counter the technology of sex by breaking the bond between
sexuality and crime; an effort to enfranchise sexual behaviors from legal
punishment, and so to render the sexual sphere free from intervention by
the state. (Technologies 37)
However, as de Lauretis glosses and elaborates Plaza's argument,
to release "bodies and pleasures" from the legal control of the state, and
from the relations of power exercised through the technology of sex, is to
affirm and perpetuate the present social relations which give men rights
over women's bodies. (Technologies 37)
Here de Lauretis's argum ent helps clarify the theoretical impasse where
Foucault's separation of sex and gender (especially as appropriated by Butler)
w ould ultimately lead us:
For even as w e agree th at sexuality is socially constructed and
overdetermined, we cannot deny the particular specification of gender
that is the issue of that process; nor can we deny that precisely such a
process finally positions women an d m en in an antagonistic and
36
asymmetrical relation. The interests of men and women, or, in the case in
question earlier, of rapists and their victims, are exactly opposed in the
practices of social reality, and cannot be reconciled rhetorically. This is the
blind spot in Foucault's radical politics and anti-humanist theory, both of
which m ust and do appeal to feminists as valuable contributions to the
critique of ideology. (Technologies 38)
Indeed this is also the blind spot in recent feminist theory which aims to
go beyond the o p p resso r/o p p ressed relation in its account of pow er.
Correspondingly, the power of feminist theory is in its exposure of a social
antagonism where gender and sex still live in the matter of political interests.
However, this position does not preclude the need to extend theory to
countenance multiple social antagonisms.
Theorizing Complicity and Complicating Power

A Foucaultian critique of repressive power does challenge feminism to
qualify its focus on, as Biddy M artin puts it, "total theories of a monolithic
control or power held by a clearly identifiable and coherently sovereign group";
for these theories, she argues, "see power as originating outside of and
independent of concrete social interactions and their material effects" (6). The
problem w ith this perspective on (male) power as monolithic is that,
Ultimately, all local and specific manifestations of pow er become the
reflection of the prohibitive pow er of a system exterior to us, or interior
only in the negative sense of our 'socialization/ Subjectivity and sexuality
are conceived as secondary effects of an essentially negative, repressive
exercise of power from above. (6)
Martin seems to be suggesting, in other words, that the challenge posed by
Foucault is to better theorize the relation between social interactions— the
everyday—and larger structures so that feminist critique does not assume a pure
37
exteriority of pow er juxtaposed to how women "internalize", a n d /o r are

"socialized." The main danger of such an assumption has been pointed out in
feminist critiques of the racialized dimension of an A m erican/Euro-centric
feminism, namely that it leads to an account of power that obscures the extent to
which feminism (like any political movement and theory) is com plidtous w ith
the power that it opposes. Correspondingly, those feminist accounts of pow er
which theorize relations between race, (hetero)sexuality, nation, class and gender
go beyond Foucault to provide the most formidable challenge to a feminist
theory of male pow er and joggles the oppositional imagination out of any
fixation on binary pairs of m an/w om an. This theory also implicitly critiques
Foucault w ith its emphasis on systemic analysis and on cultural, racial and
sexual specificity. In this vein, Chandra M ohanty's path-breaking essay
"Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism" is
exemplary; M ohanty maps a theoretical field—for w om en's engagement w ith
feminism in the third world—that both furthers and foils future theory of male
power.
Beyond Foucault: Mapping Postmodern Conditions of Women's Oppression

M ohanty em phasizes (like Bordo) an "urgent need" for feminists to
theorize relations of power "which are not reducible to binary oppositions or
oppressor/oppressed relations" ("Cartographies" 13). Instead, she proposes that
we theorize "multiple, fluid structures of domination which intersect to locate
women differently at particular historical conjunctures" w ithout, however,
forgoing the notion of a "dynamic oppositional agency of individuals and
collectives and their engagement in 'daily life' "(13, emph. mine). Mohanty goes
38
on to elaborate what she means b y this "fluidity" and "multiplicity," draw ing on
recent work in feminist sociology to invoke "relations of rule" (Dorothy Smith)
and "gender orders/gender regim es" (Connell) as key critical frameworks for
m aking sense of a "complex relationality" w hich "anchors the 'com m on
differences' between and am ong the feminist politics of different constituencies
of women and men" (13). The concept of "relations of rule, "she writes, helps
"clarif[y] the intricate connection betw een system ic relationships an d the
directionality of power" (13). M ohanty invokes "relations of rule" to suggest a
few key "socioeconomic, political, and discursive configurations" as contexts for
feminist theory and struggle. Three of these configurations are particularly
relevant as frameworks for questioning the power of radical feminist theory—
"(1) colonialism, class, gender, (2) the state, citizenship, and racial formation, (3)
multinational production and social agency..." (14). These three configurations
"focus on state rule at particular historical junctures," w hich help identify
"historically specific political and economic shifts." For example,
decolonization and the rise of national liberation movements [in the first
configuration, colonialism], the constitution of white, capitalist states
through a liberal g en d er regim e and racialized im m igration and
naturalization laws [in the second configuration, the liberal state], and the
consolidation of a m ultinational econom y as both continuous and
discontinuous with territorial colonization [in the third configuration, the
place of women in the m ultinational production process]. (14)
Each of Mohanty's configurations suggests possibilities for extending the
theory of a technology of gender in a way that shows how gender articulates
w ith other social technologies a n d /o r formations. In a colonial regime, for
example, the bureaucratization o f pow er can be understood as a project of
constructing masculinity. M ohanty thus discusses the "bureaucratization of race
39
and gender" through "institutions of colonial rule—the military, the judiciary,

and, m ost important, the administrative service" (16), a relation of rule often
enacted as the colonialist's rape of native women. For a "racialized, violent
masculinity" she writes, is "an important paradigm or trope of colonial role" (17).
This point suggests, in my opinion, that the specific "socioeconomic, political,
and discursive configurations" which Mohanty theorizes for the purpose of
"focus[ing] on state rule at particular historical junctures" can also be theorized
for the purpose of focusing on male rule at particular historical junctures.
However, the power of gender in its specificity remains mostly invisible in
M ohanty's analysis, an absence that is striking in her discussion of the liberal
state as a configuration of power. Here, discussing the racialized and sexualized
construction of citizenship—and of the state—through U.S. (anti)immigration
law, M ohanty refers to a provision of the Chinese Exclusion Act (first passed in
1882) that emerged from 1870 hearings on Chinese prostitution, namely "An Act
to Prevent the Kidnapping and Importation of Mongolian, Chinese, and Japanese
Females for Criminal and Demoralizing Purposes" (25). She analyzes the act—
which granted immigration officers the power to classify "good" women—as
drafted for the general purpose of "keep[ing] Asians (and possible other non-
European 'foreigners') out" (25) but more specifically focused on "defining the
morality of Asian women as a basis for entry into the country" (25 emphasis in
original).
Thus M ohanty construes the pow er of gender—the gender regime—at
stake in this anti-prostitution legislation in terms of "an ideological definition of
women's morality" (25), and not in terms also of, say, the historical conjuncture
where racializing and sexualizing legislation intersects with the institution of
40
prostitution itself as it emerged among Asian-American immigrants.10 Why does

the concrete practice of prostitution disappear behind a discourse analysis of
state-regulated and racialized morality? For surely the reality of Asian men's
appropriation of Asian women as prostitutes is part of the configuration of a
racialized liberal state? It seems that at this juncture, Mohanty's analysis slides
into the focus on "ideology" that worried me earlier—where power becomes
conflated w ith ideology at the expense o f theorizing (other aspects of) the
materiality of power. Thus Mohanty argues that "the ideological definition of
women's morality .. has significant material effects in this situation" (25). But is
the materiality of women's condition as prostitutes something that follows after
(as the w ord "effects" requires us to think) the "ideological definition"—e.g. of a
"bad w om an"—or is ideology intermeshed w ith practices of exploitation that
include, primarily, in the case of prostitution, sexual exploitation? The term may
seem old fashioned and (worse) unfashionable but sexual exploitation remains
salient, in my opinion, for theorizing the specificity of power in terms of gender.
A theoretical question at the heart of this project which I answer in the
affirmative is this: can feminism extend its theory of sexual exploitation while
engaging, as Mohanty urges, an account of pow er in its complexity?
This last question seems particularly germ ane for theorizing w hat
M ohanty identifies as a third configuration, nam ely w om en's place in
multinational production, which, she argues, is a site of "some of the most urgent
theoretical challenges facing the social and political analysis of gender and race
in postindustrial contexts" (28). The new global order is one characterized by a
10In A Different Mirror, Ronald Takaki tells us that "During the early decades [of Chinese
immigration] m ost of the Chinese women came alone, often forcibly transported to America as
prostitutes. In the 1870 census manuscripts, 61 percent of the 3,536 Chinese women in California
listed their occupation as 'prostitute'" (211).
41
"gendered logic of accumulation" (Connell 105) resting on, as Mohanty puts it,
"massive incorporation and proletarianization of [third world] w om en in
m ultinational factories" (28); in other words— departing from M ohanty—a
"global assembly line" (Fuentes and Ehrenreich) in which a pivotal manufacturer
and product is the "industrialization of sex" (Kathleen Barry). Before (briefly)
situating the sex industry as part of this configuration, Jacqui Alexander's work
helps further map the terrain charted by Mohanty.
Alexander synthesizes strands of marxist, marxist feminist and queer
theory to discuss the "heterosexualization of the state." She argues that "tw in
processes" of "internationalization and [hetero]sexualization" (11) explain a key
site of a new w orld order, namely, the neocolonial state as it is locked into
imperial policies that "re-colonize" its subjects. Alexander's focus is on how the
state in the West Indian countries of Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas
props itself up through policy an d economic strategy institutionalizing
heterosexuality at a moment of legitimacy crisis. New legal codes criminalizing
homosexuality interlock directly and indirectly w ith U.S. backed policies (such as
42
Structural A djustm ent Programs or SAPs) th at have their m ost severe socio
economic effect on w om en's lives.11
For example, the shift from a subsistence agriculture to an export and
service based econom y that ensues from im perial policy such as SAPs has its
m ost severe repercussions for w om en whose cheap labor is the backbone of
"export processing zones" and whose exploited sexuality becomes immensely
productive for a sex industry boom. A to u rist econom y, as A lexander
acknowledges, m eans sex tourism as a primary source of capital. Thus she refers
to this "(hetero)sexual playground" as an
arena w hich Caribbean state managers see as the economy of the future;
w here Black m asculinity manages phantasm ic constructions of Black
femininity, satisfying w hite European desire for restless adventure,
satisfying w hite European longing for w hat is "rare and intangible." (20)
Here we arrive at an am biguity in Alexander's argum ent, which is the same
place of ambiguity th a t we saw in Mohanty, nam ely the meaning of prostitution
in the circuit of p o w er she has elaborated. A lexander links the state's
criminalization of prostitution w ith its criminalization of homosexuality as two
facets of the state's regulation of normative heterosexuality: both are "non
11The state's deploym ent o f heterosexuality, Alexander argues, is pivotal to negotiating a

legitimacy crisis for nationalist states that have, since independence, "colluded in adopting
strategies that have locked these nations into a world econom ic and political system ..." (15) and
thus into economic and political crisis. These strategies include "a powerful, yet unequal
alliance" between neocolonial regimes on the one hand and on the other foreign multinational
lending agencies— the International Monetary Fund, the W orld Bank—for the purpose of
implementing U.S and m ultinational corporation backed policies (16). A s Alexander and others
have pointed out, the so-called austerity m easures that accompany SAPs have their m ost
devastating effect on w om en. As lending policies designed to reduce debt and boost foreign
investment, SAPs shift dom estic production of food to the production o f food for export, help
establish free trade zones w here exports are processed, and force the indebted country to cut
social spending. In other w ords, SAPs erode the basis of subsistence food production for which
women are m ost responsible, enable conditions of cheap labor—m ostly wom en's— and overall
gut the public sector thus shifting the burden o f caretaking from the state back on to wom en—a
policy effect, as Anderson argues, drawing on the traditional concept o f femininity.
43
productive" forms of sexuality. Yet at the same time her argument suggests that
prostitution (in contrast to homosexuality) is immensely productive for the "new
world order" that it sketches—providing a libidinal playground for white male
tourists/tricks that is also profit and power for the neocolonial black state. While
Alexander seem s to im ply that prostitution as an autonom ous, "unruly"
sexuality pre-cedes its exploitation under imperialism and disciplining by the
state, the following contrasting analysis by Kathleen Barry takes prostitution
itself to be a form of sexual exploitation that became especially "productive" with
the mass "industrialization of sex."
By "industrialization of sex" Barry refers to the production of a product—
sex—"for the purpose of market exchange." (122) in a multibillion-dollar global
market.
Sex industries are sectored and capitalized, having business connections to
the industrial sector such as the use of major internationally recognized
credit cards to buy prostitution services and airlines, hotel chains, and
tourist companies that participate in sex tourism packaging. (176-7)
The developm ent of tourist industries an d construction of export
processing zones are key conditions of the industrialization of sex—both
developm ents designed to boost foreign investm ent and succeeding in
economically marginalizing millions of women. So is the massive deployment of
military prostitution (122-3).12 Barry argues that the sex industry generates a
significant income for developing states and exploits women in the rural-to-
urban m igration process: In contrast to situations in w hich women are
12 The military deploym ent of prostitution, where as Cynthia Enloe has shown, prostitution is
built into state policy, is yet another powerful exam ple of a phenom enon I suggest should be
called the bureaucratization of heteropatriarchal power. See Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making
Feminist Sense o f International Politics, and The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold
War.
44
"trafficked," e.g. procured from families, husbands, etc. an d forced into

prostitution, the industrialization of sex refers to the situation in which "Women
hum to prostitution for material gain in the context of normalized sex industries"
(Prostitution 124).
With Barry's analysis in mind, I will re-state the theoretical problem for
the feminist theory of pow er raised especially by Alexander b u t implicit in
M ohanty's discussion. Thinking about Foucault's notion of subjection as the
constitution of subjects, one m ight say that Alexander theorizes the re-colonizing
process of the state as one that constructs sexed, raced subjects. In other words,
her argum ent suggests w ays in which subjects are en-gendered and raced
through relations of state rule. Subjection here makes/constructs racial difference
as well as the difference between masculinity and femininity as mediated by
processes of state policy, nationalist ideology, and (world) capitalism. However,
similarly to Mohanty's discussion of the Chinese anti-immigration act targeting
prostitutes, Alexander fails to address how these same processes m ight be
understood as m ediating m en's social control of w om en—for example,
prostitution as a form of subjection to men, as well as to the state. From the
vantage point of Barry's analysis of prostitution, the point is not only, as
A lexander argues, how the state mobilizes heterosexuality to shore up
nationalism and imperial processes, but also how discourses of nation and
imperial processes shore up m en's rights over women's bodies.13
13This analysis demands further developm ent that is beyond the scope of this chapter. For this
shift towards public appropriation is accompanied by re-surgent conservative ideologies world
w ide, especially fundamentalism, seeking to re-confine women to the family as property of a
single man—a point that Barry also acknowledges (Prostitution of Sexuality). Furthermore, this
conservative, patriarchal ideology is often embedded in insurgent attacks on the state that
m obilize disaffection with global capitalism. This is the case with both white suprem acist and
m ilitia groups in the United States and Islamic fu n d a m e n talists in Afghanistan—another face of
postmodern patriarchy that demands nuanced, radical feminist analysis. See r a s t e lls for an
45
The Power of Gender

My last point assum es the im portance of a theory of gender w hich
continues to "think rigorously about the relation between division and hierarchy"
(Delphy), rather than treat gender and power as separate. Connell's sociological
account of gender orders/regim es represents both the positive potential and
some of the w orst shortcomings of recent accounts of gender. A brief sum m ary
and critique allows me to focus the problem at hand—the pow er in feminist
theory—as thus far addressed in this section. In contrast to a shift in theory that
w ould dissolve power altogether into an account of gender as ideology,
Connell's gender regim es/orders suggests a parallel to "racial formation" (Omi
and Winant). It addresses multiple social structures through which gender is
institutionalized at both macro and micro levels,14 emphasizing practice as that
which re-reproduces and resists structure, and retaining a focus throughout on
the question of how interests are constituted in these processes and structures.
He suggests labor, cathexis and power as three major structures through which
gender is institutionalized at various sites, notably the family, the state, and the
street. His analysis of these sites, and the family in particular, reveals a major
shortcoming of his model insofar as it invokes an analytic distinction between
power and gender.
analysis of anti-state movements including both U.S militia and Zapatista as reactions an d /or
resistance to the "New World Order" of capitalism.
14Omi and Winant invoke racial formation to theorize "race as "a fundamental organizing principle
of social relationships" (67) at both macro- and micro-levels. At the macro-level, "race is a matter
of collectivity, of the formation of social structures" where "social structure may be understood as
a series of 'sites" (67) and by site, they refer to w hat Bowles and Gintis conceive of as "a region of
social life with a coherent set of constitutive social relations—the structure of the site" (qtd. in Om i
and Winant 67). By micro-level they refer to a "complex of individual practices and
'consciousness' [which] shapes the universe of collective action" (68).
46
The distinction leads Connell, for example, to qualify his discussion of

husbands' pow er in the family w ith the suggestion that "in the traditional
patriarchal household, a marked sexual division of labour actually places some
limits on the patriarch's ability to exercise power, since w om en monopolize
certain kinds of skill and knowledge." He dtes a study which
describes a considerable degree of psychological independence for wom en
in Moroccan culture, where patriarchal dom ination is massive and the
division of labour strong. A very sharp division of labour may produce a
degree of segregation of daily life that makes it difficult to sustain
patriarchal power as routine. (125)
But Connell fails to ask, for whose benefit is the division of labor
ultim ately sustained? If dom ination is "massive" w hat kind of pow er is
w om en's "psychological independence" or "monopoly" over skills, and w hat
sort of control is control over a household?
It may be the case (and this is where Foucault is useful) that in some post
industrial societies, disciplinary power is so effective in its re-production of
docile subjects th at it proves less fertile a ground for engendering political
agency—and thus liberation struggle— than in gender regimes where patriarchal
pow er is organized through more traditional means of appropriation, force, and
hierarchy—including extreme forms of segregation. But why compare gender-
regimes at all if n o t for the purpose of conceptualizing potential, varied forms of
w om en's liberation? For if liberation is the point, the question of power persists
as fundamental —rather than as subsidiary to g ender, identified as one structure
am ong others. Connell, by analytically distinguishing gender on one hand and
pow er on the other (even as he insists on their interplay) blunts feminist critique
of gender as a category of hierarchy. The implications of his move are addressed
succinctly by Cynthia Cockbum who argues that
47
Connell's analysis . . . fails to take account of a key mechanism

contributing both to dom ination by one sex of another and the
reproduction of th at dom ination over time. It is heterosexual
complementarity. . .masculinity by definition cannot be thought even for a
moment without femininity. (320)
This is a non-reciprocal "complem entarity/' she points out, as it typically serves
m en's rather than women's interests. In other words, Connell's account glosses
over the category of gender as a category which naturalizes and institutionalizes
hierarchical power as (hetero)sexual difference. In short, despite the virtues of an
account that theorizes gender as a formation—a la the Omi and W inant model—
Connell's distinction between gender and power dulls the force of feminist
critique by omitting the account (central to radical feminist thought) of gender as
fundamentally a category of hierarchy.15
The concept of gender as hierarchy, however, needs fortification, not only
by responding to the theoretical challenge addressed in this section—the
challenge, basically, to extend and complicate a radical feminist concept of power
to allow for both complicity and complexity. It is also imperative to critique a
wholly new development, namely, post-feminism which engenders the suspicion
(when not explicitly elaborating the position) that the key feminist term of social
hierarchy, namely patriarchy, is no longer tenable.
15 Connell's choice of "family" as a conceptual category prior to marriage and/or the

heterosexual relationship (which becomes a sub-category of family) is a m ethodological move
w ith political stakes that reflect the problem discussed here, namely, his obscuring of gender in
relation to heterosexuality as both are categories and institutions of power. Delphy's essay,
"Sharing the same Table: Consumption and the Family," incisively deconstructs sociological
studies which assume the family as the basic unit, a category which obscures the (hetero)sexual
relations of power at stake in the household (Close to Home).
48
Beyond Feminism?: Post-Feminism and Post-modernism

A t this juncture I want to express a concern that runs through my project,
namely, a concern w ith theory that goes beyond an oppressor/oppressed
relation into a "gender skeptical" (Bordo) stance that claims (or implies) a
postfem inist position, rather than a position of re-thinking and extending
feminism. For example, Butler suggests that feminists abandon the concept of
patriarchy, for the "patriarchal system of domination" she argues, is a
phrase [that] has become permanently disabled in the course of recent
critiques of (a) the systematic or putative universality of patriarchy, (b) the
use of patriarchy to describe power relations relating to male dominance
in their culturally variable forms, and (c) the use of domination as the
central w ay in which feminists approach the question of power. ("By Any
O ther Name" 54)
In m y opinion, this quote suggests a "postfeminist" discourse that in
varying ways invokes post-structuralism (or "postmodernism") for its academic
credibility—w hat I will call post(feminist)structuralism, to distinguish it from
both feminist uses of poststructuralism (as exemplified by theorists discussed
above) and the more popularized discourse of postfeminism. In order to clarify
what I m ean by postfeminism, I want to examine each of Butler's three points
against a concept of patriarchy in terms of how they reflect theoretical issues
raised b y feminists engaged in a project of trying to bridge feminism and
postmodernism.
O n top of the list is what Butler calls into question as "the systematic or
putative universality of patriarchy," a point of contention for recent feminist
thought best summarized in Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson's discussion of
the "encounter between feminism and postmodernism." They critique categories
in feminist theory
49
like sexuality, m othering, reproduction and sex-affective production

[which] group together phenomena which are not necessarily conjoined in
all societies, while separating off from one another phenomena which are
not necessarily separated. (Social Criticism 426)
In other words, they contest claims for "a basic kind of human practice
found in all societies which has cross-cultural explanatory pow er" (426) citing
such claims as rooted in "quasi-metanarratives" of a "youthful" feminism (426).
Feminist theory, they argue, "would do better first to construct genealogies of the
categories of sexuality, reproduction and m othering before assum ing their
universal significance" (426, emphasis in original). Along w ith Lyotard's critique
of metanarratives, we see the mark of Foucault in Fraser and Nicholson's call for
a discourse analysis of the categories in question as an im provem ent over
universalizing analyses. Does this prescription for fem inism 's presum ably
m ature "encounter" w ith a "postmodernism" defined by or associated with male
theorists raise again the specter of a marriage into respectability? While the task of
constructing genealogies can only deepen feminist theory (as the w ork of
M ohanty and Alexander, discussed above shows), it is not clear if this task
should displace the task of analyzing social reality through the conceptual tools
at stake in the use of generalizing categories such as "sexuality," or, say,
"housework."16 One of the outcom es of a fem inist skepticism tow ards
16Delphy's critique of housework is a good case in point. Although she has been criticized for
generalizing about a practice that she studies in only one region of the world—France—it is far
from clear that her argument is one that makes universal claims about housework in any
empirical sense. On the contrary, rather than generalize about the kinds of "tasks" involved in
housework, Delphy is deconstructing a political assum ption and social relation at stake in the
sexual division of labor—the sexual division of labor itself, however, is a universalizing claim
that fem inists do not seem to have trouble w ith—namely, wom en's subordination to men and
men's "right" to women's work, services, bodies, etc. She is arguing that insofar as we have the
category of gender and of sexual division of labor at all, this is the political problem—male
power—at stake in the category.
50
generalizing categories17 —and a feature of feminist uses as well as abuses of

postmodernism— is an emphasis on the contingency and variability of practices.
I will develop this point below w hen I argue (looking at one of the abuses of
postmodernism) th at this category of contingency has been invoked to dispute
""intransigence o f dom inance" (Alexander 11), especially insofar as this
dominance is specifically sex dominance; hence, I will argue the importance of
pornography and prostitution as cases for reflecting on feminist theory of power.
At present I suggest that theorists who valorize the category of contingency in
their efforts to be "postmodern," often uphold an "antinomy of postmodernism"
(John Sanbonmatsu), that is to say, a bifurcation in (self-defined) "postmodern"
or "poststructuralist"18 thought which, rejecting one side of a binary pair, for
example, totality or universality, leaps to the other side to extol—in this case—
difference, particularity, a n d /o r contingency, thus preserving the binary. For
example, I am concerned with the way in which some feminist thinkers invoke
poststructuralism in order to valorize —rather than to call attention to— the
contingency of practices. That is to say, rather than analyze a tension between the
particularity/variability of practices and their systemic character in a social
totality, the theory drops the systemic altogether. Any notion of totality, e.g.
17 Susan Bordo has used the term "gender skepticism" to characterize the trend I identify as
postfem inism and she discusses it in terms of some feminist theorists' uncritical adaptation of
post modernism. As Bordo characterizes it, this tendency in feminist theory—influenced chiefly
by two paradigms, Derridean and Foucauldian thought—casts the category of gender under a net
of suspicion, where generalizing about gender becomes construed as politically insidious and
theoretically impure (Unbearable Weight 232).
18I'm referring here to theorists who often use the terms "postmodern" and "poststructuralist"
interchangeably. The tendency I describe can be found, however, in those who claim either or
both category of thought for their own.
51
patriarchy, becomes suspect with the result that a binary opposition between a
reified totality and a reified contingency is preserved rather than overcome.19
Patriarchy is obviously the paradigm atic "universalizing" claim of
feminism. But to the extent that feminism engages a macro-analysis, insisting,
that is, on the systemic nature of male power, feminism exposes the "persistence
of patriarchal capitalism" (Folbre and Hartmann)—or capitalist patriarchy, as
radical feminists w ould put it. As Biddy M artin cautions, feminists need to
continue attending to "macro-structures" for, she writes,
it is im perative that we n ot dismiss the importance of the concepts
patriarchy and oppression as they have been developed by radical
feminist thinkers. The radical feminist articulation of the universality and
totality of the oppression of women constitutes the condition of possibility
for feminist deconstructive work. (16)
From this perspective, feminism might w ant to be more discerning about
its "close encounters" with Foucault and other figures of current discourse. As
Martin puts it,
there is a danger that Foucault's challenges to traditional categories, if
taken to a "logical" conclusion, if made into imperatives rather than left as
hypotheses a n d /o r methodological provocations, could make the question
of women's oppression obsolete. (17)
A popular post-feminist discourse has already explicitly w ished this
question into obsolescence. For example, in Who Stole Feminism Christina Hoff
Sommers is incredulous that "A surprising num ber of clever and pow erful
feminists share the conviction that American women still live in a patriarchy
w here m en collectively keep w om en down" (19), and, moreover, that these
feminists try to “convince us that the oppression of women, sustained from generation
19I w ill return to a discussion of this antinomy of poststructuralist thought in chapter 5 w hen I
critique the "anti-essentialist" turn to a discourse analysis o f the subject of feminism.
52
to generation, is a structural feature of society " (16, emph. mine). While situated in
radically different discursive contexts, there is a disturbing similarity between
Hoff Sommers' polemic and Butler's view of "patriarchy" as a "disabled"
phrase—a phrase no longer useful for "describ[ing] pow er relations relating to
male dominance in their culturally variable forms" (the second point of Butler's
objection to "patriarchy"), for it is precisely male dom inance as a structural
feature of society that is at stake in the phrase. In her third point, the objection to
"the use of domination as the central way in which feminists approach the
question of power," Butler suggests a fundamental cognitive/epistemological
and political rupture with radical feminism and goes to heart of postfeminism as a
discourse which itself disables the radical critique of male power.
The power of feminist theory that takes women's oppression and sweeping
social transform ation as its object and purpose is necessarily (a critique of)
dominative power. Just as the study of racial formation has as its purpose an
understanding of racializing as a process of subjection—constructing racial
difference as hierarchy—so the study of gender ought to have as its purpose the
understanding (and changing of) the technology of sex /g en d er (gender/sex
regimes—gender order) as a technology of subjection—processes which construct
sex/gender difference as hierarchy. In Pateman's words, sex difference is the
difference between m astery and subjection (which is applicable to racial
formation as well). This argum ent by no means precludes—indeed it is the
condition of—a positive account of power in and as political subjecthood,
citizenry, and sexual/racial self-determination. It also does not preclude the fact
that gender regimes consist in /o f sites where gender is contested as well as
reinforced. However, the fact of contestation presupposes an order of power to
53
be contested. A feminist theory o f pow er implies investigation into and

problematization of the power at stake in the social category of gender. In short, this
chapter argues that it remains im perative for feminist theory that this theory
"refers specifically to the subjection of women, that singles out the form of
political right that all men exercise b y virtue of being men" (Pateman Sexual
Contract 20).
PART II: Feminist Theory and the Power of The (Hetero) Sexual Contract
Pateman's Politics of Method
Carole Pateman's argument in The Sexual Contract suggests a methodology
similar to that of Christine Delphy: Both theorists deconstruct social discourse in
order to expose a sexual politics both presupposed and denied by the discourse.
D elphy reveals that marxist and conventional sociology assumes a social
institution that on another level it denies—the social contract as (hetero)sexual—
and this critique is the frame for her ow n explanation of how and why w om en's
work is appropriated and exploited. Patem an confronts this institution as it is
presupposed and legitimized by political theory and discourse; in particular she
scrutinizes the liberal/juridical tradition (in Euro-American contexts) that
concerns itself with the issues of pow er, legitimate rule, and political right,
nam ely social contract discourse. A key shared premise of method for Patem an
and Delphy is what Quebecois sociologists Juteau and Laurin characterize a basic
assum ption of materialist feminism, th at "it is women's place in reproduction
and production that is dependent on the relations of domination between the
sexes and not the reverse" (Juteau and Laurin 21).
54
This methodological position—which is, of course, also an ethico-political

position—becomes (implicitly) the key point of contention in Nancy Fraser's
argum ent with Pateman, underscored by Fraser's stated theoretical objective of
going "Beyond the m aster/subject" as she entitles her critique of The Sexual
Contract. Moreover, the case of prostitution, in both Patem an's argument and
Fraser's objection, becomes a key site for pointing up this methodological/ethical
conflict and a paradigm case for examining the power of feminist theory. In The
Sexual Contract, the case of prostitution helps focus the issue of the political
m eaning of gender, raising the following question for Pateman: What are the
political conditions that enable m en to demand that w om en's bodies be put on
the m arket—literally as prostitutes and surrogate m others, and more or less
figuratively, as workers a n d /o r wives? Concurrently, w hat is the discourse (of
contract and rights) which both presupposes and denies rights that dominant
groups have over the bodies of subordinates, with the claim that subordinates
themselves have the "right" to sell their own bodies as (if) property? In short,
Patem an's critique of contractarian ideology not only exposes a political
discourse of domination presupposed by a discourse of right—and thus of
freedom—but how the category of sex/gender is both constituted through and
constitutive of this discourse.
Pateman's Critique of Contractarian Political Discourse

Patem an argues that the sexual contract is the repressed, founding
political fiction of civil society as m odem , patriarchal society. Its story, which
m ust be teased out of the official story of the Social Contract, tells us about the
sexual politics of (supposedly gender-neutral) political right. It is the "hidden
55
half" of the Social Contract story as told by theorists from Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau up to modem day libertarians—called "contractarians" outside of the
United States. As Pateman points out, the Social Contract Story comes down to
us through the tradition of political theory, as an account of how men, bom equal
in nature, come to accept governm ent/rule as legitimate. It does not tell us about
how women were excluded from the contract as members of the pack/pact and
thus of civil society. Questions at the heart of the official story—the tradition of
contract theory—include: How do men pass from a state of nature into civil
society? What, in other words, is the origin of civil society? The key problem for
the contractarian tradition is that of the legitimacy of power, given men's natural
freedom. The contradictory solution is contract as a political fiction that defines
freedom in terms of relations of domination and subordination (this is the genius
of contract theory, revealed quite starkly in Hobbes). The freedom won by
contract, Pateman points out again and again, turns out to mean the freedom to
be subjected and this is the contradiction played out in real-life contracts central
to social institutions today: employment and marriage, for example. But this has
a particular meaning for women; indeed sexual politics are central to the social
contract, but these politics are both suppressed and presupposed.
Pateman de-mystifies a false opposition central to contract, namely, the
pseudo-opposition between patriarchy and contract. Although it has come down
to us as the antithesis of patriarchy, the social contract is the origin story of
m odem patriarchal power. While contract, as a paradigm of free agreement
among equals, does conflict with patriarchy insofar as the latter is about the rule
of the fathers, kinship and blood descent (or fiction of blood), the two "join
56
hands"—to use a favored expression of Pateman's—on the issue of women's

subjection to men. Pateman writes:
Modem civil society is not structured by kinship and the power of the
fathers; in the m odem world, women are subordinated to men as men, or
to men as fraternity. The original contract takes place after the political
defeat of the father and creates modem fraternal patriarchy. (3)
In other words, "the sons overthrow the fathers to secure freedom of
access to women" (2), a political transition overlooked by contract theory. This is
partly accomplished through a "conjuring trick " via the use of "fraternity," a
term which both presupposes and hides its sex-specificity as universal
brotherhood. The story of transition from patriarchy to contract/fraternity
suppresses its subtext as a transition in men's power over women.
Pateman's account has much in common with w hat Monique Wittig calls
"the heterosexual social contract" (Straight Mind) an analysis of "heterosexuality
[as] the metanarrative of m odem discourse; a patriarchal story of origins and of
social transition. . ." (Zerilli 156). The state of nature is a key part of this story.
The classic social contract story invokes a "state of nature" to mystify and thus
justify men's "natural" right over women. In her classic commentary on the
issue, "The Straight M ind," Wittig argues that this 'state of nature' is still
presupposed by most narratives of modem (and I w ould add, postmodern)
patriarchal discourse:
. . . although it has been assumed in recent years that there is no such
thing as nature, that everything is culture, there remains within culture a
core of nature which resists examination, a relationship excluded from the
social in the analysis—a relationship whose characteristic is ineluctability
in culture, as well as in nature, and which is the heterosexual relationship.
I will call it the obligatory social relationship between 'm an and woman.'
(Straight Mind 27)
57
For Pateman, the obligatory dimension of the relationship between man

and woman is masked by the (hetero)sexual contract which presupposes and
denies the political nature of sex difference. The real, political difference between
masculine and feminine, Pateman contends, is the difference between mastery
and subjection. This she discerns by making visible as political and obligatory
those relations between "individuals" that appear as natural a n d /o r as freely
agreed to—the relation between wife and husband, prostitute and trick, worker
and boss. Like Delphy, Pateman is arguing that it is not specific tasks that make a
woman a (house)wife, but the particular nature o f the contract which ties the female
worker—the wife— to the household of her 'master/ (Delphy) in the case of (house)
wives, or, in the case of prostitution, the nature of the contract that ties women to
their civil masters outside the household, in the public realm.
The Master/Subject Model of Male Dominance

Nancy Fraser's argum ent w ith Pateman is about this "core concept of
domination and subordination" as implied by the notion of the sexual contract
and her position resonates with Butler's objection, quoted above, to theorizing
male power in terms of dominance and subordination. "Do notions of mastery
and subjection exhaust the full meanings of m asculinity and femininity?"
("Beyond" 174) Fraser asks at the outset of her argum ent w ith Pateman. But it is
far from clear why Pateman must be committed to the thesis that mastery and
subjection exhaust the fu ll meanings of masculinity and femininity in order to
argue that the political meaning of masculinity and femininity—the meaning of
these categories as they are both presupposed and denied in the founding
fictions of civil society as the (hetero)sexual contract—is mastery and subjection.
58
Another w ay of p u ttin g it is that institutionalized sex difference, viz.

heterosexuality as an institution,20 in modem patriarchy, still carries the meaning
of male mastery and female subordination. In a moment I will tu rn to each "real
life contract" (Fraser) at issue—marriage and prostitution—to show the strength
of Pateman's thesis that (sexual) contract ideology is still operative in our central
institutions. A t present, I w ant to direct attention to the central insight and
perhaps polemical brilliance of Pateman's insistence on the "m aster/subject"
model of power. To elaborate this argument, I turn back to Foucault.
Foucault's "influential studies," Pateman points out, "m ight suggest that
the story of the sexual contract will generate a view of power and domination
that remains stuck in an old juridical formulation centered on nothing more than
the statement of the law and the operation of taboos" (16). In this vein Fraser
asks, for example, "Does it [the master/slave model of sexual contract] obscure
gendered constraints on w om en's lives that take the form not of the authoritative
will of a superior, b u t of processes in which the actions of m any people are
abstractly or impersonally mediated?" (emphasis mine). The point returns us to
Bartky's concept of a disciplinary society without disciplinarians. Again we are
asked to juxtapose a notion of male power as sheerly repressive on the one hand,
to a notion of im personal mechanisms on the other, precluding the power of
feminist theory as that which might precisely be in the relation between the two.
For example, Fraser objects to an account that explains male dom ination as
primarily a m atter of m en (husbands, pimps or tricks, bosses) ordering women
20 As Pateman points out, and I agree, the institution of heterosexuality should be distinguished
from individual relationships betw een men and women that may or may not be resistant in
various ways to the institution. See Christine Overall, "Heterosexuality And Fem inist Theory"
for an extremely useful discussion of this distinction. She critiques the notion that fem inists don't
choose to be heterosexual, elaborating on what kind of choice this choice can potentially be.
59
around, giving commands, coercing women to do m en's will. She opts instead
for an account of "gendered constraints," "processes in which the actions of
m any people are abstractly or im personally m ediated," (174) rather than
construing women as "under the direct command of individual m en" (180). The
operative terms are "many people," and "impersonally." Fraser wants to shift
aw ay from an account of pow er centered in w hat she (strangely) terms
"hierarchical dyads"—in other words in the (institutionalized) heterosexual
relationship—and seems to suggest that Pateman's analysis of the heterosexual
institution (the sexual contract) presupposes a notion of m en always bossing and
pushing women around. But is this the decisive issue? Is this the notion of
(male) mastery that Pateman is interrogating? I will answer this question, first,
by way of Pateman's use of Foucault.
Similarly to Bartky, Pateman recasts Foucault's model to analyze the
m odernization of patriarchy; in sharp contrast to Bartky's analysis, Pateman
holds that men, rather than let off scot-free are specifically em powered by this
developm ent. Pateman construes contract as a site of m en's "d iscip line,
normalization and control" (16) of women, and glosses Foucault accordingly:
In the History of Sexuality Foucault remarks th at "beginning in the
eighteenth century, [new power mechanisms] took charge of m en's
existence, men as living bodies." But beginning in the seventeenth
century, w hen stories of the original contract were first told, a new
mechanism of subordination and discipline enabled men to take charge of
women's bodies and women's lives. The original contract (is said to have)
brought a modem form of law into existence, and the actual contracts
entered into everyday life form a specifically m odem method of creating
local pow er relations w ithin sexuality, marriage and employment. The
civil state and law and (patriarchal) discipline are n ot two forms of power
60
but dimensions of the complex, multifaceted structure of domination in

m odem patriarchy. (16, emphasis mine)
The accounts of Pateman and Foucault overlap on the following point:
that the discourse of freedom in particular—of political right, for example—has
been the site of new forms of subjection. Precisely at this juncture, the critique of
the liberal tradition in Western patriarchal discourse, radical feminism must join
one hand w ith Foucault, but with the other, wave good-bye to all that. Foucault
shows that the juridical paradigm—power as law, power as repressive—is based
on the social contract model. This model supposes that power is something that
can be exchanged like property and that sovereign pow er (in either its
monarchical, vertical form or its, horizontal, contractual, dem ocratized form)
derives from an agreement: subjects give pow er to a central authority in
exchange for this authority's (the sovereign's) protection. Critiquing this notion
of pow er, Foucault characterizes it as "that concrete pow er w hich every
individual holds, and whose partial or total cession enables political pow er or
sovereignty to be established" (P/FC 88). The key political question troubling the
contract theorists, is, as Pateman and Foucault both point out, the question of the
legitimacy of sovereign power and, correspondingly, that of political right—
which subjects hold against (as a limit on) sovereign/governing power.
However, while the tradition of political theory casts "right" in terms of
legitimacy and of limits to sovereign power, for Foucault, right is in fact a locus of
"m ethods of subjugation." Power is productive rather than repressive,
producing specific relations of subjection. The fact that "right" is the locus of
subjugation is precisely what Pateman considers the genius of contract theory,
arguing, "Contract always generates political right in the form of relations of
domination and subordination" (8). Pateman parts from Foucault w here she
61
argues that contract generates new forms of specifically male power and female
subjection.
Rather than presupposing the juridical paradigm, Pateman interrogates this
paradigm. She makes a comparable, though politically distinct, move to that
m ade by Foucault by exposing the notions of "legitim acy' and "right" told
through the contract story, as gendered, and as producing m odem forms of
patriarchal power. In other words, Pateman demystifies contract as a discourse of
freedom, a task which involves what Pateman calls its central contradiction and
genius, the fiction of labor power. Again this point dovetails with Foucault's
critique of the juridical and contract based paradigm of pow er as a
right, which one is able to possess like a commodity, and which one can in
consequence transfer or alienate, either wholly or partially, through a legal
act or through some act that establishes a right, such as takes place
through cession or contract. (P/FC88)
Pateman similarly critiques what she construes as a fiction of labor power:
this is the fiction that when individuals enter employment, marriage, prostitution
or any other contract, what they contract o u t is use of som e mythical property—
labor power—as if they could really "transfer or alienate" this property as some
thing distinct from their selves. The genius of this fiction is that it construes
freedom as doing w hat one wants with one's property, including one's body—
including, therefore, contracting to be a "civil slave." Thus it construes
domination as freedom.21 The fiction of labor power is based on a notion of the
21This critique of contract helps frame a critique of lesbian sadomasochism insofar as the latter is
justified in terms of doing what one wants with one's body as property. Pateman writes,
"Feminists w ho object to sado-masochism have been dism issed as m oralistic and as failing to
appreciate the elem ent of parody in fetish costumes. Be that as it m ay, sado-masochism is less a
rebellious or revolutionary fantasy than a dramatic exhibition of the logic of contract and of the
full im plications of the sexuality of the patriarchal m asculine 'individual'.. . From the standpoint
of contract, there is nothing surprising in the representation of sexual freedom through the
figures of master and slave, through [she quotes Pat Califia] the 'personae of guard and prisoner.
62
individual as (in political philosopher C P McPhereson's phrase) the "possessive

individual," the notion (another fiction) that "I own my body," have property in
my person, and can thus, or should thus be able to rent/sell/exchange that
property.22 The fiction, however, is that one is actually capable of separating this
property from the laborer (wife, prostitute) as if one actually had an external
relation to this property. This fiction is central to w hat links the em ployment
contract w ith the sexual contract, i.e. with prostitution and marriage contracts:
since th e em ployer cannot really contract for labor power, as the latter
presupposes the will, intentions, and in short the labor of the laborer, the contract
(for w o rk e r, wife or prostitute) is about "sell[ing] command over the use of his [or
her] bod y and himself [or herself]" (150, em ph. mine).23 "The [sexual contract]
story," Pateman writes, "helps us understand the mechanisms through which
men claim right of access to women's bodies and claim right of command over
the use of women's bodies" (17). These mechanisms include paradigm s of
"freedom," "free exchange" and "free agreement" in real-life contracts that, in
cop and suspect, N azi and Jew, White and Black, straight man and queer, parent and child, priest
and penitent, teacher and student, whore an client, etc.'"(186). These representations of sexual
freedom are not surprising because "Civil mastery requires agreement from the subordinate and
numerous stories are spun in which slaves and women in chains contract and consent to their
subjection." She adds, "How apt it is, in a period when contract and the patriarchal construction
of the individual have such widespread appeal, that the end of the m ovem ent from status to
contract should be prodaimed in feminist defenses of fantasy slave contracts" (187).
current example of this ideology is in libertarian lawyer Richard Epstein's book, approvingly
reviewed by Nathan Glazer in the New York Times Book Review, July 15,1995.
^ In the em ploym ent contract, this point is manifest in the right that employers assum e to
compel the workers' obedience as well as to compel them to use their capacities in a given
manner. This point is confirmed by the analysis of Gintis and Bowles on the subject:
Here is a real peculiarity of labor-power. The enjoyment of the use-value of any other
com m odity is non-problematic:— not so w ith labor-power. Its 'use value' is not
delivered, it is not offered, it is not consumed. It m ust be extracted, this process of
extraction engages the energies of armies of supervisors, time-motion men, guards, spies,
and bosses of all descriptions. (14-15)
As one writer, Huw Benyon put it, writing about Working for Ford, as his book is entitled,
"workers are paid to obey" (qtd. in Pateman, 148).
63
fact, produce new relations of subjection. Contract re-inscribes men's sex right in
a discourse of (men's) civic freedom.
C ontract also re-inscribes m en's sex right in a discourse of women's
freedom—wives' and prostitutes' "freedom" to sell (command over) their bodies.
Thus Patem an's argum ent aims to undercut contem porary sexual libertarian
defense of (especially) prostitution as a form of freedom. The libertarian
argument, for example, aims at improving the conditions under which women
can "choose" to sell their bodies a n d /o r poses an ideal world where everyone
can be or buy a prostitute, regardless of race or sex/gender. This position
assumes sex right as a given rather than asking "why men dem and that women's
bodies are sold as commodities in the capitalist m arket" (Sexual Contract
emphasis mine, 194). This account of "w hat is wrong w ith prostitution," as
Patem an entitles a chapter of The Sexual Contract, can be extended to other
relationships where contract produces subjection in the form of rights, namely,
marriage and employment. In short, Pateman's strategy is an immanent critique
of liberal individualism that exposes its m ain internal contradiction in the
confluence of freedom and subordination. Thus, to turn back to Fraser, while
Fraser hardly advances a libertarian argument, her critique of Pateman glosses
over the force of this (Pateman's) critique of liberalism. For the issue is not as
much m en's coercive force but political relations which continue to normalize
force (and other forms an d /o r mechanisms of dominance) by re-inscribing
dom inance an d subordination in contract-discourse as forms of freedom.
Fraser's desire to go beyond the m aster/subject model reveals resistance, in the
end, to theorizing the specificity of these political relations.
64
Fraser's Critique (Is the Master at Home?)

Fraser's main strategy for getting beyond Pateman's m aster/subject model
is to look at Pateman's examples of real-life contracts, marriage, prostitution and
employment—of which I will only concern myself with the first two—in order to
show that the master/subject model is inadequate for accounts of contemporary
"gender inequality." Again Fraser's objection to this model and her approach to
these real-life contracts seems, in part, the legacy of the kind of coupling of
feminism and Foucault sketched above (see Part I, particularly my discussion of
Bartky, Butler, Fraser & Nicholson).24: In contrast to Patem an's use of Foucault
to explain modernized masculinism, in Fraser and other contemporary feminist
theorists, an account of male agency and systemic patriarchal power (patriarchy)
loses ground to supposedly more nuanced accounts of social practices in their
historic variability and contingency. For all their nuance, these accounts threaten
to suspend us in a postfeminist fantasy of a postpatriarchy: In this w orld we
ascribe less endurance to structure, and more fluidity to pow er, and less power
to any central force, least of all to the will(s) of men. W hile claiming as her
motivation a better account of male dominance than that provided by Pateman's
account of power, Fraser's argument suggests an account of "gender inequality"
in which the specificity of men's power, and especially of heterosexuality as an
institution structured through relations of domination and subordination, does
24This is despite Fraser's sharp critique of Foucault elsewhere. In Unruly Practices Fraser
addresses key problems in Foucault's theory with respect to its value as social critique, including
his failure to address normative questions that his framework otherwise solicits. What Fraser
seems to inherit from Foucault is an account of power as de-fused and de-centered, and,
accordingly, o f the contingency and variability—in contrast to intransigence and system atidty—
of practices. In her account of welfare and other mechanisms of m odem capitalist and patriarchal
power, Fraser sustains a tension between system ic and variability. It is w hen confronting the
specificity of relations between men and women, when, that is, it com es to theorizing m ale power
in its specificity, that she suddenly seems to lose this tension and lapse into a "respectable"
version of Foucaultian feminism.
65
not figure at all. In other words, her account suggests inequality w ithout
domination and gender without hierarchy.
To begin recounting Fraser's argument, I turn back to her question cited
earlier, "Does [the m aster/subject model] obscure gendered constraints on
w om en's lives that take the form not of the authoritative will of a superior, but of
processes in which the actions of many people are abstractly or impersonally
mediated?" (174 emphasis mine). This question is related to a second posed by
Fraser, namely whether the master/subject m odel "obscure[s] larger structural or
systemic processes that underlie and support hierarchical dyads?" (174). At the
outset, such questions presuppose, rather than argue, certain, core assumptions
that decide in advance the outcome of Fraser's critique of Pateman, and indeed, of
common criticisms of radical feminist thought in general. First of all, there is an
assum ed opposition, in these two questions, between an analysis of gender in
terms of relations of domination and subordination, on the one hand, and "larger
structural or systemic processes" on the other. But why does an analysis of one
obscure the other? Why is the latter "larger or broader"? W hat makes the latter
"underlie" the former? And, finally, what is this de-contextualized/de-gendered
"hierarchical dyad"? Fraser's question begs a deeper question, viz. the question
of the specificity of heterosexuality as a structural and systemic process. Radical
feminism has argued that one need not look to a larger process underlying
hierarchical dyads of men and w om en in o rd er to discern the structure of
heterosexuality as a social institution. Rather, the point is that these dyads—
normatively regulated relationships between m en and w om en—are a primary,
albeit not the only, structure of this institution. By posing the question as she
does, Fraser precludes this analysis, rather than directly critiques it. Yet how can
66
one assess either Pateman's m aster/subject model or Fraser's criticisms of it

without addressing this fundamental conflict in the basic presuppositions of their
arguments? Fraser's argument, as she examines the concrete cases of marriage
and prostitution, implicitly rejects a feminist analysis of heterosexuality and thus
does not critique b ut rather misses Patem an's p o in t
Marriage: A Resemblance of Power?

Fraser looks at the marriage contract, comparing Pateman's model to what
she states to be a better model: Susan Okin's discussion of "a cycle of socially
caused and distinctly asymmetric vulnerability by marriage" (174). Perpetuating
the obfuscating style of this quote from Okin, Fraser paraphrases the latter's
description of "power dynamics w ithin marriage today":
Women, thus are rendered vulnerable. . . by anticipation of marriage,
since the expectation of prim ary domestic and child-care responsibilities
bu rd en s their decisions about education, training, and degree of
commitment to employment. (174)
Note the passive voice. There is no query into who (or what) is doing w hat to
whom. Rather, Fraser notes "women's traditional responsibility for childrearing
helps shape labor markets" (174). Absurdly, it is (an implicitly essentialized)
women's traditional responsibility that does the shaping of the structures here. A
sem antic clue, the term "cycle," sm acks of naturalization—as if such
"expectations" were generated like the tides, the seasons, or menstrual cycles. In
any event, the phrase "cycle of vulnerability" clearly begs the question regarding
the usefulness or not of the sexual contract ("male sex right") as an analytic
framework for scrutinizing the marriage contract; it begs the question rather than
improves upon it, as Fraser would have it. In other words, Fraser does not tell us
67
why something like "sex right" w ould not account for women's "anticipation of
marriage" and "expectation of prim ary domestic and child-care responsibilities."
It seems to me that the institution of m arriage itself, with its built-in obligation
that women be (house)wives still begs explanation in terms of power relations.
Fraser elaborates on O kin's m odel, raising two further points about
w om en's "cycle of vulnerability." First, w om en "are rendered vulnerable"
within marriage due to their inferior labor market opportunities, a vulnerability
which increases over time and thus decreases options for getting out. Secondly
and finally, women "are rendered vulnerable by separation or divorce"—the
"poverty is only a divorce away" factor. Fraser finds this account more useful
than Pateman's for describing power relations in marriage. "If marriage still too
often resembles a master/subject relation, this is due in large measure to its social
em beddedness in relation to sex-segmented labor markets, gender-structured
social-welfare policy regimes, and the gender division of unpaid labor" (174,
emphasis mine). But what is em bedded in what? Fraser seems to suggest that
male dominance derives from other social structures outside of institutionalized
relations between men and women. Fraser's problem, then, is clearly w ith an
account that critiques heterosexuality itself as a specific social institution. But
Okin's account (in Fraser's rendition, at any rate) does not offer an alternative to
this critique of heterosexuality as m uch as elide specific relations of pow er
presupposed by the "cycles" of vulnerability in her description of marriage. Fraser
leaves unargued the claim that the "resemblance" between m arriage and
m aster/subject relations is due to its social embeddedness in other practices. She
does not address the question of whether the gender division of labor, paid and
68
unpaid, as well as welfare policy regimes, might themselves be somezuhat, if not

largely, explicable in terms of male sex right.
In other words, Fraser's analytical move is ambiguous. What exactly does
Fraser intend w ith her use of the term "resemblance"? How might a marriage
resemble a m aster/subject relation in contrast to enacting one? Fraser does not
help us o u t by say, citing an example where resemblance to mastery and
subjection, rather than its actuality might be discerned. One place where I would
like to see this distinction argued is invoked by Pateman, namely that of "marital
rape"—an act only recently recognized as criminal in all U.S states.25 Does the
difficulty that the court has in recognizing forced sex within marriage as rape
have something to do with the actuality of the master-subject model as persisting
in the marriage institution? A related issue concerns how men's violence toward,
including m urder of, their wives is adjudicated today. A recent case in the
United States as discussed by journalist Anna Q uindlen raises the issue at hand
quite sharply:
Kenneth Peacock, a Maryland truck driver got a mere 18 m onths for
shooting his wife after he found her in bed with another man. Her
infidelity counted as "contributory negligence." "I seriously wonder how
many men married five, four years would have the strength to walk away
25lt is only as recently as 1993 that marital rape became a crime in all 50 states. Further, as of this
date
thirty three states still have some exemptions from prosecution for rape, e.g. when the
husband does not need to use force because the w ife is m ost vulnerable (temporarily or
permanently, physically or mentally legally unable to consent)! ("State Law Chart,"
National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape, Berkeley California).
In other words, husbands are exempted from prosecution for rape when a woman's prior consent
is im possible. Thus, if a woman is asleep, drugged, or otherwise unable to consent to sex when her
husband or boyfriend sexually attacks her she can not legally claim that what he did to her was
in fact rape. This astonishing exemption from prosecution of marital rape exposes the ideological
basis of marital rape and why it has taken so long for it to be recognized as a crime, namely, the
assumption that husbands (and also cohabitants or "voluntary social companions" [dates]), own
their wives.
69
w ithout inflicting some corporeal punishm ent" the judge, Robert Cahill
said sympathetically.26
I take it that the underlying assumption in this case, shared by individual
husband and Court alike, that the man had a right to punish this woman for her
infidelity has something to do w ith how his relationship to her as husband and
wife is institutionalized.27 In w hat sense is the (still) institutionalized
presum ption that a m an owns his wife a resemblance to a relation of mastery and
subjection, rather than, actual one?28
At this juncture we can return to the question left a few pages earlier,
namely, w hat is the notion of mastery that Pateman interrogates and what are
the implications of her analysis for the pow er of radical feminist theory—
especially insofar as the latter has come to focus on coercive force and violence?
Fraser's desire to go beyond the m aster/subject relation resembles, as it were, a
26Quindlen's rejoinder: "I seriously w onder how m any m en earning the minimum wage would
have the strength to walk away from a handful of crisp new bills." I
27a recent (1997) case in Mexico underscores this point quite sharply: In the case of a woman
raped by her husband, a supreme court's ruling legitim ized a light sentence on the basis that the
act of "violently forcing a spouse to engage in sexual relations was not rape but the undue
exercise of a right." Such offenders "w ill no longer face eight to 14 years in prison without right
to probation—the punishm ent for those found guilty of rape—but instead will choose between
three to 12 months in prison or a 100 to 300 dollar fine." The Supreme Court decision states that
"if one spouse violently im poses on the other normal copulation w hen the obligation of
cohabitation" exists, that is not sufficient for the act to be considered rape, in spite of the
em ploym ent of m ethods typically used to define that crime." The point is that "while spouses
[sic] have the right to sexual relations, they cannot be permitted to achieve that aim through
violence. Hence if such conduct is observed, it w ill be treated according to the article p e n a liz in g
the undue exercise of a right." (Eduardo Molina y Vedia "Supreme Court Legitimizes Rape of
Spouses, Critics Say," June 16,1997. InterPress Third World N ew s A gency [IPS]).
28Lest anyone think that the court adjudicates in comparable fashion, women who kill husbands
for infidelity, or, what is much more often the case as Quindlan points out, for reasons of self-
defense against a batterer husband or boyfriend, sentencing record proves otherwise. Hence the
"old math" of Quindlan's tide; wom en are much more severely punished for self-defense than
men are for killing fem ale partners in scenarios such as the Peacock case. Of course w e have not
dealt here w ith the discrepancy in m edia treatment either, i.e. betw een vilification of wom en who
kill and indifference toward or hero-ization towards m en who kill wom en. Phyllis Chesler
addresses this issue in her discussion o f the Aileen W uom os case (Right to Self Defense).
70
confusion on the part of feminists discussed earlier—like Bordo and Bartky—

who invoke Foucault's critique of repressive power to propose a shift from an
account of pow er as coercive force to an account of pow er through more
impersonal mechanisms in which both m en and w om en are implicated. Thus
Fraser's argument seems to support B ordo's point that
Within a Foucauldian/feminist framework, it is . . .senseless to view men
as the enemy: to do so would be to ignore, not only power differences in
the racial, class, and sexual situations of men, b ut the fact that most men,
equally w ith women, find themselves em bedded and implicated in
institutions that they as individuals did not create and do not control—
and that they frequently feel tyrannized by. (28)
Yet, by glossing over the difference between how men and wom en are
im plicated in these institutions, by ignoring m en's different interests in and
benefits from sex/gender institutions, Bordo's Foucaultian framework dulls rather
than complicates her feminist critique.29 What all of these feminist theorists—
Bartky, Bordo and Fraser—seem to lose sight of in their aversion to nam ing men
as agents and beneficiaries in women's oppression, and in their shift of focus
from coercive to normalizing power, is the extent to which radical feminist
theory is an attem pt to relate men's coercive force to the (more abstract)
mechanisms through which this force is normalized. This analysis of male power
situates radical feminism as an extension of cultural critique and social theory
which, prior to Foucault, starting from Gramsci's discussion of hegemony, aimed
to explain power in terms of the complex ways in which consent to domination is
socially constructed in capitalist societies, where the locus of power is no longer a
29This is only the case, however, in Bordo's reflections on shifts in feminism in her Introduction
to Unbearable Weight. The rest of her book contains an incisive analysis of the power of gender
with respect to contemporary body-ideologies: dieting, anorexia, beauty and how wom en's
bodies are (de)formed and disciplined through cultural representation.
71
monarch, tyrant or repressive (totalitarian) state. If radical feminism emphasizes

coercive force, it does so in order to strategically foreground an operation of
pow er that has remained (and remains) largely invisible to cultural critique—
namely the extent to which m en (still) hold rights over women's bodies, as
illustrated by the Peacock case. The m aster/subject model is not m eant to
suggest that all m en/ husbands /boyfriends tyrannize their female partners or
w ould w an t to; it is m eant to call atten tio n to the way in w hich
m arriage/heterosexuality is still institutionalized in terms of this m odel of
power. That this model lives, is seen in the extreme b ut not uncommon cases of
violence against women in. the context of heterosexual relationships, and how
they are treated by law.
Prostitution
Fraser's spurious distinction between the master-subject relation as a
"resemblance" vs. actual power in the case of marriage, becomes more explicitly
articulated, and more spurious, in the case of prostitution. Unlike libertarians,
Fraser does not try to endorse prostitution as an example of sexual freedom and
does seem to find something morally and politically problematic about the
practice. Indeed, she concedes, prostitution appears to be a stark case of male
mastery and female subjection. Appears, she stresses, rather than is. With her
startling sleight of hand, we find ourselves reverting back to a surely "disabled"
model for making (non)sense of prostitution, where gender and sexuality means
cultural and cultural means epiphenom enal rather than actual, determ ining
power. Thus Fraser resurrects the marxist method for contending with feminism
that reared its head in the debate betw een Delphy and marxist feminists
72
McIntosh and Barrett. Male domination is cultural and only "resembles" "actual
pow er relations," i.e. those having to do w ith the exploitation of wom en as
workers. In the case of prostitution and the sexual contract in general, Fraser
distinguishes between institutionalized power relations on the one hand, and
"cultural dimensions of male dominance and female subordination" on the other
hand (178, emphasis hers). She argues that while the sexual contract/m aster-
subject m odel is inadequate for "actual" power relations, it may illuminate
culture, including the symbolic meanings of femininity and masculinity. W hat is
this "sym bolic" cultural dim ension, distinguished from pow er relations?
Significantly the "cultural dimension" turns out to be fantasy. The master-subject
relation which marriage "resembles" transmigrates into "fantasy" in the case of
prostitution. As I will argue further below (in chapter three), the use and abuse of
"fantasy" is central theme of postfeminist discourse as it lives in the academy,
and is a key rubric under w hich the theme of contingency is juxtaposed to
fem inist critiques of systemic male domination. According to Fraser, for
example, the role of (men's) fantasy in prostitution supports her view of the
contingency of m en's power over prostitutes, a view which she counters to
Pateman's model of power as sex right:
. . . far from implying the solidity of [symbolic associations of masculinity
and femininity] prostitution implies their fragility. I suggest that w hat is
sold is a male fantasy of 'male sex right,' one that implies its precariousness
in actuality. (179)
Note the central oppositions: fantasy, precariousness and fragility and
culture on the one hand are lined up against solidity and sex right and
institutional power, on the other. But w hy is "male sex right" a fantasy in
contrast to a concretely real institutional power? In other words, why does this
73
notion of fantasy get deployed, if not to undermine an account of real power?

Furthermore, w hat needs to be looked at here is how the contingency/fantasy
paradigm is used in the service of a move which under cuts the force of a radical
critique of heterosexual social relations.
Fraser contests Patem an's argum ent that "the john acquires the right of
command over the prostitute" ("Beyond" 178) for the following reasons. First,
because prostitution involves a "contract of specific perform ance" (citing
Pateman) and thus, in contrast to marriage, prostitution, "does not establish a
long-term relation of dependence" ("Beyond" 178, Fraser's phrasing). Secondly,
as Fraser sees it, "the transaction is often governed by advance negotiations over
specific 'services' which lim it the pow er of the john. . ." (179). Fraser points to
examples of prostitutes w ho enjoy "autonomy" over the sexual transaction and
outside of it. Finally, she contends that in some "masculine cultures today,
resorting to prostitution is a token not of power or m astery b u t of shame,
suffused with the em barrassment of having to pay for 'it'" (179). To clarify basic
problems w ith Fraser's position here, I'll address her three points one at a time,
starting w ith the second tw o points—the prostitute's autonomy and the trick's
shame. In the first case, the "evidence " of prostitutes' autonom y, cited in a
footnote by Fraser, is a fictional film, Working Girls (by Lizzie Borden); in the
second, Fraser provides no evidence whatsoever of "masculine cultures" or of
men who are ashamed to go to a prostitute. On the subject of m en's shame, for
example, Fraser does not tell us w hy the emotion of shame w ould inevitably be a
token of social and political power-/ess-ness. On this point w e can see a
convergence w ith a popular(ized) postfeminist argument: Katie Roiphe, in The
Morning After, makes an identical point in her criticism of Mackinnon. A few
74
weeks after hearing MacKinnon speak on the issue of pornography, Roiphe finds
herself in Times Square, ruminating, "the word that came to mind was 'dingy'
rather than 'om inous,'" and (without use of quotations) she elaborates on
MacKinnon's message:
Somehow w ith her image of m en turned on an d turned into beasts,
Mackinnon misses the squalor, the pathos. H er lurid description of
pornography overlooks how depressing it can be. How many of these
men are compensating for how short they are or how little money they
make. She overlooks the numbness, the mechanical way in which they
reach into their pockets for money. The joy and elation, the naked will to
power, and the male pleasure in subjugating women she describes don't
seem to be the whole story. (157)
Roiphe does little more than provide the visuals that make explicit (and
more accessible) the assum ptions behind Fraser's oblique points about the
m aster/subject model generally and more specifically about men's shame with
respect to prostitution. (I bracket Roiphe's facile and dubious description of
Mackinnon's account of male consumers of pornography—joyful, bestial will to
power and all—and m erely point o ut that she is confusing M ackinnon's
description of pornography itself with the men who use it). The argument
shared by Roiphe and Fraser presupposes a false opposition between, on the one
hand, the banality of how men need and acquire prostitutes— the fact that this
need, these actions, may not always be the consequence or condition, of "happy"
people—and, on the other hand, the social reality of pow er as domination and
subjugation. A parallel argument would be that the anger and frustration of men
who batter is evidence of their real powerlessness rather than power, a point
which equivocates oddly on the notion of power, for to say that someone does
not feel good about themselves or is unhappy is no argum ent that they are
75
power-less on a social level—domination and subjugation is not always satanic,

stark, sadistic; evil can be banal, Hannah A rendt pointed out, and so can
domination. (Nor is the argum ent that powerlessness on one level can not
coincide w ith pow er on another—the argument is that powerlessness on one
level, for example, class, does not cancel out power on another level, for example,
"sex right").
I now move to Fraser's most theoretically significant point, namely
Fraser's contrast between the limited length of a prostitute's interaction with her
john, vs. the long-term "dependency" of a marital relationship. It is not d ear to
me why the length of the specific interaction between john and prostitute is
relevant to assessing a practice in which women w ho are prostitutes are
accessible on a long-term basis to all men who desire such access. Fraser's
contrasting term "long term dependence" of marriage obfuscates the issue which
is not women's dependence on one man or many but the power relations which
legitimate m en's access to women in the private and public realm. Thus the fact
that "advance negotiations over 'specific' services.. .limit the power of the john,"
as Fraser suggests, begs the question entirely; for it is not whether this power is
limited or not, but why it exists at all and why women should have to negotiate
within and for these limits.
The question is, as Pateman argues in the case of marriage, "not whether a
husband is an absolute ruler, but whether he is a ruler at all, and, if he always has
a limited (dvil) right over his wife, how that comes about" (52). While Fraser's
criticism of the master-subject model seems to assum e that m astery means
"absolute power," the question for Pateman is "W hy... has [ sex-right] so rarely
been seen as an example of political power?" i.e. as an example of political power
76
at all—for, she writes, "In civil society all absolute pow er is illegitimate (uncivil),
so the fact that a husband's right over his wife [or a John's over a prostitute] is
not absolute is not sufficient to render his role non-political" (54). By invoking
prostitutes' autonomy and by re-focusing the issue as one of limited vs. absolute
power, Fraser elides rather than contends with the argum ent at hand, which is,
as Christine Overall puts it in her critique of prostitution:
interrogating. . .'the commercial availability of sexuality' rather than
taking it as a given—that is, investigating w hat makes possible the social
definition of wom en's sexuality as a desirable commodity. ("W hat's
W rong" 572)
While Fraser invokes fantasy in order to dispel the political nature of
m en's dem and for prostitution, Pateman's own argum ent provides a way to
draw the opposite conclusion about the role of fantasy in this institution. Indeed
Pateman makes it quite clear that male fantasies of mastery are inextricable from
actual mastery as constructed in patriarchal culture, w hen examining further the
prostitution contract. In order to illuminate the relation between fantasy and
power in prostitution, the relevant question is, w hat do men contract for w hen
they contract for the "service" of prostitutes? Pateman demystifies m en's need for
prostitutes—as if in contracting for a prostitute m en were satisfying a natural
appetite. As she puts it, "an im portant question is begged" by this natural
appetite theory, namely, "why do men dem and that satisfaction of a natural
appetite m ust take the form of public access to women's bodies in the capitalist
m arket in exchange for money?" (198). And she points out, "satisfaction of a
mere natural appetite does not require a m an to have access to a woman's body;
w hat then, is the significance of the fact that 15 to 25 per cent of the customers of
the Birmingham prostitutes dem and w hat is known in the trade as 'hand relief'
77
?" (199). M en's dem and for "hand relief" foregrounds the place of fantasy in
prostitution, b u t it is precisely this component of fantasy that points to the actual
relation of m astery that men contract for w hen purchasing a prostitute. "The
story of the sexual contract," Pateman writes,
suggests that the [demand for "hand relief" and thus for enacting fantasy]
is part of the construction of w hat it means to be a man, part of the
contem porary construction of masculine sexuality. The satisfaction of
m en's natural sexual urges m ust be achieved through access to a woman,
even if her body is not directly used sexually. Whether or not any m an is
able and w illing to find release in other ways, he can exhibit his
m asculinity by contracting for use of a wom an's body. (199, emphasis.
mine)30
Lesbian fem inist theorist D. A. Clarke makes a sim ilar argum ent,
countering the notion that prostitution is a kind of work w ith its own special
expertise, analogous to other work, for example healing, that involves expertise
in touching:
. . .the mechanics of sexual stim ulation are so basic and uncomplex,
particularly in the male, that no enormous amount of lore or expertise is
required. If that were all the customer required, he could in 99 cases out
of 100 do it for himself. (149)
But, he doesn't.
this is a service to be performed by a servant, damn it, not something he
should have to do for himself. He wants more than orgasm: he w ants his
fantasy, and one essential element of his fantasy is pow er over a woman,
pow er of force or power of cash, to make her (even temporarily) a servant.
If she was a plain, muscular, heavy-set m atron of 40 in baggy overalls with
the no-nonsense manner of a senior nurse, no matter w hat extraordinary
m anipulative skills or physiological expertise she m ight have, only one
m an in half a million would choose her over a frightened, angel-faced
30N ote Patem an's use of the word part; she is hardly claim ing that m aster/subject exhausts the
meaning of m asculinity and femininity as Fraser suggests.
78
teenager in spike heels—or a woman who manages somehow, in dim

light, to look a little like o n e.. .(149)31
The force of (male) fantasy for actual power32 is further foregrounded
when considering the racial as well as sex/gendered force of this fantasy. When
a white m an's purchase of a black prostitute is seen in relation to white male
fantasy of black female animality and savagery, is his right of sexual access to her
body a mere fantasy as opposed to actuality?33 In sum , does the fantasy of sex
right im ply its precariousness—any more than, say, fantasies of racial
miscegenation imply the precariousness of white power?34 Hence the meaning
of the "fragility" of whiteness that upholds this power: its social constractedness.
The moral of this story is that revelations of "contingency" are nothing new to
any radical analysis which, in exposing the extent of pow er inevitably exposes its
fragility as hum an-m ade rather than divinely decreed a n d /o r inevitable. The
point of contention here is a pernicious opposition between contingency on the
one hand and "actual pow er" on the other—an opposition m ost explicitly
deployed through Fraser's use of such terms as fantasy, culture, resemblance.
Fraser's move "beyond" the master-subject m odel is to relegate the
relation of dom ination and subordination to the realm of "culture" while
preserving other relations of gender as actual power relations. But ultimately she
34 Martin Dufresne discusses the role of fantasy from the vantage point of a former male
consumer of pornography: "The woman I was chatting with had no idea at first that she had to
measure up to the dozens of pets, playmates, bunnies, pieces of tail I had pored over and
fantasized about this past week. They are called 'fantasies' but they sure become real and sink
deep when you orgasm to them day in and day out for years. N obody acknowledges the jerking
off" (107).
3 2 1 w ill discuss this w ith more depth below in chapter 2.
33See Patricia H ill Collins, "Pornography and Black Women's Bodies" in Black Feminist Thought.
34 A long tradition of such fantasies in American Literature testifies to the opposite, namely, that
fearful, yet com pelling fantasies about racial mixing shore up w hite power as m uch as they
betray anxiety about m yths of white purity. See Gillman, Dark Twins and Berlant, Anatomy of
National Fantasy.
79
fails to provide an argument as to w hy such a split between culture and power

helps us understand the institutions of marriage or prostitution. What are the
relations that Fraser considers actual in contrast to those considered resemblance,
culture, or fantasy? In the present essay we have the following examples: the
"larger institutional context in which [the m arital dyad] is situated," its
"em beddedness" in the labor market, social-welfare policy, the division of
unpaid labor—all defined by Fraser as "larg er.. . systemic processes" which the
m aster/subject model threatens to "obscure." An interesting (and traditional
marxist) economy is established within the argument here regarding w hat has
value as actual in contrast to fantasy.
A t stake, is partly the force of fantasy as a term circulated within certain
dom ains of postfem inist argum ents th at stress the "contingency" and
"variability" of practices that older feminist models once assumed as enduring
and intransigent. A second theme follows from this focus on "contingency,"
namely, the point raised by Butler, discussed above that the patriarchal system of
domination" is a "phrase [that] has become perm anently disabled." [G]ender
inequality today," Fraser contends, in her conclusion "is being transformed by a
shift from dyadic relations of mastery and subjection to more impersonal
structural mechanisms that are lived through more fluid cultural forms" (180
emphasis mine). What does Fraser mean by more fluid cultural forms? While
Fraser has thus far argued against the use of the m aster/subject m odel to
understand power relations in marriage, employment, or prostitution, now her
remarks suggest that while the model might once have been useful, historical
shifts in male domination are the issue. One consequence of these shifts is the
anonym ity discussed by Bartky, i.e. in Fraser's words, "the (re)production of
80
subordination even as women act increasingly as individuals who are not under
the direct command of individual men" (180). While Fraser also suggests that
"male dominance can persist even in the absence of m aster/subject relations
(179), she neither theorizes male dominance nor distinguishes morally,
conceptually, or politically her own notion of male pow er from Patem an's
notion. Fraser clings to a notion of "hierarchical dy ad " that she notes, in
objection to Pateman, is changing. The question is, how ever, is this "dyad"
changing in a way th at implies the erosion of the master-subject model? Since
Fraser provides no concrete examples of what she means by this change, one has
to speculate. The first possibility is that there has been an erosion in the
heterosexual institution and that fewer and fewer w om en are in heterosexual
relationships. Clearly this is not the case. What Fraser m ust be referring to, at
least implicitly, is the erosion of long term, permanent heterosexual arrangements,
accompanied, to continue speculating, by women's increased participation in the
labor force. The question at hand, then, unfortunately n ot pursued by Fraser, is
whether this shift renders an analysis such as Pateman's irrelevant or dated, or,
in other words, whether, the erosion of permanent heterosexual relationships in
contemporary (Western, I take it) society also implies an erosion an d /o r radical
shift of the power relations in heterosexuality. What is needed, on this front, is
an account of what Patem an means by the sexual contract as "the patriarchal
right of access to w om en's bodies" (199). This notion of right of access is central to
what Pateman means by the master-subject model of pow er. A similar notion
has been theorized by materialist feminists in Quebec and France as the relation
of appropriation—w hat Colette Guillaumin calls the pow er relation of sexage—
men's appropriation of women's bodies. I turn next to the w ork of Danielle Juteau
81
and Nicole Laurin who, elaborating on Guillaumin, argue that "Evolution of the
Forms of the appropriation of Women (emphasis mine)," as they subtitle their
1988 article, explains specifically (post)modem mechanisms of power in the
heterosexual institution. Their work, which argues that m ore restrictive (for
women) forms of appropriation coincide with the erosion of traditional, private
forms, provides a counter point to Fraser and opens a way for evolution in the
forms of theory—especially feminist theory of male power in a global capitalist
patriarchy.
Conclusion: When Fluidity is not Freedom: Materialist Feminist Critique and

The Evolution of M odem Male Power
Distinguishing Guillaumin's (and Delphy's) materialist feminist position
from m arxist feminism, Danielle Juteau and Nicole Laurin, like Pateman,
privilege male power as a central way to understand women's exploitation rather
than the reverse. Thus Juteau and Laurin note that among m arxist feminists,
Heidi Hartm ann comes closest to materialist feminism with her emphasis on "the
control exercised by men over wom en's work (work whose modalities vary in
time and space)," a power relation which "remains at the center of the relations
of domination between the sexes as well as being central to understanding them"
(Juteau and Laurin 21). However, Juteau and Laurin stress the difference in
Guillaumin's approach; for the latter "it is not just the labor pow er of women that
is preem pted but its origin, the body that is the reservoir of the labor power" (21).
In this way, Guillaumin extends Delphy's position that a power relation precedes
(domestic) exploitation by theorizing a more general p o w er relation—
appropriation. Appropriation is not unique to sex relations; it is the power relation
82
defining serfdom and slavery—a relation of exploitation in which it is the whole

body that is at the disposal of the powerful group/class. Guillaum in uses the
terms "sexage" to designate "the specific nature of the oppression of women,"
and argues that
it is the material appropriation of the physical individuality of the class of
women by the class of m en that makes possible the use of w om en's
unpaid labor power, particularly within the framework of a personal and
exclusive relationship— marriage, (qtd. in Juteau and Laurin 21)
Guillaumin and, following her, Juteau and Laurin share w ith Pateman a
theoretical objective: All w ant to call attention to a power relation—one defined
by (male) domination and (female) subordination, writ into the social contract as
"master-subject" and institutionalized in terms of relations of m en's access to
women's bodies, a power relation prior to any appropriation of w om en's labor
power. From this vantage point, theorists who emphasize the use or abuse of
labor power in their explanations of oppression—contractarians/libertarians—
obscure the power relation of appropriation. For if abuse of labor pow er is the
problem, contract seems to be the solution, a strategy w hich, in turn, perpetuates
rather than contests the constructed legitimacy of appropriation. For example,
the contractarian's approach to prostitution discussed above— clean up
prostitution by giving women benefits and general control over the conditions in
which they sell their bodies; let everyone who wishes become prostitutes, of any
color, class or gender35—obscures the real problem which is the constructed
As Christine Overall argues, the libertarian defense of prostitution assumes that nothing is
wrong with prostitution that is not also wrong with other kinds of women's work that involve
"dangerous, debilitating, coercive, and largely unfulfilling" circumstances. From this
perspective, indeed "it is imaginable that prostitution could always be practiced, as it
occasionally is even now, in circumstances of relative safety, security, freedom, hygiene, and
personal control ("What's Wrong w ith Prostitution" 716). Such a conclusion could furthermore
lend support to the kind of "social reform" (rather than abolition) of prostitution, proposed, for
example, by philosopher Lars O. Ericsson w hose construal of the problem is that, "under the
83
legitimacy of m en's buying and selling of wom en as sex. A focus on

appropriation, on the other hand, confronts a pow er relation th a t precedes
exploitation.
Guillaumin further describes the power-relation, appropriation, as
The utilization of one group by another, its transform ation into an
instrument, manipulated and used for the purpose of increasing the assets
(and therefore also the freedom and prestige) of the dom inant group, or
even (as usually happens) simply of allowing this group to live in better
conditions than it w ould be able to achieve by itself.. . ("Appropriation"
7)
The last clause probably refers to the fact that while the majority of the
world, men as well as women, are poor, sexage exists for the benefit of even men
in impoverished and subordinated cultures and contexts. To elaborate this point,
consider, as does Guillaumin, concrete expressions of appropriation as well as
means of appropriation. As for concrete expressions, Guillaumin lists four main
forms. Men appropriate: time; products of body (children in so far as
reproduction is controlled by men and patriarchy/capitalism); sexual obligation-
physical burdening of those members of the group who are charged with
material upkeep of the physically least able—the latter including children, the
aged, the sick—as well as of healthy adult men. As for means of appropriation,
Guillaumin cites five main forms: the labor market which constrains women, as
(house)wives, to sell their bodies rather than their "labor pow er"; sp a tia l
confinement (women are kept in their place as housewives and off the streets due
present unequal circumstances of sex work som e benefit is withheld from or denied wom en that
is not withheld from m en . .The best w ay to deal with this inequality.. .would not be an attempt
to stamp out the institution but an attempt to m odify it, by making the benefit in question
available to both sexes" (721). Within the libertarian paradigm, in other words, the only problem
w ith prostitution is either that it is not equally "beneficial" to women and men or that wom en
don't have control over the conditions in which they can choose to sell their bodies, or both.
84
to male violence);36 "show of force," i.e. male violence; sexual constraint—on a

continuum from sexual harassment to rape; and law (a good example w ould be
how marital rape is and is n ot adjudicated). This analysis entails a crucial
theoretical step—retaining "women" and "men" as important political categories
of analysis, w hich in turn implies retaining, as central to theory, a political
analysis of the institution of heterosexuality.
Returning to Fraser's point about contemporary shifts in forms of power—
which is also the theme of feminist uses of Foucault discussed in section 1,
above—the question p u t to those of us who subscribe to the radical and
materialist version of feminism is: can w e explain women's conditions today as
conditions of the heterosexual institution , given the erosion of the main forms of the
heterosexual institution today—erosion of the nuclear, two parent-headed family
and (long-term) marriage—and, connected to this, the shifts in the sexual
division of labor? In the end, Nancy Fraser's argum ent rests on a key
assumption—that a shift to "more impersonal mechanisms" of power has taken
place in m odem patriarchy. The related questions are, first, w hether the
"hierarchical dyad" is therefore any less a site of pow er and, secondly, to the
degree that the "hierarchical dyad" has altered its form, is this an indication, as
Fraser implies, of an erosion in the institution of heterosexuality in its relations of
mastery and subjection? In answ er, Juteau an d Laurin contend th at
"appropriation" is a concept that helps us understand the current re-organization
36 Homelessness for wom en exposes the fragility o f shelter that hom es for more privileged
wom en offer, if one considers that hom elessness is due to a fem inization of poverty partly
explicable by the sam e power relations which offer wom en a home at the price of staying w ith a
man. The point isn't to mute the severe inequalities between privileged women and poor wom en
or between white w om en and w om en of color but to argue that at certain nodal points of power,
it is still relevant and indeed urgent to talk about how male power specifically, but also
articulated with other power relations, can explain the m ost brutal (post)modem forms of
wom en's oppression.
85
in the sexual division of labor. They cite, "the growing participation of w om en in

the labor m arket, the generalized usage of contraception, the extension of
commercial production to domestic goods and services, as well as other changes
in the material bases of wom en's activities" as producing "an evolution in the
system of sexage " (24, first emphasis mine).
By evolution, Juteau and Laurin mean, not a loosening of pow er relations
defined by mastery and subjection—as Fraser's notion of "fluid cultural forms"
suggests—b ut rather a shift in form of means and expression, and perhaps an
improvement in terms of efficiency. This account of male power depends on a
materialist feminist analysis of public patriarchy as collective appropriation—male
dominance as it is "effected in the context of general, institutional relations as
well as in the context of particular, interpersonal relations between m en and
w om en" (Juteau and Laurin 25). Thus materialist radical feminism rejects a
"dualistic type of marxist feminism that postulates the existence of two distinct
systems of social relations"37 (Juteau and Laurin 17)—patriarchy as a system of
domestic exploitation (understood as reproductive labor and housework), and
capitalism as a distinct economic sphere of capitalism. The problem w ith this
dualistic model is that it confines patriarchy to family relations and leads to a
theoretical impasse: the model can not account for the oppression of w om en who
are not (house)wives or mothers, and thus not subject, primarily, to domestic
exploitation, namely, Juteau and Laurin write, "women who escape patriarchal
exploitation in the family—yesterday nuns; today single, divorced, and separated
w om en" (23) as well as prostitutes yesterday and today. What m aterialist
37Juteau and Laurin d te the follow ing as key proponents of a dualist model: Annette Kuhn,
"Structures o f Patriarchy and Capital in the Family," Juliet Mitchell; Women’s Estate.; Mary
O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction.; and Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and
Feminism."
86
marxist feminism fails to account, materialist radical feminism takes as a key

premise, namely that
Civil society (as a whole) is patriarchal. Women are subject to m en in both
private and public spheres; indeed, m en's patriarchal right is the major
structural support binding the two spheres into a social whole. Men's
right of access to women's bodies is exercised in the public m arket as well
as in private marriage. (Pateman 113)
Both Pateman's "sexual contract" and the materialist radical feminist
analysis helps make sense of the new sexual division of labor as deriving from
changing modes of private and public appropriation which combined or separate
can not provide for women's (and children's) subsistence (Juteau and Laurin 32).
For at least two decades, feminist social and economic theorists have called
attention to the emergence of a "new female proletariat" and the "feminization of
poverty" (See Pearce; Stallard et. al; Amott). At a time of economic crisis, such as
the present, women's "growing share of the shrinking pie" means the incursion
of women workers into the lower and informal sectors of the labor force (Amott).
This means w ork that is part-time, tem porary and unstable, often without
benefits, characterized by sexual harassment as well as menial tasks: sweat shop,
fast food, home-work/piece-work labor.
A materialist radical feminist analysis shows how the feminization of
poverty results from "the interests of the class of men [as these interests] merge
with the general. . .interests of the bourgeoisie as the dominant economic and
social class" (Juteau and Laurin 30). On one level, this "merger" can be seen in
shifting relations between women, capital and the state. A new female
proletariat indicates a reconfigured relationship between civil society and the
state where, on the one hand, the state partly compensates—for example, with
AFDC—for losses that new modes of appropriation bring to women. On the
87
other hand, "by means of the state—guardian of order, legislator, policeman—

the class of men assures itself the institutional (that is, collective, impersonal)
control of the class of women" (Juteau and Laurin 35). Feminist welfare activists
used to talk about being on welfare as being married to the state. Now that recent
"welfare reform" has meant an "evolution" in the role of state from traditional to
"dead-beat" husband, men's social control of women is tightened from another
direction as women are throw n back into more traditional, private forms of
appropriation: The gutting of the welfare state effectively re-shifts the traditional
burden of caretaking—that it had partially relieved with social programs—ever
more heavily on to women's backs. At the same time, the current conditions for
wage-earning women produce a double bind for women who "have to keep on
serving men in the family so as to insure the subsistence of themselves and their
children" and who, because of this very burden of domestic responsibilities,
become "ideal recruits for the secondary labor market" and for the informal
sector and the sex industry (Juteau and Laurin 31).
Current relations of private appropriation have a peculiarly (post)modem
form given the decline of marriage as a one-time, permanent arrangem ent
betw een a m an and a w om an. However, the fragility of the long-term
monogamous heterosexual relationship as an institution is not necessarily a sign
that men's sex right is in decline—as, for example, Nancy Fraser seems to think.
Rather, "[p]rivate appropriation continues to flourish," albeit in the form of
"serial private appropriation" (32-3), in which "the duration of the appropriation
is indefinite in principle, but in reality it is limited and the people involved are
conscious of that fact..." (32). "A woman can —and often m ust— Juteau and
88
L aurin elaborate, "belong to several m en in succession" (33). In serial

heterosexual relationships, a woman still
carries out the material and emotional work dem anded for the upkeep of
that partner and bears his children. In return, her subsistence and that of
her children are only partially assured by the partner, who expects the
woman to also have a paying job, and besides, his support only lasts for
the period of their union. (33)
The contingency of this arrangem ent, then, in terms of duration does not
necessarily mean more freedom for women.
New modes of "private appropriation" often seem to grant women a new
autonomy. "Private appropriation is experienced as freedom: freedom to chose
one's partner, the kind of union w ith that partner, to have children w ith that
partner, to break up, to divorce, to live alone, to begin again" (Juteau and Laurin
36). Juteau and Laurin respond by offering the following image of women's
oppression, namely, a cage, "like that found in a hen house" (27), or, perhaps
more precisely, a "squirrel cage," an image w hich invokes the kind of "freedom"
possible for w om en today: "to circulate am ong the various sites of their
oppression" (36).38 For women
are no longer confined for life in a fixed framework of appropriation: a
p hysical fram ew ork—house, co n v en t, b ro th e l—or a sym bolic
framework—vocation, function, image of femininity to the exclusion of
everything else. Like the squirrel in the cage, they are really running in
circles without getting any place. (36, em ph. mine)
If this movement appears to be freedom it might be the effect of the fact
that "m en, individually and collectively, less and less give the im pression of
being responsible for the fate of women and the constraints that weigh on them"
38 The cage w ill resonate with readers familiar with Marilyn Frye's "Oppression," in w hich she
uses the central im age of a cage to call attention to the structure of choice for a wom an trapped
within negative options on all sides.
89
(36). Yet, in contrast to Fraser for w hom new forms of wom en's oppression
imply a weakening of the power of gender as a m aster/subject relation, Juteau
and Laurin argue that
For the class of men, this [current] system is probably more rational, more
economical, and more efficient than the previous one. What is certain is
that it insures the mobilization, circulation, and utilization of the bodies
and labor power of women at an unprecedented level and tempo. (36)
Hence the clearest rejoinder to Bartky's suggestion that (post)modem patriarchy
lets m en off "scot-free" from the "task" of disciplining w om en is that the
disappearance of male accountability (man as master) in new feminist theory
m ight be a symptom rather than diagnosis of a new social order, the very social
order that the theory claims to analyze.
In conclusion I offer the following summation: From a radical feminist
perspective, the social contract as heterosexual can be seen as an ambiguous site
w here pow er is both more fluid and more restrictive, and, correspondingly,
showing both gaps of possible resistance and illusory escape hatches of illusory
freedom. W hat arguments of both Pateman and the materialist feminists make of
new and fluid forms of male power, in contrast to Fraser, is an evolved form of male
power. For a majority of women, this means serial sexual contracts, whether in
short term heterosexual relationships, prostitution, a n d /o r participation in an
unstable labor force segmented by sex. In this shift there is, to be sure, a moment
of hope for new forms of solidarity between women to emerge. But this hope
m u st n o t be confused w ith the fatal o p tim ism esp o u sed by the
post(fem inist)structuralist who is libertarian w hen it comes to sexuality—an
optimism expressed in such imaginings as equal opportunities for one and all to
90
become prostitutes and johns, male or female, black or w hite.39 Such a free-
market model of sexuality is precisely the model that we b u tt up against when
we push certain post(fem inist)structuralist argum ents "against th e anti-
pornography paradigm " (Butler) to their startling yet logical conclusions.
(Indeed, w e w on't have to push at all when we come to Judith Butler's apologia
for pornography). It has often been noted that in the so-called "sex wars," so-
called "sex radicals" are as much if not more "liberal" than "radical" in their
detraction from radical feminist approaches to pornography and prostitution—
insofar as "sex radicals" invoke a hefty tradition of libertarianism.40 The debate
over prostitution and pornography, as it has developed in the academy, betrays
an interesting conjunction of libertarianism and post-stnicturalism. But the debate
is not limited to prostitution and pornography. As I will argue further below,
libertarianism and post-structuralism make bedfellows, as it were, on the subject
of sexuality per se. Groping for a beyond to the oppressor/oppressed a n d /o r to
domination and subordination, post(feminist)structuralists very much invoke a
libertarian position, as—implicitly or explicitly—they inflate sexuality w ith an
unreal freedom, investing this dom ain with a property of individual choice
otherwise absent in the social w orld thev are "radical" critics of. Carole
j
Pateman's argument shows the extent to which such a position on sexuality is

invested in a contract model of social life, thus buying into basic political
presuppositions of capitalist patriarchy about the nature of individuals, freedom, power
and sex.
39 Butler for example, echoing the kind of libertarian defense of prostitution w e saw in Lars O.
Ericsson, defends pornography as equal opportunity for debasement: "The effect of pornography
is not to force wom en to identify with a subordinate or debased position, but to provide the
opportunity to identify with the entire scene of debasement, agents and recipients alike (114).
4®Leidholdt and Raymond eds.. The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on F e m in ism Freccero "Notes of
a Post—Sex Wars Theorizer."
91
There is a sense in which the paradigm of sexuality and hum an interaction

as contractual appears liberatory for women: it appears to divest itself of the
romanticization clinging to hetero-sexuality with its view of contract as the
paradigm of free relations. And yet, while libertarianism spurs a m eltdow n of
certain myths of hetero-sexual relationship, a core of power is left unscathed. In
a paradoxical move, the post(feminist)structuralist grants sexuality an aura of
immediacy—exempting it alone from the mediations of social power—w hile
simultaneously casting it in terms of the crude mechanisms of contract: sexual
encounters prescribed and legitimized as a series of free exchanges, including or
especially, the exchanges between prostitutes and their customers.
What remains is to undertake further analysis, after Pateman, of contract
as a mechanism of subjection, not freedom. The new and fluid forms of
patriarchy offer a deceptive mobility, if they imply shifting from one site of
subjection to another, as Juteau and Laurin suggest. Utopian hope may persist
among contemporary forms of power if women can reach eachother in the gaps
between these sites; if, as Fuentes and Ehrenreich suggest, the "Global Factory"
may allow for new forms of feminist solidarity, as well as subjugation.41 Turning
back now to de Lauretis's notion of the "discursive difference" that feminism
makes, one clear difference is that between a post(feminist)structuralist view
which takes contingency qua contingency as a site of freedom, and a radically
feminist view which takes contingency as a site of hope only insofar as it points
to real, not fantasy, weak points in men's power over women. The latter view
41Quoting garment worker/activist Min Chong Suk who writes of women working in the
transnational global sector, "We all have the same hard life...we are bound together with the
same string" Fuentes and Ehrenreich suggest the potential of "The most difficult, yet most
important task in multinational domination" nam ely, of creating "direct links between wom en
workers around the world" (59).
92
takes as imperative the following agenda for radical feminist theory: to expose
the gaps of possible freedom opened, paradoxically, by an increasingly restrictive
w orld—the "squirrel cage," in which freedom comes to m ean freedom to
circulate among a variety of sites of oppression, between the household, the w ork
force, the welfare state, an d /o r prostitution.
93
CHAPTER 2: "Pornography" is the T heory...: The Force of Reality

saidRepresentations of the (Post)Feminist Intellectual
Part I. The Radical Feminist Critique of Pornography and the Politics of

Interpretation
Pornography is the theory. Rape is the Practice. These words represent one of
the more hotly contested positions in U.S. post second-wave feminist debates.
The slogan and the analysis it encapsulates point to an earlier phase of anti-
pornography feminism, in which it was argued that the problem of pornography
was its causal effect on men's behavior. This view of pornography has long been
superseded, although not w holly rejected, by a m ore complex critique of
pornography as a "a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based
on sex that differentially harm s w om en" (D w orkin and MacKinnon,
Pornography and Civil Rights 33). Feminists critique pornography because, as
MacKinnon puts it, pornography "sells women to men as and for sex. It is a
technologically sophisticated traffic in women" (Theory of State 195). This view is
one that objects to pornography as a practice based on a "mercenary logic of a
market economy," as Rosi Braidotti puts it: "The whole body becomes a visual
surface of changeable parts, offered as exchange objects" (Nomadic Subjects 68).
Or, according to Susanne Kappeler, women are the "generic [exchange] objects"
in this market (49). Pornography, in this view, constructs social meanings of
masculinity and femininity in terms of what Guillaumin calls appropriation, men's
right of access to women's bodies. MacKinnon argues:
Possession and use of wom en through the sexualization of intimate
intrusion and access to them is a central feature of w om en's social
definition as inferior and feminine. Visual and verbal intrusion, access,
94
possession, and use is predicated upon and produces physical and psychic
intrusion, access, possession and use. In contemporary industrial society,
pornography is an industry that mass produces sexual intrusion on, access
to, possession and use of w om en by and for m en for profit. It exploits
women's sexual and economic inequality for gain. (Theory of State 195)
Feminist theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins, furthermore, have assessed
the racial dynamics of this system of access—the appropriation of African
American women by white men, and its construction of black femininity in
particular. Collins has argued that you cannot abstract accounts of pornography
from the institution of slavery and the history of the buying and selling of black
w om en's bodies as breeders and as whores (Black Feminist Thought).1 These
works open a space of an account of the sex industry and pornography as a point
of entry into analysis of the connections between the technology of gender (de
Lauretis), and other, economic, racial, cultural, labor conditions of women's lives
and w ork today.
An account of pornography as appropriation is implicit in the key political
strategy of anti-pornography fem inism in the U nited States, the "anti-
pornography civil rights law" (the "Ordinance") drafted by Andrea Dworkin and
Catharine MacKinnon.2 The Ordinance is based on a definition of pornography
2 In a sim ilar vein, Kimberie Crenshaw, w hile not specifically addressing the institution of
pornography, assesses practices of representation (misogynist and racist films, media, rap m usic)
as producing narratives that render women of color more vulnerable to harm ("Beyond Racism
and Misogyny").
2The Ordinance was drafted by MacKinnon and Dworkin in the Fall of 1983 at the invitation of
the M inneapolis City Council; it was passed in December and shortly thereafter vetoed by the
mayor. The law was supported by a grass-roots coalition of women, people of color,
neighborhood groups, and the city's welfare poor and working poor. The Ordinance was a law
that, for the first time, would "allow a woman to go into court to try to prove that she had been
injured or victim ized by having pornography forced on her, by being coerced into a pornographic
performance, or because pornography was used in some sexual assault on her. The ordinance
w ould also allow a woman to sue traffickers in pornography on the basis of the proven harm
pornography does to the civil rights of women as a class" (Stoltenberg 73).
95
as a complex of social relations in which the effect of representations on viewers'

behavior is b u t one part. The civil rights approach redefines the politics of
pornography as a matter of equality vs. inequality in contrast to one of
censorship vs. freedom of speech, and, accordingly, defines the appropriate legal
strategy as civil suit (for women claiming harm by pornography) rather than
criminal legislation (censorship). By nam ing trafficking, in particular, one of the
actionable harms of pornography to women, Dworkin and MacKinnon drafted
the most controversial but also most radical provision of their legislation, one
which w ent to the heart of the problem nam ed by radical feminists—the claim
that pornography singles out women as a class for sexual use by men, and that
this is a discriminatory practice involving, "dehumanization, sexual exploitation,
forced sex, forced prostitution, physical injury, and social and sexual terrorism
and inferiority presented as entertainm ent" (Pornography and Civil Rights 33).3
The formula, pornography is the theory, rape is the practice is inadequate and indeed
misleading because, MacKinnon elaborates, "The aesthetic of pornography
itself, the way it provides what those who consume it want, is itself the evidence
[of its harm]. Pornography turns woman into a thing to be acquired and used"
(Theory of State 199).
A lthough inadequate as a reflection of the anti-pornography position
today, the slogan is interesting in another respect: it underscores an issue that, in
various guises, remains central to the discursive construction of pornography as
a political issue in feminist theory, namely, the theory/practice relation. Insofar
as the political issue of pornography has been debated as a question of the
3 This "finding" by both Minneapolis and Indianapolis City Councils, based on numerous
hearings, constituent letters and documents, provided the factual basis for the Ordinance
designed by legislature in each city (Pornography and Civil Rights 33).
96
relation of "representation" (the "theory") to violence (the "practice"), the

discursive construction of pornography as a feminist issue, I suggest, has broader
implications for the w ay in which feminist scholars conceptualize the relation
between feminist theory and feminist practice generally. A propos of this point,
my argum ent in this chapter is as follows: First I discuss the anti-pornography
movement in terms of "the discursive construction of political issues," to cite
Nancy Fraser's theory of needs-interpretation. Using Fraser's discussion as a
framework, I ask, W hat are the implications for the role and vocation of the
feminist intellectual vis-a-vis the process of constructing pornography as a
political issue? Secondly, I critique Judith Butler's self-defined post-structuralist
defense of pornography as a representation of the post-feminist intellectual.
The Politics of the Anti-pornography Position: Contesting the Good Girl /Bad
Girl story
Liberals and conservatives define pornography as a point of view, as,
respectively, ideas to be protected as harmless (liberal view: ideas can't h u rt a
girl) or censored as obscene (conservative view: keep those bad ideas away from
good girls). Embedded in this liberal/conservative paradigm is a narrative that
pits good girls against bad, virgins against whores, and im plies a sexual
technology of race and class as well as of gender. The history of the "nice girl" in
our culture is buried in assumptions of class and race—the angel in the house,
the gate-keeper of morality, the domestic sexless "lady" are all deeply coded as
white and bourgeois. It has been the sex liberal's tendency to subvert the angel
by claiming the whore: hence Madonna, vaunted by some proponents of post
97
(structuralist) feminism as "liberating."4 But how liberating is a M adonna for

wom en who have always been marked and indeed used as "whore" by men in
this culture?5 Indeed, African-American women are still resisting the legacy of
rape under slavery, and corresponding myths stigm atizing black women as
breeder or w hore, the opposite of the w hite lady. The angel in the house
(Virginia Woolf's phrase) co-developed w ith and feeds on, its opposite: "Black
'w hores' make white 'virgins' possible," as Patricia Hill Collins puts it (176). She
quotes Jacqueline Dowd Hall:
In the U nited States, the fear and fascination of female sexuality was
projected onto black women; the passionless lady arose in symbiosis with
the primitively sexual slave. (170)
A nti-pornography conservatives aim to conserve the boundary between
good girl (white, bourgeois) and bad girl (wom en of color, w orking class
women). But liberals also leave the categorical dichotom y intact w hen they
defend pornography on the grounds that even white and middle class girls can
be "bad girls." From a liberal perspective—one w hich maintains the good
g irl/b ad girl binary—the radical feminist critique of pornography resembles the
conservative position. Thus Pat Califia argues th at the anti-pornography
"movement has done at least as much as the male system ' to make 'whores' seem
vile in the popular imagination" (Macho Slats 18), and Alice Echols contends that
"These [anti-pornography] feminists indict pornography for eroding the
traditional boundary between virgin and w hore" ("Taming" 82). Feminist
protests in red light districts may have on occasion fueled tensions between
prostituted w om en and the marching activists. However, I suggest that the
4See Bordo, "Material Girl" in Unbearable Weight, for discussion and criticism of several cultural
studies and literary critics who celebrate Madonna as exemplary o f a postmodern heroine.
5I am indebted to Joy James for this insight. Personal conversation, March 1995.
98
radicalism of the anti-pom ography civil rights strategy and the campaigns
galvanized aro u n d this strategy, derived from its ru p tu re of the
"w hore"/fem inist boundary by opening a (counter)public space of dialogue
betw een prostituted w om en and feminist activists—som e of w hom were
themselves former prostitutes.6
Pornography. Politics and Public Space

The politics of interpretation, through which a group defines its political
claims and needs, is a vital dynamic of social movements and their potential to
engender new spaces of action and solidarity. In turn, political interpretations of
issues and the theories that emerge from them cannot be evaluated except in
relation to this social dynamic, the context of activism in which they emerged.
I'm draw ing on N ancy Fraser here, whose "politics of needs interpretation"
provides a fruitful frame for theorizing the political significance of the feminist
critique of pornography. Fraser's discussion of the discursive construction of
needs, which involves "disputes about what exactly various groups of people
really do need and about who should have the last w ord in such m atters"
{Unruly Practices 161), helps contextualize the issue of how pornography was
politicized by pro-Ordinance activists and by their critics who contested the
former's interpretations.
Fraser points out that one can proliferate questions indefinitely as to what
constitutes the interpretation of a need or a claim. For example, there are
numerous ways that feminists might interpret, and have interpreted, the issue of
^Three organizations to com e out of this movement that criticize pornography and the system of
prostitution have been started by an d /or run by former prostitutes: WHISPER (wom en hurt by
systems o f prostitution engaged in revolt) in Minneapolis; Council for Prostitution Alternatives in
Portland; and Promise in San Francisco.
99
violence against women. What are the needs at stake? Shelter? Temporary
shelter or more perm anent housing for women escaping batterer-spouses? Is the
need to be interpreted as obtaining safe space or is it for w om en to learn to
defend ourselves? Is our prim ary need to stop batterers? Does the discursively
constructed goal of "safe space" obfuscate the fact that violence against women
escapes boundaries of home, and indeed is a m ajor cause of w om en's
homelessness? Does the goal of safe space, in fact, obscure the race and class
differentiation of violence, eliding the connections between, say, police violence
against w om en of color, incarceration of women of color, prostitution and
pornography as violence affecting mostly poor women? By proliferating these
questions we are "at the same time proliferating controversy," Fraser writes:
That is precisely the point about needs claims. These claims tend to be
nested, connected to one another in ramified chains of 'in-order-to'
relations. Moreover, w hen these chains are unraveled in the course of
political disputes, disagreements usually deepen rather than abate.
Precisely how such chains are unraveled d ep en d s on w h at the
interlocutors share in the way of background assumptions (163).
As Fraser further points out, conflicts in these assumptions shape policy
redressing need. For example, does it go without saying that policy designed to
deal with violence against women must not challenge the basic (power) structure
of the heterosexual institution?7 I would argue that the Ordinance is a strategy
that presupposes this fundamental challenge. The feminist interpretation and
politicization of pornography as an issue of equality contests the constructed
legitimacy of w hat Pateman contests as "[men's] dem and that wom en's bodies
7I'm paraphrasing Fraser's comments on homelessness here: "Does it go w ithout saying that
policy designed to deal w ith hom elessness must not challenge the basic ownership and
investment structure of urban real estate? Or is that a point at which people's assum ptions and
commitments diverge?" (163).
100
are sold as commodities in the capitalist m arket" (Sexual Contract 194). Fraser's
notion of politicization as a discursive process might further clarify this point
about the feminist critique of pornography.
Fraser points out th at there are no a priori constraints on w hat constitutes
"political," but, rather, political is a contested cultural classification. For Fraser,
politicization is a process of contesting an issue "across a range of different
discursive arenas and am ong a range of different publics. . ." (166). M ost
im p o rta n t fo r o p p o sitio n al g ro u p s, p o liticizatio n m eans co n testin g
institutionalized boundaries which delimits "politics" through its contrast w ith
"family" and "economy," both of "which are defined as being outside the official
political system even though they are in actuality underpinned and regulated by
it" (166). In other w ords, for oppositional groups, the political implies
contestation of the public/private dichotomy. As Fraser points out, "privacy"
from this perspective can in fact be conceptualized as depoliticization. In this
context, the feminist politicization of pornography as a civil right-claim is an
exam ple of w h at Fraser calls a "runaw ay need [claim]," indeed a kind of
discursive excess:8 a claim that erupts from "zones of discursive privacy" (167-8),
rupturing the institutionalized boundaries of the political. The anti-pornography
feminist claim exposes privacy as a zone of male power that traverses "private"
and "public" realms, and exposes the private/public dichotomy as integral to the
social contract as heterosexual. Furtherm ore, this process of politicization
exemplifies how , for oppositional discourses, a politics of interpretation can
constitute "a m om ent in the self-constitution of new collective agents or social
8The notion provides a striking contrast w ith the "discursive excess" that Judith Butler invokes
for her construal o f pornography. In her view , pornography itself, in its potential "gender
trouble," its utopian valenced "indeterminacy" constitutes discursive excess whereas the radical
fem inist critique "reigns in the imaginary." See below .
101
movements" (171), in this case opening a counter-public space of dialogue and

activist solidarity for prostitutes and non-prostitute feminist activists.
The central concept at stake in Fraser's approach is that of counter-public
space, or w hat Rita Felski, draw ing on Fraser's work, calls "feminist public
space." Felski proposes the concept of "feminist counter-public sphere" as a
"means of theorizing the complex mediations betw een literature, feminist
ideology, and the broader social domain" (9); draw ing on her concept, I will
substitute feminist social theory and strategy for "literature" to call attention to how
issues are politicized or, in Fraser's terms, discursively constructed within such a
space. Felski elaborates:
Defined as an oppositional discursive arena w ithin the society of late
capitalism, structured around an ideal of a communal gendered identity
perceived to unite all its participants, the concept of the feminist public
sphere provides a key to analyzing the distinctive yet often diversified
political and cultural practices of the women's movement. (9)9
This model helps, as Fraser puts it, "to bring into view the contextual and
contested character of needs claims" (163), for example, the claim that battering is
a political issue. From this vantage point, the political m eaning of battering for
feminists derives from its historical relation to a broader context of feminist
practices—an ideal totality of such practices that is sim ultaneously a concrete
9 Felski's m odel aims to draw "attention to the communicative networks, social institutions, and
political and economic structures through which ideologies are produced and disseminated" (9).
She wants to thereby avoid a "subjectivist" and "form alist" approach which "attempts to
extrapolate grand political consequences from micrological textual excavations without any
systematic account of the relationship between the two" (9). Shortly, I w ill examine Butler's
argument as just such a subjectivist and formalist approach to the anti-pom ography argument
(and to radical feminism in general)—an approach that abstracts this argument from the social
context that both Fraser and Felski are elaborating, and treats political positions and historical
moments as sheer texts on the one hand (its formalism) and on the other as narratives of the
(reader's) interior, matters of sheer, psychic fantasy abstracted from social relations (its
subjectivism). The alternative is to put the "text," whether it be theory or strategy or practice back
into "the m edium of social m ovement history" (Fraser, Unruly Practices).
102
process of contestation across a range of discursive publics. This process of

contestation is both internal to fem inist counter-public space as itself
heterogeneous and contested, and exists in relation to a larger, "external" dom ain
of social institutions and discourses, including dominant, patriarchal and
capitalist ideologies and practices.
The notion of counter-public space mitigates against a use of "discursive"
that implies or leads to "relativism." While it is beyond the scope of this chapter
to take up in any detail the question of justification with respect to moral claims
that one political interpretation is better than another, I do argue here that such
claims are both desirable and ultimately unavoidable if we are to call our claims
feminist. Competing daim -interpretations raise the question,What is at stake in
one interpretation as opposed to another? But if posed in a way that relates
particular interpretations to a broader domain of feminism as a social movement
and counter-public space, the question, What is at stake necessarily raises the
question, What is to be Done? In other words, is feminism as a social movement at
stake in this theory, and, if so, w hat conceptions of this movement, past, present
and future are implied? These questions are essentially ethical and political,
bound up with contested notions of the good life and of justice. The real, albeit
contested, question at hand for feminist theory contextualized by m ovem ent
practices is, what ought to be done? (What ought to be done to further w om en's
equality? to build a movement? to foster justice?) From this perspective, the
concept of the counter-public helps keep feminist theorists' focus on theory as
one feminist practice among others and confronts us with the question of how
feminist theory connects or ought to connect to other practices. It is from this
angle that I examine pornography as a category of feminist theory.
103
Representations of the Pornography Debate and Role of the Feminist Intellectual

In a 1994 issue of differences, Butler represents the anti-pornography
position as a "discourse on victimization/'
The anti-pornography movement through the 80s and more recently, the
assimilation of feminist politics to the discourse on victimization, have
succeeded in rendering popular a view of feminism in which positions of
g en d er are strictly correlated w ith positions of dom ination or
subordination. ("Proper Objects" 7)
Thus Butler objects to w hat she calls "the anti-pornography paradigm "
("Proper Objects" 7), i.e. the anti-pornography movement as a paradigm for the
contested category of power discussed above in chapter 1—a critique of
domination and subordination. By rhetorically conflating the anti-pornography
movement and the critique of domination and subordination with "the discourse
on victim ization/' it is Butler herself who here "assimilates" the movement into
some reified discourse secured in advance— the discourse on victimization. In
the same stroke, she omits to say that this indeed popular view is a popular
criticism of (anti-pornography) feminism—one w hich she reiterates. The
particular interpretation of the anti-pornography position as a discourse of
victimization is a claim-interpretation circulated in both academic and popular
contexts; it thus bears discussion in light of the question of how political issues
are discursively constructed within feminist counter-public space and the role of
the academic intellectual in this process.
Academia, as Fraser points out, is a significant site of public discourse in
which needs/claim s that arise from oppositional groups are institutionalized as
legitimate and political needs or claims. Fraser's model of social discourse helps us
position the feminist intellectual in an ambiguous relation to what she calls "the
104
sociocultural m eans of interpretation and communication" (Unruly Practices

165). A feminist intellectual has privileged access to and control over "the
historically and culturally specific ensemble of discursive resources available to
members of a given social collectivity in pressing claims against one another"
(Unruly Practices 164), including resources available to different fem inist
constituencies.10 This position of privilege burdens the oppositional intellectual
w ith an extra responsibility—to be accountable for her representations. The
intellectual's vocation, as Edw ard Said argues, is a "vocation for the art of
representing... " (13) and thus
has an edge to it, and cannot be played w ithout a sense of being someone
whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront
orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who
cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose
raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely
forgotten or sw ept under the rug. (11)
In the context of the discourse about pornography, the no tion of
representations of the intellectual—to cite the title of Said's book on this theme—has
multiple resonances. As circulated through feminist arguments concerning the
reality of pornographic representation, the category of representation has taken on
a certain symbolic function which is foregrounded—indeed caricatured—by the
slogan with which I opened this chapter—pornography, the theory, rape the practice.
The representation of pornography (and anti-pornography) I suggest, functions as
a trope in feminist discourse for a contested (and sometimes elided) relation
10Pierre Bourdieu discusses the role o f the intellectual as follows: "The capacity to make entities
exist in the explicit state, to publish, make public (i.e. render objectified, visible, and even official)
that which had not previously attained objective and collective existence and had therefore
remained in the state o f individual or serial existence—people's m alaise , anxiety, disquiet,
expectations—represents a formidable social power, the power to make groups by m aking the
common sense, the explicit consensus, o f the whole group" (202).
105
between theory and practice. In the feminist discourse I examine here, in which a
concept of anti-pom ography feminism as victim feminism is circulated and
legitimized, pornography is the trope for a rupture between representation and
reality that throws into question rather than promotes what Said discusses as the
intellectual's accountability to political practice.
An anecdote concerning Judith Butler (whose arguments are the locus of
m y critique in this chapter) conveniently makes my point here plain. As a
participant at a 1995 conference on the theme of censorship and freedom of
speech, Butler was introduced by a male professor of politics who praised Butler
for doing more than anyone else for making feminist theory autonomous from the
feminist movement. Whether Butler would wish for such "credit" or not, the
professor's gaffe strikes a note of truth, lauding a current of feminist practice that
Barbara Christian, among others, has criticized as "The Race For Theory." While
the notion of a counter-public space as the context for fem inist theory
foregrounds the theory/practice relation, the "race for theory" points to a trend
which abstracts theory from a feminist counter-public space, inflating it with an
unreal autonomy. In my opinion, pornography is a key trope in feminist discourse
for examination of this trend.
Representing the Anti-Pomography Feminist: Who Owns the Story?

One way of elaborating this last point is to examine the way that the anti-
pom ography position has em erged as a category of recent taxonomies or
typologies of feminist theory. Feminist theorists have called attention to the
construction of taxonomies as "interested stories"—narratives of feminism that
belie specific political assu m p tio n s and agendas (King; H araw ay).
106
Interpretations of anti-pomography feminism in light of a related "family" of

'ism s—cultural feminism, essentialism , etc.—provide examples of these
interested stories. For example, in the above-quoted essay which assimilates anti-
pomography feminism to a discourse on victimization, Butler invokes a narrative
of feminist theory that dates from 80s debates about pornography, feminism,
sexuality and power. The legacy of this decade of debate is a particular story of
the "sex wars" that serves, in Katie King's words, as an "origin story" of feminist
theory.
King writes: "Origin stories about the women's movement are interested
stories, all of them. They construct the present moment, and a political position
in it, by invoking a point in time out of which that present moment unfolds—if
not inevitably, then at least with a certain coherence"(65). With respect to the
feminist criticism of anti-pomography feminism as victim feminism, I w ant to
argue that this political position has mobilized a particular origin story of
feminist theory and of divisions between feminists. Alice Echols's polemical
history of the women's liberation movement is a paradigmatic example. Echols's
work has been influential in accounting for divisions between feminists in terms
of the demise of the "real" radical feminism and the ascendancy of "cultural
feminism" with the rise of the anti-pom ography movement. Echols's story
depends on a distinction betw een early and later radical fem inism as
representing two different theoretical models:
Early radical feminists believed that women's oppression derived from
the very construction of gender and sought its elim ination as a
meaningful social category. Today's radical feminists, by contrast,
claim that our oppression stems from the repression of female values
and treat gender differences as through they reflect deep truths about
the intractability of maleness and femaleness. ("Taming" 50)
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Cultural feminism is essentialism, and has "its present incarnation in the

anti pornography movement" ("Taming" 51). In other w ords, essentialism is the
theory and anti-pornography is the practice. C o rre sp o n d in g ly , social
constructionism is the theory and pro-pornography is the practice.
The (post)feminist intellectual's defense of pornography exemplifies a
trend in Anglo-American theory engaged in "typologizing, defining and
branding various 'feminisms' along an ascending scale of theoretico-politico
sophistication w here 'essentialism' weighs heavy at the lower end" (de Lauretis,
"Triangle" 4). W ith respect to this typology, de Lauretis' "polemical point" is
that too much or
too little is m ade of the "essentialism" imputed to most feminist positions
(notably those labeled cultural, separatist or radical, b ut others as well,
w hether labeled or not) so that the term serves less the purposes of
effective criticism in the ongoing elaboration of feminist theory than those
of convenience, conceptual simplification or academic legitimation. (4)
My own point is that debates surrounding anti-pom ography feminism
constitute a key m om ent in the "typologizing" de Lauretis refers to. This
typology, moreover, calls attention to the "value of narrativity " (Hayden White)
at stake in conflicts of interpretation regarding political claims, a value
"conferred by the historian's [or theorist's] desire for a moral order underlying the
aesthetic aspect of historical representation" (White qtd. in de Lauretis, Alice
Doesn't 128). The moral order conferred by a narrative of anti-pom ography
feminism (as essentialist, victim and cultural feminism) was one in which the
prudes were distinguished from the transgressors; of late, however, it has been
has translated into a bad feminist theorists vs. good feminist theorists story. In
other words, there is a clear overlap between the narrative of anti-pomography
feminism detailed b y Echols and the kind of typologizing of feminist theory that
108
Anglo-American feminism has often concerned itself with. "G ood" feminist
theorists, typically means sophisticated theorists w ho often invoke, in de
Lauretis' words, "this late-comer, poststructuralist feminism, dark horse and
winner of the feminist theory contest" as the remedy for "bad" theories—namely
essentialist theories "disadvantaged" by the historical circumstance of their
genesis, having developed in movement practices and communities rather than
in those academic contexts that were m ade possible by these same practices and
communities.11
In sum , my argum ent is inform ed by a m ultidim ensional sense of the
phrase representations of the feminist intellectual; the phrase designates the way in
which the feminist intellectual—in this case the anti-pom ography feminist
theorist or her critic—is represented in feminist discourse as well as what she
represents and how she theorizes representation. My argum ent in these pages is
that the construed of anti-pom ography feminism as politically pro-censorship,
epistemologically essentialist an d /o r realist and morally victim-feminist, radically
misrepresents the issue of pornography. Butler's argument, I suggest, epitomizes
this misrepresentation. But more im portant for me than correcting her construal
11De Lauretis's remarks address Chris W eedon's typology of fem inist theory—one which not
only opposes poststructuralism on one side to cultural/Iiberal/radical/lesbian feminism (I) on
the other, but claim s the former as a "first stage in intervening in order to provide change" in
"discourses of biological difference" (Weedon 135 qtd. in "Essence of the Triangle" 7). In contrast
to earlier phases of feminism (now labeled "cultural" feminism ), which rely on fixed biological
referents, poststructuralism "requires attention to historical specificity in the production, for
wom en, of subject positions and modes of fem ininity and their place in the overall network of
social power relations" (135, W eedon qtd. in "Triangle" 6). As de Lauretis responds crisply.
There is more than sim ple irony in the claim that this late-comer, poststructuralist
fem inism , dark horse and winner of the fem inist theory contest, is the 'first stage' of
fem inist intervention. How can W eedon, at one and the same time, so strongly insist on
attention to historical specificity and social—not m erely individual—change, and yet
disregard the actual historical changes in western culture brought about in part, at least,
by the wom en's movement and at least in some m easure by fem inist critical writing over
the past twenty years? (7)
109
is the question of w hat is at stake in her story, a story which invokes a division
between "high" and "low " theories, good and bad girls: If the victim-
fem inist/essentialist story of anti-pomography feminism is an interested story,
what is its interest? To begin elaborating the question—and I see my major task
here as elaborating rather than fully answering the question—I turn next to a
brief discussion of another essay by Butler, "Against Proper Objects," before
examining in detail the main essay under consideration, namely, "The Force of
Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess."
Part 2: The Force of Reality: A Critique of Judith Butler

Determining/Desiring Power
In her argument "against the anti-pomography paradigm," Butler objects
to the theory that gender is determined through relations of domination and
subordination. In other words, Butler contests the "power" of feminist theory
discussed above in chapter 1—the account, in feminist theory, of gender as a
category of hierarchy. For this theory is "rigid determinism," an "untenable
account of female sexuality as coerced subordination" (Proper Objects 7). The
term coerced subordination stands out; it implies a new category, namely, an
imcoerced subordination. In other words, subordination itself is not the problem,
the problem is w hether it is coerced or not. Indeed Butler criticizes the anti-
pom ography paradigm for its "totalizing view of heterosexuality. . . —one in
which all power relations are reduced to relations of domination—and for the
failure to distinguish the presence of coerced domination in sexuality from
pleasurable and w anted dynamics of power" (7). I would agree that feminists
should distinguish between coerced and "wanted" dynamics of power. It's far
110
from plain, however, how this distinction stands as an objection to the radical
feminist account of gender as a category of hierarchy, determ ined through
relations of domination and subordination.
It might very well be the case that feminist theory needs to develop its
account of heterosexuality in order, for example, to elaborate a distinction
between heterosexuality as an institution and heterosexuality as a domain of
sexual practices—and to examine points of discrepancy as well as continuity
between the two. Does Butler point us in this direction? On the contrary,
Butler's aim seems to be to clear a space for pleasurable an d wanted
subordination (domination). However, the fact that subordination can be
pleasurable is not an argum ent that it is not determined through the power of
gender—not unless domination implies the absence of pleasure and pleasure, the
absence of domination.
Butler's objection to the anti-pomography position rests on a firmly liberal
premise—that individual choice justifies a practice as desirable. In turn, the
liberal argument is a tautology—subordination is wanted because women want
it, and therefore it is good. This leap of logic from "is" (women find subordination
desirable, i.e. pleasurable) to "ought" (women find subordination desirable, i.e.
good—something that ought to be desired) carries the central claim in "The Force
of Fantasy" for her defense of pornography: Pornographic fantasy "spells a kind
of gender trouble that the anti-pomography analysis fully suppresses" ("Force"
114). We have gone beyond any claim for a complex account of (hetero)sexuality
against the supposed simplification of the anti-pom ography position and are
now heralding pornography as good for women.
I ll
There is an ironic contrast in the end between the tautological structure of

Butler's objection to the anti-pom ography argum ent and her key rhetorical
strategy in defending pornography as good—which she fully em ploys in the
"Force of Fantasy" essay—nam ely, to elevate pornography th ro u g h the
typologizing of theory discussed above. Pornography itself (as "resignified" by
Butler) becomes the term of theoretical sophistication positioned beyond the
inferior epistemology of the anti-pom ography argument. An ideal of theory
provides the force of "fantasy" in Butler's extended critique of the anti-
pom ography position in the 1990 differences essay, and, in turn, pornography—
with its "spell" of gender-blending transgressions, infinite perm eability and
infinitely permeable pleasures—provides the postfeminist w ith her fantasy of
intellectual force.
The "Utopian" Appeal of "Fantasy"

Butler casts her argum ent for the force of fantasy in pornography as a
"poststructuralist effort" (106), and indeed her argument points to a conjunction
of poststructuralism and postfeminism—an "effort" to win the theory-race and
retreat from feminist analyses which sustain a focus on the political m eaning of
gender in relation to social hierarchy. Butler herself construes her strategy as one
of "problematizing suspension of the ontological" (106). She wants to question
"the line according to which the distinction between the real and unreal is
drawn," and to ask,
w hat is it that passes as the real, that qualifies the extent or dom ain of
'reality'? are the parameters of the real acceptable, contestable? in whose
name is a given version of the real articulated?. .. If w hat goes u nder the
description of the real is contingent, contrived, and instituted for a set of
112
purposes, then, the real is not a ground on which we might easily rely;
indeed, it is a postulate that requires a political interrogation. (106)
Yet feminist critics of pornography would consider ourselves engaged in a
"critique of reality."12 Indeed, it is precisely as an interrogation of reality that
feminists contest the reality of pornography as contrived, contingent and instituted
for a set of purposes. The problem is, Butler tries to establish her argum ent in
term s of com peting epistem ologies, pitting a supposedly poststructuralist
approach which questions reality, against a feminist anti-pom ography view
which (according to Butler) presupposes it as ontological foundation. But it is
questionable that epistemology is the m ain issue at stake in this debate. The
force of fantasy as a category for Butler's argument does more, or rather less than
problematize knowledge-accounts of reality, and goes farther than protect
pornography from censorship— censorship being the political strategy that is
implied by and follows from anti-pom epistemology, in her view.
In fact, more than protect pornography for the sake of other kinds of
speech, Butler ascribes to pornography a positive value "suppressed" by the anti-
pom ography feminists. "Fantasy" rigs her argument, ensuring a distinction
between coercion and "w anted" subordination, implying a realm beyond the
reach of normative (ethical/political) thinking while presupposing an unargued
normative value. We know this from the very first paragraph in the "Force of
Fantasy" essay, and with respect to how Butler frames the issue of fantasy. In a
rather startling sleight of hand, these beginning words of her argum ent establish
pornography as fantasy and as therefore something we need more of. "Fantasy," she
12 MacKinnon makes this point about fem inist critique of reality in her discussion of
consciousness raising as feminist m ethod "[Consciousness raising] produces an analysis of
woman's world which is not objective in the positivistic sense of being a perfect reflection of
reality conceived as abstract object; it is certainly not distanced or aperspectival. It is collective
and critical" (101).
113
writes, "has been crudal to the feminist task of (re)thinking futurity; to that end
feminist theory relies on the capacity to postulate through fantasy a future that is
not yet. . (105). Indeed, but this is an article about pornography as fantasy. Is
Butler implying that pornography, like feminism in its "phantasm atic" utopian
dimension, postulates a desirable futurity? This implication, remarkable as it
may seem, is underscored by a point made later on. Contesting the claim (of
anti-pomography feminists) that pornography enscripts women's subordination,
Butler argues that,
The effect of pornography is not to force women to identify w ith a
subordinate or debased position, b u t to provide the o p p ortunity to
identify with the entire scene of debasement, agents and recipients alike.
(114)13
Even if Butler could argue that men and women have equal opportunity
to identify with victim or victimizer, the argument begs the question, namely, to
what end? Is pornography something men, let alone women and feminists need?
What kind of opportunity does identification with debasement offer? At the outset,
such ethical and political questions are preem pted by presum ably pure
theoretical considerations—the critique of "representational realism," the concept
of "fantasy." But conflicting ideological interests, not purely theoretical
questions are at the heart of the debate between anti-pomography feminists and
other feminists—interests that imply competing political/ethical vantage points.
The feminist critique of pornography emerges in a context of political activism—
a movement to end violence against women—in which certain goods are at stake,
l^Butler's remarks echo the libertarian position of Lars O. Ericsson on prostitution that "under
the present unequal circumstances of sex work some benefit is withheld from or denied women
that is not withheld from m en . .The best w ay to deal with this inequality w ould not be an
attempt to stamp out the institution but an attempt to modify it, by making the benefit in
question available to both sexes" (qtd. in Overall, "What's Wrong" 721).
114
such as creating a world free of violence and sexual exploitation. While, on one
level, Butler's use of theory preem pts the question of whether pornography is
good for women, on another level she assumes this good. Her use of "fantasy"
valorizes pornography as utopian, yet fails to interrogate the political nature of
its value for women's freedom.
By attributing a utopian value to pornography, Butler's argum ent begins
to buckle under its key premise—that fantasy bears only an impossible relation to
the real. If pornography is fantasy and fantasy is good because of its "implied
futurity" a relation to the real is suggested, a positive relation. Butler wants to
"have her cake and eat it too, fantasy (pornography) can do no harm " as de
Lauretis puts it (Practice 145); indeed for Butler fantasy/pornography does some
good. Further examination of Butler's problematizing suspension of the ontological
exposes this notion as a faulty premise of her argum ent against the anti-
pornography position while returning us repeatedly to the real issue—the issue
of interests at stake in her particular politics of interpretation.
Pornographic Representation and Reality

In Butler's view, radical feminist and conservative anti-pornography
positions—those she identifies w ith Andrea Dworkin and Jesse Helms to be
precise—share an "untheorized" argum ent about fantasy, w hose missing
theoretical premise Butler will supply,14 arguing that D w orkin's and Helms'
argument "relies upon a representational realism that conflates the signified of
fantasy with its (impossible) referent and construes 'depiction' as an injurious act
14De Lauretis's remarks on the essentialism debate are relevant here. "What is the purpose, or
the gain, of supplying a missing prem ise [to a particular feminist work ]in order to construct a
coherent image of feminism which thus becomes available to charges (essentialism ) based on the
very premise that had to be supplied?" ("Triangle" 13).
115
and, in legal terms, an injurious action or 're'-effect" (106). Butler's effort is to

rupture this impossible, naively construed relation between reality/referent and
pornography/fantasy. The force of fantasy (once theorized) shatters any delusion
(such as indulged by Dworkin an d Helms) of "teleological" machinery in which
pornographic picture, (psychic) fantasy of viewer of picture, and action of viewer
(violence), are seen to be inexorably joined. In other words, the point is to
ru p tu re the causal connection betw een reality and fantasy that, in B utler's
representation, the anti-pornography movement insists upon. Hence her two
main questions:
Does fantasy compel a phantasm ic identification with aggression or
victimization? Does it provide a motivational link between representation
and action? If both of these questions are based upon a misconstrual of
fantasy, then the argum ents in favor of censorship are seriously
weakened. (109)
But if both questions are based upon a misconstrual of both fantasy and
the anti-pornography position, Butler's argum ent is puzzling, at the least.
Apropos of these two questions, Butler's use of "fantasy" contests a view of
pornography as significantly related to reality on two fronts: first she contests the
view that assumes a (causal) relation between representation and reality and
second, she contests the view of pornography as a determ inant of social
meanings of masculine subjects and feminine objects. In the first case, Butler
contends that a causal relation between pornography and reality (real violence) is
underm ined by the meaning of "fantasy" as "discursive excess." In the second
case, she argues that "fantasy" implies a subject (the "authorial I" or spectator
who "has" the fantasy) that itself is a form of discursive excess. The m astery of
this subject of pornography is alw ays/already undone—hence pornography
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holds no determ inable gendered meanings for sexuality, no "technology of

gender" / ideology. I will take these two refutations one at a time.
A ddressing the claim that pornography "causes" violence—Butler
contends th a t "[a]ccording to [the radical feminist] implicit theory [of
pornography], the real [i.e. sexual violence] is positioned both before and after its
representation [i.e. pornographic imagery, fantasy] and representation becomes a
moment of reproduction and consolidation of the real" (emphasis mine, 106).
Note first, B utler's focus on implicit theory. Her representation of anti-
pornography feminism includes no reference to the explicit arguments of anti-
pornography feminists such as Dworkin, MacKinnon15 or Susanne Kappeler.
Yet K appeler's Pornography of Representation is a critique of pornography that
rejects the causal thesis that Butler claims anti-pornography feminism relies
upon. Kappeler explicitly rejects the notion that the problem of pornography is a
matter of "refuting or proving a causal relationship between the consumption of
pornographic fiction and the perpetration of sexual crimes: does the represented
content lead to content being acted out?" (Pornography 8). Kappeler goes on to
argue that this way of posing the question assumes that "representation itself is
not considered a part of the real; as fiction it is opposed to fact, and it does not
apparently involve any acts, activity, action, save fictional ones in its content" (8).
Kappeler's critique of the causal formula of pomography-as-harm is the basis for
conceptualizing representation itself as socially real and harmful as such. Butler
derives the opposite conclusion from a similar premise.
Arguing against the anti-pornography feminists' view of a "motivational
link between representation and action," Butler states that in pornography ". .
15Butler does quote a few passages from the Ordinance in her footnotes, juxtaposing them to
passages from an anti-obscenity amendment that Helm s tried to pass.
117
.the 'real' remains permanently w ithin quotations, i.e. action is suspended, or,
better yet, pornographic action is always suspended action" ("Force" 113). She
posits a contingency and indeterminacy of reality (it is suspended within quotes)
against the "teleological," causal view implicit in the critic of pornography who
sees pornography as (a cause of) violence. The view that pornographic
representations "are discriminatory actions," Butler argues, implies a naive view
of representation "as the incipient moment of an inexorable action, containing
w ithin itself a teleological principle whereby the transformation of picture into
fantasy is followed by the transformation of fantasy into action" ("Force" 113,
em ph. in original). Her own view, in contrast, is that fantasy is constitutive of
reality. Pornography does not suddenly transm ute into action; fantasy is not
separable from reality; it is its ow n reality. There's enough action in
pornographic action, in other w ords.16 Indeed. But critics of pornography
would say that this is the problem w ith pornography.17
Butler's view of pornography mirrors rather than critiques the "censorship
experts" who, as Kappeler points out, "are asking for proof that men who have
looked at pornography will go and do something similar (to the 'content') in the
16Butler's point, however, is something like a high tech variant of the rather banal argument
made by Dierdre English (cited by Butler), nam ely, the "benign masturbator theory" of
pornography. This liberal formula replaces one "causal formula" with another, the "cathartic
theory": more film equals less rape; a cathartic theory o f pornography, "suspended action" as
"suspended rape/sexual violence." But this is a view that takes men's (and presumably w om en's
too?) "need" for pornography for granted, and fails to engage with the argument that this "need"
is what should be interrogated.
17In fact, the analysis of a causal relationship between m en's use of pornography and m en's
action (tendency to rape) is only one, albeit important, dim ension of feminist critique of
pornography—the sociological analysis of pornography as a kind of product consumed by
certain populations, an analysis based on the not earth-shaking assumption that certain types of
consumption of commodities in the United States have effects on peoples' behavior. This
sociological perspective certainly has more resonance in the context of an analysis discerning,
more precisely and complexly than behavioral studies, the social relations that make possible this
kind of consumption. See Russell, ed, Making Violence Sexy.
118
world" (60). Kappeler argues that, "So long as w e see sexual crime as the (sole)
reality and pornography (exclusively) as pornographic content, we will never
find a satisfying description of the relationship between 'fantasy' and 'reality'"
(60). Pornographic representation is not a matter of contents or depictions to be
matched w ith reality, because, Kappeler writes,
Representations are not just a matter of m irrors, reflections, key-holes.
Somebody is making them, and somebody is looking at them, through a
complex array of means and conventions. N or do representations sim ply
exist on canvas in books, on photographic paper or on screens: they have
a continued existence in reality as objects of exchange; they have a genesis
in material production. (Pornography 3)18
Disregarding accounts such as Kappeler's, b u t also ignoring the history of
feminist theories of representation,19 Butler advances her notion of fantasy as
constitutive of reality against a straw-woman anti-pornography feminist as
positivist:
Whereas anti-pornography feminists presume a mimetic relation between
the real, fantasy, and representation that presumes the priority of the real,
we (sic) can understand the 'real' as a variable construction which is
always and only determined in relation to its constitutive outside: fantasy,
the unthinkable, the unreal. (106)
18Or, representation is a matter of imaging rather than images, as de Lauretis puts it in her account
of cinema as an "image machine" (Alice Doesn't 37,38). De Lauretis's feminist account of
cinematic representation holds for socially produced representation in general as, "a signifying
practice, a w ork of sem iosis; a work that produces effects of m eaning and perception, self-im ages
and subject positions for all those involved, makers and viewers; and thus a semiotic process in
which the subject is continually engaged, represented, and inscribed in ideology" (37).
19Here we have another problem with Butler's account, which is that, aside from anything she
has to say about anti-pomography feminism, Butler's implicit binarism between positivist/realist
anti-pomography criticism and her own view of textual indeterminacy, elides a whole body of
feminist literature on representation and ideology, literature that often explores tensions betw een
social determ inism /ideology and ruptures, points of resistance in ideology. See Teresa de
Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, Technologies of Gender; Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema and the journal
Camera Obscnra.
119
A nti-pom ography feminists w ould agree that (pornographic) fantasy is

constitutive of social reality but we would differ over w hether such fantasy is
"unthinkable" or "unreal." In a point that resonates oddly w ith Butler's position,
Kappeler contends that representations "are more 'real' than the reality they are
said to rep resen t or reflect. All of these factors som ehow straddle the
commonsense divide between fiction and fact, fantasy and reality" (3). In other
words, Kappeler, like MacKinnon and Dworkin, argues th at pornography is
integral to th e construction of social reality—hardly a m im etic view of
pornographic representation.
Butler's account of (fantasy as) representation, in the end, is contradictory.
On the one hand, she argues for the non-effectivity of pornography and claims
that representation/fantasy is constitutive of reality over and against w hat she
c o n s tru e s as th e " r e a lis t's " p o s itio n . For th e r e a lis t,
pornography/representation/fantasy consists in depictions that match up with
(mimic) reality. However, when Butler grants the viewer of pornography the
freedom to pick and choose its "scene of debasement" it is she who assumes a
sense of representations as mere depictions. For, as Stephen H eath discusses this
contradiction in Butler's argument,
there cannot be a simply separate class of identifications that a subject
stands in front of and uses on his or her terms: the subject is always
already in and from representation, including the representations of
pornography, whether or not he or she individually ever w ent any where
near p o rn o g rap h y (the p o in t is the social cu rren cy of those
representations).20
20Personal communication; June 1991.
120
H ere Heath implicitly revives a concept that Butler's argum ent renders
"q u ain t/'21 namely ideology-critique which allows critique of representation "in
the totality of its operations and effects," as de Lauretis argues regarding cinema.
The cinematic apparatus, de Lauretis writes, "produces not merely images but
imaging. It binds affect and meaning to images by establishing terms of
identification, orienting the movement of desire, and positioning the spectator in
relation to them" (Alice Doesn't 137, emph. mine). At stake in the process of
imaging is "the movement of the spectator taken up as subject, performing the
film" for, "the spectator completes the image as its subject. . ." (Heath qtd. in de
Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 137, italics his). Similarly, "the fantasy of pom ," as
Kappeler argues, "is not fully depicted, it is not identical w ith the 'content' of
representation," but
is to be com pleted by the active subject, the view er-hero of the
representation. The zone of pom ography-fantasy stretches from the
view ing subject to the doing subject: w hat he is doing is watching,
imagining, fantasizing, producing the feeling of life, delight and pleasure
in himself, w ith m asturbating as an optional extra. (Pornography 59,
emphasis mine)
F ro m th is p e rs p e c tiv e , th e p ro b le m is not w h e th e r
representation/pornography causes some thing or act external to its operation
b u t how (to cite MacKinnon again) "[t]he aesthetic of pornography itself, the
w ay it provides what those who consume it want, is itself the evidence [of its
harm]. Pornography turns woman into a thing to be acquired and used" (199).
In other words, pornography as representation has a specific social currency in
concrete social relations between men and women, relations defined by w hat
21De Lauretis writes, "Ideology is a quaint word now , in disuse, but its effects are still at work in
the spectator-subject of public fantasy..." (Practice 148) such as cinema or pornography.
121
Pateman calls the (hetero)sexual contract legitimizing men's dem and for w om en
as desirable sexual commodities.
At this juncture w e can see that the claim that fantasy is constitutive of
reality is not one that provides a sufficient argument against the feminist critique
of pornography. Kappeler, like MacKinnon and Dworkin, w ould agree w ith
Butler in fact that, as the latter puts it, "fantasy postures as real. . ."(108); the
conflict in positions is n ot solely epistemological b u t ethical. The "possibility of
suspending and interrogating the ontological claim itself, of reviewing its own
productions, as it were, and contesting their claim to the real" ("Force" 108), a
possibility th a t Butler attributes to pornography itself is, from the anti-
pom ography vantage point, the prem ise of fem inist critique that opposes
pornography's claim to the real, and hence exposes its social contingency as
fabricated and interested rather than as ontologically given.
The difference between Butler and Andrea Dworkin is not, I contend, that
one finds contingency and the other doesn't, but that the former finds in it a site
of value, "gender trouble," while the other finds there the banality of pow er in
the repetitions and indeed the posturings of pornographic reality. Where Butler
finds a source of subversion, Dworkin and other anti-pomography feminists find
a site for potential political intervention and resistance.
The Subject of Pornographic Fantasy

At this point we return to Butler's second question, w hether "fantasy
compels a phantasm ic identification w ith [male] aggression or [feminine]
victimization" (109). Butler's response is two-fold; on the one hand she argues
that "even pornographic representations as textualized fantasy do not supply a
122
single point of identification for their viewers, whether presum ed to be stabilized

in subject-positions of m ale or female" (114), w hich is the "reason why
representations do not jum p off the page to club us over the h e a d ... " (114). On
the other hand, her argum ent, going farther than to claim m erely an
indeterminacy/contingency for the subject of pornography, also suggests that
this indeterminacy/contingency has value as "gender trouble." In contrast, "the
fixed subject-position of 'w om an'" assumed by anti-pom ography feminists is
repressive; this position "functions within the feminist discourse in favor of
censorship [sic] as a fantasm that suppresses multiple and open possibilities as
fantasy through its self-stabilization" (emph. mine; 120). "Indeed," she contends,
"the postulation of a single identificatory access to the representation is precisely
what stabilizes gender identity" (114). Thus stability vs. indeterminacy are set up
and valorized in relation to one another but this constructed opposition begs a
whole set of questions in relation to social reality. What, in other w ords, is so
good about indeterminacy—even assuming that the subject of pornography is as
unstable as she contends?
Butler's notion of pornography as gender-subversive moves between two
themes in poststructuralist thought.22 The first is the theme of the indeterminacy
of the subject—its contingency, hybridity, multiplicity; the second, a theme of
culture (in this case pornography) as an indeterminate, heterogeneous field of
pleasures and powers—a textual field, and as such dem anding an equally
indeterminate, pleasurable interpretative strategy. These themes in themselves,
as they emerge in poststructuralist thought, are not un im p o rtan t critical
developments. The intervention of psychoanalytic thought, deconstruction, and
^ I'm drawing on Aijaz Ahmad and his paradigm of themes in "post colonial" literary theory.
123
Foucaultian accounts of power help complicate feminist accounts of subjects and

subjectivity, culture and knowledge production, everyday life and institutional
sites of power, forms of legitimacy etc. One stake in this chapter's engagem ent
w ith Butler is the role of psychoanalytic theory in feminist and radical theory
which has decentered consciousness (the rational unified self) as a "m otor" of
psychical life—to draw on Rosi Braidotti's account of this shift in theory.
"Psychoanalysis," Braidotti writes,
places a question m ark beside the hard kernel of the philosophical
equation of subjectivity w ith consciousness, by emphasizing the paradox
of unconscious thought. This implies a view of consciousness which is
anim ated by effects beyond its control, an d of th o u g h t w hich
paradoxically has no thinker. The idea of unconscious signifying
structures throws dow n a fundamental challenge to the sovereignty of the
subject. (Patterns of Discourse 18-19)
If, as Braidotti concludes, "the inevitable consequence of this is that the
identification of the subject w ith consciousness, stricto sensu, is a radical
m isunderstanding of hum an subjectivity" (19), perhaps feminists can use
psychoanalytic accounts for rethinking political and moral agency in ways that
help extend feminist accounts of revolutionary change. Feminists can no longer
rely on accounts of the willful feminist amazon who can leap out of ideology in a
single bound. But can we abandon her altogether and still remain feminist? In
other words, it might be as radical a mistake to replace consciousness, a category
of political, feminist subjecthood, with subjectivity, a category of psychoanalytic
theory, designating psychic/unconscious processes, as it is to do the reverse and
reduce the subject to consciousness. But I am anticipating a later discussion of
this distinction as it is draw n by de Lauretis. Let me return to the issue at hand
w hich is Butler's use of the poststructuralist theme of indeterm inacy in the
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subject and in culture as an approach to feminist interpretations of pornography.

While Butler invokes psycho-analytic categories, her approach to pornography is
almost strictly one of linguistic and textual analysis.
This approach to pornography relies on a discursive account of gender
which, as I discussed in the preceding chapter, has significant implications for
the category of power in feminist theory. I suggested that Butler's account of
how gendered subjects are constructed th ro u g h discursive practices of
norm alization replaces (and thus dulls) the feminist critique of gender as
normalization of hierarchy. Furthermore, as show n in "The Force of Fantasy,"
Butler's account of gender allows her to re-define subversion in term s of
practices that de-naturalize gender rather than in term s of practices that
transform existing pow er-structures. Indeed, Gender Trouble underpins the
"Force of Fantasy" essay; thus, some of its key features are w orth considering
before returning directly to the latter essay.
In Gender Trouble, Butler proposes that we consider gender as "a corporeal
style, an 'act,' as it w ere, which is both intentional and performative, where
'performative' suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning" (139).
This view weaves theory of performative speech acts with discourse theory into
a linguistic account of gender identity, taking from the first an account of how
the "I" of discourse is constituted through speech-acts and from the second how
these performances are constrained by rules of w hat is sayable and not sayable.
In this view "identity" is constructed("perform ed") through a repetition of
utterances and gestures that are constrained by rules of discourse. This is the T
as citation, an aspect of the postm odern m elt-down of th at frozen unity of
consciousness and subject of w hich B raidotti speaks; this "I" is a
125
reconceptualization of agency that, inspired by Nietszche, banishes the "doer"

behind the deeds, rejecting the notion of any original foundation of gender:
Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency
from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously
constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized
repetition of acts. (Gender Trouble 140)
This model of gender as discursive construes subversion in term s of
"resignification."
If the rules governing signification not only restrict, but enable the
assertion of alternative dom ains of cultural intelligibility, i.e., new
possibilities for gender that contest the rigid codes of hierarchical
binarisms, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a
subversion of identity becomes possible. (145)
Hence we see the them e th at is reprised in "Force of Fantasy":
"perform ance" a n d /o r "resignification" provides the conceptual fram e and
motor of the claim that gender/fantasy/pornography is tenuous (contingent,
indeterminate etc.) and therefore a site of subversion. "Butler's analyses," Bordo
writes, "of how gender is constituted and subverted take the body as . . . a text
whose meanings can be analyzed in abstraction from experience, history,
m aterial practice, an d context" (293), and consequently ex em p t from
ethical/political scrutiny.23
C ertainly a critique w hich aims at d en atu ralizin g g en d e r and
heterosexuality is useful for feminist theory.24 However, while Butler's account
^Butler's approach exem plifies uses of poststructuralism that have, in Rita Felski's view ,
"isolated] the literary text as a supposedly privileged space." Felski objects to what she calls the
"hypostatization of the text as a site of negation, heterogeneity, indeterminacy" which "runs the
risk of ignoring the symbolic functions of literature in the broader context of social life" (7).
24Susan Bordo's assessment of Butler's contribution on this count is particularly lucid:
For Butler.. .our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not express some authentic 'core'
self but are the dramatic effect (rather than the cause) of our performances, (footnote
continued on p. 127). These w e learn how to 'fabricate' in the sam e way we leam how to
126
is useful for theorizing gender identity, does it have anything to say about
feminism as a political, ethical challenge to organized power? This question is
im portant for theorizing the political and ethical stakes of theory as a feminist
practice, in relation to other feminist practices within the broader dom ain of
feminism as a counter-public sphere and social movement. Nancy Fraser points
out that Butler's use of "resignification" carries a strong, if implicit positive
charge (Feminist Contentions 67), that nevertheless, as Fraser argues, begs key,
normative questions:
Why is resignification good? C an't there be bad (oppressive, reactionary)
resignifications? In opting for the epistemically neutral 'resignification', as
opposed to the epistemically positive 'critique,' Butler seems to valorize
change for its own sake and thereby to disempower feminist judgm ent.
(Feminist Contentions 68)
In other words, is denaturalization subversion? Or perhaps better, is
subversion the same as liberation?
Butler's approach points up the limits of a textual paradigm for feminist
theorizing. In this vein, Bordo questions Butler's "discursive or linguistic
foundationalism" which the latter offers as "the highest critical court" of "Truth"
(291). This foundationalism, Bordo argues, "suggests that the textualization of
the body is itself a privileged theoretical turn immune from cultural suspicion
and critique" (291). In this framework, for example, "drag" is construed as
subversive via its "strategy" of parody; parody, an aesthetic strategy, becomes an
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exem plar of politics in Gender Trouble.25 But "drag" is not in itself a social
movement, it is not inherently oppositional; "subversion" is not the sam e as
political resistance. Indeed it is n o t surprising that such an account of gender
subversion would lead Butler to claim pornography as a site of this subversion.
If performance or resignification holds as sole criterion for w hat determ ines
"subversion," no criteria exists for distinguishing one text/perform ance from
another; none, that is, outside of indeterminacy itself. To elaborate, I will look at
a further problem related to Butler's reliance on a linguistic paradigm, namely,
how Butler brings psycho-analytic categories into the subversion pot. The force
of her particular use of "fantasy" (like her use of "performance") derives from its
capacity to further validate pornography as a text and thereby remove it from
social reality.
Beyond the Master-Subject. Again

According to Butler, the feminist view of pornography as compelling men
to identify with victimizers, w om en w ith victims, is a "univocal" reading.
Whereas the anti-pom ography feminist argues that pornography interpellates
masculine subjects as consumers of women-as-sex, Butler insists that this notion
is itself a fantasy of the (generic) subject as master:
manipulate a language: through im itation and gradual command of public, cultural

idiom s (for instance, the corporeal gestures of gender). Within this framework, the
illusion of an 'interior and organizing gender core' is itself a 'fantasy instituted and
inscribed on the surface of bodies' through our performances. That illu sion .. .effectively
protects the institution of reproductive heterosexuality from scrutiny and critique as an
institution, continually regulating rather than merely reflecting our sexuality. (289-90)
^ B utler argues, "Just as bodily surfaces are enacted as the natural, so these surfaces can becom e
the site of a dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the performative status o f the
natural itself. Practices of parody can serve to reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction
between a privileged and naturalized gender configuration and one that appears as derived,
phantasmatic, and mimetic—a failed copy, as it were" (Gender Trouble 146).
128
Although we might w ant to think, even fantasize, that there is an T who

has or cultivates its fantasy w ith some measure of mastery and possession,
that T is always already undone by precisely that which it claims to
master. (110)26
In what sense is the "I" of pornography always already undone by w hat it
claims to master? Butler contends that pornography is the "scene of the subject's
fragmentation" rather than one that compels a m ale subject/victim izer and
female victim:
. . .fantasy does not entail an identification w ith a single position w ithin
the fantasy; the identification is distributed among the various elements of
the scene.. .identification is multiple and sh iftin g .. .There is, then, strictly
speaking, no subject who has a fantasy, but only fantasy as the scene of the
subject's fragmentation and dissimulation.. .(109-110)
Butler derives this view from the account of fantasy developed by
Laplanche and Pontalis. As she quotes the latter, "Fantasy is not the object of
desire, but its setting. . .[T]he subject, although always present in the fantasy,
may be so in a desubjectivized form, that is to say, in the very syntax of the
sequence in question..." (109-10). Another way of putting this is that when one
"has" a fantasy there is a sense in which one identifies w ith the whole scene, one
is dispersed into all of its parts. She argues, "the subject cannot be collapsed into
the subject-position of [a] fantasy; all positions are the subject, even as this
subject has proliferated beyond recognition" (110). But the notion that the
subject is in all the parts of pornography suggests a point that Butler disregards:
that the subject identifies w ith pornography itself, its "very syntax" limited to
"opportunities for debasement," victim or aggressor. W e will return to this point
26We are thus back to the desire to go beyond the master/subject paradigm professed by Nancy
Fraser in the latter's critique of Carole Pateman ("Beyond M aster/Subject"). Fraser's ow n use of
fantasy to dispel a notion of the m asculine subject as master—as authoritative loill of a superior—in
feminist understandings of prostitution is clearly indebted to Butler.
129
shortly, in more depth, as it ultim ately underm ines, rather than supports,
Butler's "utopian" valorization of pornographic fantasy. The more immediate
problem here is that "fantasy" has its "utopian" currency for Butler's argum ent
insofar as the concept trades on a central ambiguity, namely, two different
meanings of fantasy: the meaning of pornography as a social, mass produced
fantasy and the meaning of fantasy as "psychic process."
As de Lauretis points out, the plausibility of Butler's use of Laplanche and
Pontalis depends on a selective reading of their essay, one which omits their
distinction between an unconscious "form of fantasy from the conscious reverie
or daydream " (Practice 144). Regarding the latter form of fantasy, the daydream,
Laplanche and Pontalis write, "the scenario is basically in the first person, and
the subject's place clear and invariable" (Laplanche and Pontalis qtd. in de
Lauretis 144). Laplanche and Pontalis, in other words, are not only talking about
unconscious fantasy and an unconscious (dispersed) subject whose mastery is
always already undone, but, as de Lauretis points out, "on the strength of this
theory of fantasy.. .there is also a subject who fantasizes herself in the scene and
w hose fantasy (precisely) is one of mastery, even as that fantasy may be in
contradiction with her own unconscious fantasy" (144, emphasis in original).
The fact that conscious reverie is m ore akin to viewing pornography than is
unconscious fantasy is inadvertently underscored by Butler's appeal to accounts
of utopian fantasy, its implied futurity, for her appeal to fantasy as the site of
pornography and gender trouble—in other words, her appeal to collective and
strategic, conscious social fantasy. De Lauretis puts the problem with Butler's
argum ent clearly: "In equating the pornographic text with the pornographic
fantasy, or pornography with fantasy, she conflates fantasy w ith representation
130
and disregards the different relations of production of fantasy that obtain for the
subject in a private or analytic situation, on the one hand, and for the subject in a
public context of representation, on the other" (146). In this way, Butler offers an
account that abstracts pornography from its public, social relations of production
and consumption, in short, from the sex industry. As a consequence, Butler's
argum ent cannot countenance the epistem ological and political difference
between those who support and those who critique this industry.
It's time, then, to turn to Butler's troubling criticisms of Andrea Dworkin,
troubling as much for what they imply about Butler's view of feminist theory as
for w hat they im ply about her view of Dworkin. Ultimately, these criticisms
imply no less than the impossibility of fem inist critique of pornography
altogether, or, m ore precisely, the impossibility of a critique that does not in
effect reproduce w hat it is critiquing. On the strength of her own notion of
fantasy, Butler, first, questions Andrea Dworkin's identification with women as
the victim (of/in) pornography. Dworkin's argument "defeats itself" in Butler's
view, because "the muted, passive, and injured stance of the woman viewer
would effectively preclude a critical analysis of its structure and place within the
field of social pow er" (113).
The pornographic fantasy does not restrict identification to any one
position, an d Dworkin, in her elaborate textual exegesis, paradoxically
shows us how her form of interpretative mastery can be derived from a
viewing which, in her ow n view, is supposed to restrict her to a position
of mute and passive injury. (114; italics in original)
This is a rather astonishing conclusion: Butler seems to be suggesting that
victims cannot critically analyze the structures of their ow n victimization, or
rather, that they cannot do so w ithout disproving their very claim of
victimization. As de Lauretis writes, Butler ignores
131
the obvious, if contradictory, fact that feminist analysis and politics have
always proceeded concurrently with—indeed have been prom pted by—
the social injury suffered by women, but the strength of feminism, or what
social power it m ay have, does not disprove that injury. (146)
How ever, even m ore astonishing than the presum ed impossibility of
feminists' identification w ith victims is Butler's suggestion that Dworkin's very
"interpretative mastery" implies identification w ith the master, not the victim. "Is
it even possible," Butler queries,
to do the kind of reading that Dworkin does that involves a retelling and
repetition of the pornographic scene w ithout making use of precisely the
variable identifications that the pornographic fantasy itself occasions?. ..
[D]oes the identificatory process that her own reading requires effectively
refute the theory of identification that she explicitly holds? (115)
The suggestion here is th at if you interpret pornography you identify w ith the
pom ographer. But as MacKinnon and Dworkin point out,
Pornography is n o t what pornography says. If it were, the Ordinance's
definition of pornography w ould be itself pornography, because it says
exactly w hat pornography is. In other words, the Ordinance does not
restrict pornography on the basis of its message. (Pornography and Civil
Rights 37)
Butler's claim that Dworkin's critique is "impossible" conflates feminist
critical description of patriarchal practice w ith the practice itself, and this
conflation relies, ironically, on a notion of pornography as sheer images,
depictions. To describe these images, Butler suggests, is to be doing the same
thing as w hat pornography does. Hence, the claim that Dworkin's critique is
impossible is not only remarkable for its political and ethical implications, but
depends on contradictory analytic moves.
132
De Lauretis' argum ent show s that if Butler equivocates on the two

meanings of fantasy, correspondingly she equivocates between two different
senses of the subject of fantasy. De Lauretis writes,
Quite correctly, in my opinion, Butler reads 'D w orkin's'27 interpretive
mastery as a form of feminist sociopolitical subjecthood; but she does not
acknowledge that subjecthood—conscious, affirmative, even willful, and
based on a political and collective identity—is not the same as subjectivity,
w hich is perm eated by repression, resistance, am bivalence, and
contradiction. Obviously, subjectivity and subjecthood are never
dissociated in the subject, just as the psycho-analytic subject is always a
social subject, but the two terms stand to each other in a conceptual
relationship analogous to that of private or subjective representation
(fantasy) to public representation. (Practice 147)
By conflating these different aspects of the subject, psychoanalytic and
social, "w hat Butler loses sight of, ironically, is precisely the imaginary
(unconscious?) force of fantasy in 'D w orkin's' subjectivity" (Practice 147). In
other words, Butler misses the force of fantasy which de Lauretis elaborates as
"the hold of a socially constructed and subjectively internalized identification
with the victim's or 'feminine' position... " (147). That is to say, what takes hold
is ideology, "a quaint word now, in disuse, but its effects are still at work in the
spectator-subject of public fantasy" (148). Indeed an account of ideology, crucial
for any account of the relations between public representation and psychic
fantasy, is as critical for an account of the relation between political subjecthood
and subjectivity. Elsewhere De Lauretis discusses the subject of feminism who is
neither wom an as representation and gender ideology, nor the historical beings
27De Lauretis puts Dworkin in quotes in order to "indicate that I am not referring to the person
or the author Andrea Dworkin but to the character in Butler's fictional dialogue, the antagonist in
her argument. I thus hope to indicate as clearly as possible that, in objecting to Butler's
argument, I am neither 'defending' Dworkin' nor—much less—supporting the arguments made
by the actual Andrea Dworkin" (145).
133
interpellated by gender b ut as one existing in a space between. This space of

discrepancy, tension and slippage points to
a logical contradiction in o u r culture and an irreconcilable one: women are
both inside and o u tsid e gender, at once w ith in a n d w ithout
representation. That wom en continue to become Woman, continue to be
caught in gender as Althusser's subject is in ideology, and that w e persist
in that imaginary relation even as we know, as feminists, that w e are not
that, but we are historical subjects governed by real social relations, which
centrally include gender—such is the contradiction that feminist theory
must be built on, and its very condition of possibility. (Technologies 10)
This contradiction, I w ould add, is essential to feminism as critique; it
explains the nature of theory that paradoxically derives its strength from an
account of those practices that w ork against its possibility. That is to say,
feminist theory, by laying bare and opposing structures of oppression that deny
w om en's subjecthood, paradoxically enacts that subjecthood.28 It is the social
construction of "feminine subjects" (emphasis mine) namely, "that imaginary
identification with the victim's position," de Lauretis writes, "that both limits the
interpretative possibilities for 'D w orkin' as viewer of the pornographic text and
makes her feel constricted in a fantasy scenario that her subjecthood will not
accept as hers" (Practice 147), and which prevents the feminist view er from
"taking up the aggressor's or 'masculine' position' which Butler projects onto
her" (147). Hence de Lauretis contests Butler's suggestion that 'D w orkin's
reading draws its strength an d m astery' from 'a n identification and
redeployment of the very representation of aggression [the 'masculine' position]
that she abhors" ("Force" 115), and argues that, on the contrary, as a contradictory
28 MacKinnon's account of the paradox of feminist consciousness in Toward a Feminist Theory of

the State is pivotal to de Lauretis' account of the subject of feminism especially in the latter's
incarnation as "Eccentric Subjects." See chapter 3, below.
134
subject of feminism, "'D w orkin' resists seeing herself in the m ass-produced

fantasy, in which she does see herself. In short, w hat Butler sees as masculine
aggression, to another may look more like feminist resistance" (147, emphasis
mine).
This last clause seems crucial; to it I add the following: w hat Butler sees as
resistance, i.e. gender trouble, to others looks like the technology of gender.
Butler's thesis thus redefines feminist resistance as attributing to pornography
the force of subversion while attributing violence to the anti-pom ography
movement. By conflating the two meanings of subjectivity, Butler can claim that
it is "the epistemological discourse that Dworkin uses" (113), not pornography,
which "links masculinity w ith agency and aggression, femininity w ith passivity
and injury" (113); it is Dworkin who "uses" this epistemology and thus, Butler
concludes, "her argum ent defeats itself." Indeed, while pornography is
subversive, it is the anti-pomography critic's
claim th at the text permits of a single interpretation [that] is itself a
construction of the pornographic text as site of univocal meaning; if
pornography is a textualized fantasy of dissim ulated and unstable
identifications, then the claim that pornography enforces a foreclosure of
the text's possible readings is itself the forcible act by w hich that
foreclosure is affected. (114)
Or, in a nutshell, if the argument that everything is text, is fantasy, is
representation an d thus "unstable," "dissim ulated," "polyvocal" a n d /o r
"contingent" in meaning allows us to have pornography as fantasy and fantasy
as utopian, then we can say that any attem pt to "read" this text otherwise is
repressive, and indeed is "itself the forcible act" being criticized. The corollary to
the move which disables the anti-pom ography feminist critic as like the right
wing and like the pom ographer—that reduces the critic to what she critiques—is
135
the move which simultaneously elevates the post-feminist critic into a dubious
utopian space of "gender trouble," unmoored by coordinates of social pow er that
weigh down the anti-pomography feminist.
But this O rw ellian opposition gains conceptual leverage from an
impoverished notion of resistance. The emptiness of Butler's conception of
resistance-as-subversion is pointed up by her overall strategy of argum ent,
nam ely her choice to not debate competing accounts of political resistance, but
rather cast her argument in terms of epistemological/ontological issues divorced
from political debate. This strategy leads Butler to argue that a subject-position
defined by a victim 's p o litical/eth ical resistance to o p p ressio n is an
epistemological impossibility. Yet, as de Lauretis concludes her critique of
Butler, 'Dworkin' does not lend support to Butler's theory that 'fantasy does not
restrict identification to any one position."
This is so. . .because 'Dworkin' is neither the subject nor the producer of
the fantasy in question; because the pornographic text is not her fantasy
but a fantasy (representation) produced by others, which, as she sees it,
interpellates her and solicits her identification w ith a particular scenario in
which she does not, will not, or cannot find her place, a scenario whose
specified positions (victim or aggressor) she will not or cannot occupy. - -
{Practice 148)
D workin's refusal to occupy the pornographic scene, derives from an
epistemological shift in which a position outside the scene of debasem ent is
conceived and lived by those who are simultaneously called by that same scene
to inhabit it. This "outside" is a lived "moment in the self-constitution of new
collective agents or social movements" (Fraser, Unruly Practices 171). In other
w ords, it derives from the force of subjecthood as collective and conscious,
political and ethical.
136
The Utopian Subject of Pornography as Representation of the Intellectual as

Libertine
Since Butler rules out "im aginary identification with the victim" as a
possible position of protest against pornography, the question remains of the
identity/identification of her subject/view er of pornography. W hat or who is
this subject free to stand back from pornography, to pick and choose among its
identifications w ith aggressor a n d /o r victim? While at one level Butler's
argument denies a unified subject—her subject proliferates beyond recognition—
at another level her argument requires it. The non-effectivity of pornography in
Butler's argument—it does not club us over the head—presupposes an individual
viewer abstracted from the social currency of representation. That is to say,
Butler's poststructuralist effort assumes a fundamentally libertarian premise, an
individualist notion of a subject "as freely willing and consciously choosing in a
world that is seen as background" (Spivak 119). This subject is the effect of w hat
Spivak calls "ideology in action" which "is w hat a group takes to be natural and
self-evident, that of which the group, as a group m ust deny any historical
sedimentation" (119).
Butler's libertarian/poststructuralist account of both pornography and of
the feminist critique of pornography, in its very retreat from ideology, is a
moment of ideology. We see in it a denial of historical sedimentation in both
pornography and feminist critique. We see a "subject" abstracted from
pornography as a social practice of the technology of gender, and a subject
abstracted from feminism as a social movement practice. The condition and
effect of this sort of argum ent is a subject-spectator of pornography as abstract
137
individual, freely willing an d consciously choosing in a w orld seen as

background—the "entire scene of debasement." The argument assumes the
subject-spectator as something like (recall the professor's remarks in the anecdote
recounted earlier) an autonomous intellectual, disinterested critic of texts. The
theorized contingency of the subject position, its mastery always already undone,
paradoxically allows Butler to resurrect a subject whose mastery is assured by its
freedom to play in the text as a heterogeneous field of possible, pleasurable
identifications to pick and choose among—the mastery of the theorist.
A recent example of this interpretive mastery shows Butler's defense of
pornography as utopian taken to its logical and practical conclusion, namely, as
"pom pedagogy,"29 or "How Feminist Scholars Learned to Love Dirty Pictures."
Thus runs the sub-title of a 1997 Lingua Franca article covering a recent
development in "feminist" academia. As the title (archly) indicates, the "feminist
scholars" under discussion—who include Constance Penley, Laura Kipnis, Linda
Williams—are not studying pornography for the purpose of critique but as the
object of elaborate textual exegesis demonstrating pornography's positive cultural
value. According to these theorists, pornography offers no less than "parody"
(of "male vainglory, narcissism, and sexual and social ignorance") (Penley qtd.
40), "class warfare" (Kipnis) and "political theater" (Kipnis). Pornographic texts
can be interpreted as "narratives exiled from sanctioned speech and main-stream
political discourse" (Kipnis qtd. in Lord 40), yet can be said to "function[...] like
a Hollywood musical, with narrative stretches between erotic 'nu m b ers.'"
(Williams qtd. 45). Thus, according to this breathtakingly contradictory
narrative, pornography is at once "a relatively normal and socially significant
29 Credit belongs to Maureen Sullivan for this term. Personal Communication, 1997.
138
instance of culture," and something that "goes a long w ay toward disarm ing
those who depend on its typification as sexual violence to crack dow n on moral
and political dissidence" (Penley 41). In other words, the "feminist" intellectual
as represented in this article stands behind pornography as "norm al" while
defending its status as politically dissident. Enter postfeminism where the rules
of internal feminist debate have been transfigured: We are no longer in the realm
of a debate about censorship for example. For, if Butler's argum ent is any
evidence along w ith the Lingua Franca article (and given her influence I think it
is) the question has shifted from something like, say, does the harm of censorship
outweigh the harm of pornography? to the forthright claim that pornography is
something that is good for women and for "feminism." This ideology in action
rests on a conventional illusion of the abstract intellectual in post m o d em /p o st
feminist form, an illusion full-blown in Butler's theorization of pornography as
"fantasy."
Conclusion: Optimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the W ill, or, Illusions of

the Postfem inist Intellectual
The imagined subject of p o m pedagogy implies w hat Susan Bordo has
criticized as a traditional, Cartesian "fantasy of transcendence" (226) in its "new,
postm odern configuration." This fantasy—which she dubs "epistemological
jouissance"—is derived in part from a Derridean model of interpretation which
includes
a constant vigilant suspicion of all determinate readings of culture and a
partner aesthetic of ceaseless textual play. Here is where deconstruction
may slip into its own fantasy of escape from hum an locatedness—by
supposing that the critic can become wholly protean, adopting endlessly
139
shifting, seemingly inexhaustible vantage points, none of which is 'ow ned'

by either the critic or the author of a text under examination. (Bordo 226)
This interpretative m odel is w rit large in Butler's notion of a subject-
viewer of pornography who in its epistemological jouissance can "proliferate
beyond recognition" ("Force" 110) for pornography has no determinate meaning
and no determinable effect. And yet this same subject is thoroughly determined
by pornography, for there is no position from which to critique pornography
without identifying with the pomographer. (And therefore identifying with the
pom ographer is the only—and best—option, an assum ption implied by such
post-feminist paeans to pom ographers like Laura Kipnis's tribute to Hustler's
Larry Flynt as "a figure of 'Rabelaisan transgression'" [43]). The paradox
exemplifies w hat Terry Eagleton calls the libertarian pessimism characterizing a
postmodern dream of the subject:
At once libertarian and determinist, it dreams of a hum an subject set free
from constraint, gliding deliriously from one position to another, and
holds simultaneously that the subject is the mere effect of forces which
constitute it through and through. (Illusions 28-9)
Butler's fantasy of transcendence at once denies the determining power of
gender in pornography yet allows for no outside to pornography. The moral of
her story—repeated by the pom pedagogues—at once libertarian and pessimist,
reverses what Gramsci advocated as "optimism of the will and pessimism of the
in te lle c tshe offers us a "utopian" freedom that derives its epistemological
advantage to endlessly in te rp ret the given "text" from an assum ed
political/ethical impossibility of transforming the text. Resistance is fiitile unless—
to turn back to Eagleton's elaboration of the paradox of libertarian pessimism:
140
one wants to preserve the idea of subversion in the absence of any likely
agent of it, in which case you can always claim that the system subverts
itself, and so combine a certain skepticism with a certain radicalism. (10)
The system subverts itself—its mastery already undone, pornography and
pomographer, viewer/consumer and consumed are all and each invested with a
contingency, an indeterm inacy th at makes resistance unnecessary, moot.
(Pornography is political theater, class warfare, transgression, and limitless
opportunities for debasement). Thus the force of Butler's "fantasy" moves us
beyond Fraser's proposed distinction between fantasy/cultural and actual power
in the institution of prostitution—an argument claiming the contingency of male
pow er as over and against its systemic structure. We have m oved to a
qualitatively different claim, w here contingency implies subversion. Yet this
utopian promise derives as m uch from political defeatism as from theoretical
hubris. Butler's argument grants to fantasy qua fantasy (and to the fantasizer)
w hat she denies the social critic of pornographic fantasy, a capacity "to change the
real" (107, emphasis mine).
"[T]o change w hat qualifies as real," she continues, "would be to contest
the syntax within which pointing [to the real] occurs and on which it tacitly
relies" (107). Yet Butler's argum ent precisely assumes rather than contests the
basic syntax of pornography. H er argum ent thus substantiates w hat Susan
Sontag has called the "totalizing imperative" of the pornographic imagination,
w hich proposes, "a total u n iv erse" w ith "the pow er to in g est and
m etam orphosize and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing
everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative" (66). From
the vantage point of pornography, criticism is impossible, or rather, becomes one
more variable of its formula. From this perspective, the only option is to convert
141
necessity into virtue, an "optimism" that redefines freedom as freedom to choose

the inevitable as "wanted" and desirable. "The options are strictly defined
within the one imperative that it [sexual domination/submission] will happen to
her; [the victim] can [only] choose an attitude" (Kappeler 90). This sums up the
libertarian position, according to Kappeler, and it seems to be one that Butler
embraces in her defense of pornography. The moral imagination here reduces to
choosing an attitude within a syntax taken as given; there is no dialectic of
critical scrutiny (of the given) and positive affirmation (of an elsewhere).
In the end, the difference between a feminist critique of pornography and
what I consider to be a postfeminist defense of pornography, turns on a moral
im agination which resists a post-fem inist paradox of e ith e r/o r absolute
freedom/absolute necessity (constraint) by allowing for another paradox—the
subject of feminism as contradictory. A critique of pornography assumes that
identification w ith the victim (of pornography) is, paradoxically, a possible
position of protest, indeed a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of protest.
This im agined/projected transformation of victimization into protest is not
(only) achieved through interpretative mastery but in and through "the medium
of social movement history" (Fraser, Unruly Practices) where consciousness of
victimization can lead to political will, the will to politically transform structures
of oppression. It is precisely the resistance to any identification with victims (of
pornography) that distinguishes representations of the postfeminist intellectual.
Pornography is (only) theory for the intellectual who seeks sanctuary in
represen tatio n as autonom ous, seeks autonom y from p o rn o g rap h ic
representation as intellectual, and thus redefines/accepts the technology of
142
gender at stake in pornography (as a totality of representations) as a site of

interpretative mastery rather than political will and revolt.
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CHAPTER 3: Resistance or Ressentiment?: Moral Imagination and the

Consciousness of Feminist Theory
Part I: Consciousness
Feminist Consciousness as Paradox and Critique
A term central to "modes of knowing we want to claim as feminist," (de
Lauretis, "Eccentric" 115), including theory, consciousness still designates a
decisive cognitive and political/ethical shift: the personal becomes political and
w om en come to know ourselves as political agents. However, fem inist
consciousness is a paradox. If "sexualized objectification is w hat defines women
as sexual and as women u n d er male suprem acy" (MacKinnon, Feminism
Unmodified 50), consciousness-raising is—paradoxically—an inquiry into the
conditions of the very impossibility of consciousness. Insofar as wom en have
been deprived of subjecthood, "Feminist consciousness is consciousness of
victimization" (Bartky 15). The claim is contentious in light of recent disputes
about radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon promoting a "discourse of
victim ization" (Butler), or, in other w ords, defining gender in term s of
dom ination and subordination. MacKinnon's account of consciousness as a
paradox, however, points to tensions in feminist theory that—to paraphrase de
Lauretis's reading of MacKinnon—are historically specific to the "subject of
feminism" as defined by a "constant turn of subject into object into subject"
("Eccentric" 119). I suggest that, correspondingly, this notion of feminist
consciousness as paradoxical is one key to thinking through some of the ways
that feminist theory and activism have been gridlocked on questions of violence,
sexuality and agency after the eighties "sex debates."
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M acK innon elaborates the paradox of consciousness as follows:

"Feminism, through consciousness raising, has grasped the completeness of the
incursion into w ho one really becomes through grow ing up female in a male-
dominated society" (103). Consciousness is consciousness of the constructed
female self as "a distortion of self. It is not only one's current self one is
understanding, b u t the self that understands w h at one has become as a
distortion" (Theory of State 103). In this way, as de Lauretis argues, the "subject of
feminism" is necessarily contradictory. For this is a subject defined by a tension
between positions beyond dominant ideology and "the real historical beings who
cannot as yet be defined outside of those discursive formations" (Alice Doesn't 5).
The subject of feminism is thus, paradoxically in process necessarily, at the very
site of its negation, absence an d /o r re-presentation as patriarchal construction in
patriarchal reality" (see de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't; Technologies ). A movement
between positions in and out of ideology, furtherm ore, "is w hat grounds a
different relation, for women, to the erotic, to consciousness and to knowing"
("Eccentric" 119). I would add that this movement also grounds a different
relation to, or within, feminist moral im agination as a dialectic of critical
scrutiny—n eg atio n —and utopian affirm ation — affirm ation of a new
political/m oral imaginary.1 To elaborate, one might consider w hat philosopher
1I take the concept of moral imagination from Sabina Lovibond's Realism and the Imagination in
Ethics. She draws on W ittgenstein to formulate a concept of the m oral imagination as "the critical
scrutiny of existing institutions by 'seeing new aspects', and—arising logically out of such
scrutiny—the speculative construction of alternatives" ("Analytical Table of Contents" 45).
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Seyla Benhabib, in her discussion of critical theory in the m arxist/hegelian

tradition calls the "emphatic normative dimension" of critique (Critique 5).2
By "normative dimension/' Benhabib means that critique is never simple
negation of the existing social order but also implies the projection of new values
and new forms of life beyond or counter to this order. Noting an ambivalently
utopian m om ent in Marx, Benhabib argues that critique as radical negation
"emphasizes the emergence of qualitatively new needs, social relations, and
modes of association, which burst open the utopian potential within the old"
(Critique 13). Thus negation implies utopianism and conversely, a politics of utopia
implies a "qualitative break" with the existing social order for, "the society of the
future is viewed to be. . .the radical negation of the present" (Critique 41-2).
Feminist practice (like other forms of radical practice) might be assessed in terms
of its utopian and oppositional imagination. From this perspective, I raise the
following questions: How do feminists conceptualize those internal m oral
tensions and ambiguities specific to a subject at once w ithin and w ithout
ideology? How do we conceive of a process of social transformation—a praxis—
that accounts both for constraints by ideology and for new social formations
projected beyond ideology?
I suggest that, historically, radical feminism (as a subcategory of U.S
feminism) can be framed in terms of a tension between its emphasis on negation
of male pow er on the one hand, and on constructing a (woman-centered)
counter-culture on the other. While in the second half of the dissertation I will
2Benhabib's Norm, Critique and Utopia is a study of how this tradition is appropriated and/or
contested by the members of the Frankfurt Institute. "Critical theory is distinguished from
positivistic science by its "emphatic normative dimension" and "stands in the tradition of the
Kantian teaching of autonomy, and the Hegelian-Marxist transformation of practical philosophy
into a philosophy of historical praxis" (5).
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discuss the utopian emphasis of radical feminism, here I continue m y focus on

feminism's oppositional imagination. As a politics of negation, radical feminism
has spaw ned contem porary movements against sexual violence, and, in this
context, theorized gender as a category of hierarchy that functions to normalize
and eroticize pow er relations between men and women. A stark example is
MacKinnon's account of women's sexuality as "its absence"—as something, in
other w ords, th at consists in, and through, the projection of m en 's needs
("Feminism, Marxism, Method" 19).
Radical feminists such as MacKinnon have been taken to task for reducing
gender [woman] to "radical non-being" (Haraway). However, if taken as a
"methodological provocation"3 MacKinnon's position "exposes a dilem m a"
(Theory of State 103) for feminist oppositional theory. The dilemma is illuminated
by a related question/them e for marxist theory: "How can consciousness be
alienated, hence ideological, as a result of capitalist social relations and yet aware
of the necessity to revolutionize this system?" (103). In feminist terms, the
dilemma is at the root of feminist accounts of victimization and agency:
.. .understanding women's conditions leads to the conclusion that women
are damaged. If the reality of this damage is accepted, women are in fact
not full people in the sense men are allowed to become. So on w hat basis
can a dem and for equal treatment be grounded? If women are w hat they
are made, are determ ined, women m ust create new conditions, take
control of their determinants. But how does one come to know this? On
the other hand, if women go beyond the prescribed limitations on the
basis (presumably) of something outside their conditions, such as being
able to see the injustice or damage of inequality, w hat is the dam age of
inequality? (103)
3I am alluding here to Biddy Martin's proposal that feminists take Foucault's work as
"methodological provocation" rather than as doctrine. See chapter 2 above.
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How can feminism at one and the same tim e claim victimization and
agency? Fem inism m ay very well "run aground" on such questions, as
MacKinnon assesses the above dilemma. A key exam ple is an impasse in
feminist, political theory of sexual violence and sexuality regarding concepts of
agency and victimization.
An Impasse in Feminist Theory

In my view, feminism is at an impasse where it fails to confront dilemmas
that flow (in part) from the paradoxical nature of the subject of feminism, and
slides, instead, into a polarized view of the subject as either victim or agent.
Correspondingly, a potentially dialectical relation betw een opposition and
utopianism collapses into a fixed dualism. For example, in one variant of this
polarity, radical feminism has sometimes straddled two extremes of, on the one
hand, a projection of amazonian (e.g. lesbian) utopics beyond the patriarchal here
and now, and, o n the other, a focus on victimization that locks us into this here
and now. This polarity, in my view, results from the fact that feminists have not
yet adequately theorized a praxis of transformation. H ow do we move from
what-is to what ought-to-be w ithout sliding into either extreme of denying or
resting within the lived contradictions of a subject in process? However, those
libertarian feminists who criticize radical feminist oppositional politics for
prom oting a "discourse of victimization" assume an equally rigid polarity
between victim and agent, opposition and utopianism.
The libertarian tendency in recent feminist theory emerged in the eighties
"sex debates" and congealed around a "pro-sex" argum ent that positioned itself
against the "anti-pornography paradigm" (Butler) as overly determinist. As I
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discussed above (see chapter 2), this tendency also runs through some feminist
theorists' (ab)uses of specifically poststructuralist strategies (including Butler's
defense of pornography). The m oral imagination at stake for a libertarian
post(feminist)structuralist position can be described as "libertarian pessimist" or
rather, as betraying an optimism of intellect and pessimism of will: This position
offers a playground of floating signifiers as corrective to the supposedly
determ inist, victim-ideology prom oted by MacKinnon and other radical
feminists. From a libertarian, pessimist vantage point, the project of radical
feminist critique of sexual violence "defeats itself" because, "[t]he m uted,
passive, and injured stance of the woman viewer would effectively preclude a
critical analysis of its structure and place w ithin the field of social pow er"
("Force" 113).4 Thus I return to Butler's claim, discussed in chapter 2, that
Andrea Dworkin's critique of pornography is a conceptual impossibility. Yet,
Butler's claim, in turn, defeats the very possibility of critique as negation. As
radical negation, critique moves between what-is and what-ought to be and thus
implies a contradictory subject that is at once contained by and beyond that
which it critiques, both an instance of ideology and utopian projection. From the
lived contradiction of a subject in process, Butler infers logical impossibility,
where MacKinnon (and de Lauretis) infer the reality of consciousness as paradox.
This theoretical confusion (between logical and real contradiction)5 is also, of
course, a political/ethical assum ption about the (im)possibility of radical
negation/utopianism in feminist thought. I suggest that this assumption might
4"The pornographic fantasy does not restrict identification to any one position, and Dworkin, in
her elaborate textual exegesis, paradoxically shows us how her form of interpretative mastery can
be derived from a viewing which, in her ow n view, is supposed to restrict her to a position of
mute and passive injury" (114, italics in original).
^1 am indebted to Jocelyn Hoy for this point. Personal communication.
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underlie some or most recent feminist efforts to move "beyond" an oppressor-

oppressed model of power (or any of its variants, for example, master-subject).
To elaborate I w ill take a closer look at the "pro-sex" objection to radical
feminism as "victim feminism."
A key, early articulation of the "pro-sex" position was advanced w ith the
publication of two anthologies, Powers of Desire and Pleasure and Danger. Both
texts were instrumental in the process of academic legitimation discussed above
(see chapter 2), nam ely the production of a taxonomy of feminism in which
radical feminism is redefined as "cultural feminism" and the term degraded to
one of the lower rungs in intellectual hierarchies of feminisms. The inclusion of
Alice Echols's essays in these anthologies was key to the position, articulated by
Echols, that "[cultural feminism has] its present incarnation in the anti-
pornography movement" ("Taming" 51). For example, the editors of Powers of
Desire argued that the anti-pornography movement "implied that [pornographic]
images of female vulnerability were fixed, universal, natural" (37-8). For these
and other critics, the anti-pornography movement and its ideology could be
traced to a radical feminist view of "women as fundam entally innocent, the
powerless victims of male cruelty and violence throughout the long history of
civilization. . ." (112). Thus Hester Eisenstein, although not using the tag
"cultural feminist" characterized Mary Daly's work as "biological determinist."
The argument, in short, is that radical feminist analysis of m en's victimization of
women is one that mirrors rather than critiques man as aggressor/w om an as
victim. However, I suggest that the very construction "cultural feminism"
depends on misreadings of radical feminists that conflate critical with uncritical
description of patriarchal reality. Echols, who was b o th instrum ental and
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influential in fram ing radical feminism as "cultural feminism" also provides a

stark case of such misreading. Echols's practice of misreading sets the process of
academic legitimation in sharp relief for the following reason: While w idely
cited, the basis for Echols's intellectual credibility as an authority on "cultural
feminism" is baffling—even a cursory reading of her essays shows a fast and
loose use of citation that strains the term "scholarship."
Echols's criticisms of "cultural feminist" authors such as Daly, Raymond,
Rich and Barry depend wholly on single, brief, quotations rem oved from the
context of argum ent in which these authors' w ords make sense. In a glaring
instance, Echols cites a paragraph from Kathleen Barry's Female Sexual Slavery as
an exam ple of cultural fem inists' "characterization of m ale sexuality as
compulsive and violent and female sexuality as m uted and ethereal" ("Yin and
Yang" 442). The paragraph in question is a short, personal account that Barry
gives about her ow n adolescence. "Kathleen Barry maintains," Echols claims,
"that her m other correctly advised her to beware of the infamous 'm ale sex
drive'" ("Yin and Yang" 442). She quotes Barry, "If I allowed a boy to kiss me
and one thing led to another then I w ould be getting him all excited and he
w ouldn't be able to control himself. His 'thing' w ould get h ard and then he
couldn't be expected to stop. I would no longer be a nice girl" (qtd. in "Yin and
Yang" 442). W ithout providing any further textual evidence, in direct quotes or
paraphrase, Echols draws the conclusion that "For Barry, as for her mother, it is
women's responsibility to tame and restrain the irresponsible and irrepressible
beast that is male sexuality" ("Yin and Yang" 442). Here Echols is citing Barry's
story as evidence that Barry endorses patriarchal morality. Yet Barry herself used
the story to foreground the meaning of a widespread cultural belief: " . . . My
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mother w asn't wrong. She was expressing the general belief of the 1950s about
the male sex drive—a belief w hich stands unchanged today "(Female Sexual
Slavery 256). Indeed, Barry goes on to analyze this "belief" as cultural ideology
revolving around male sexuality, an ideology which is central to the patriarchal
institution and bastion of male power that forms the subject of her book. As the
proverbial response goes in these cases—Did Echols read this book?
Echols reads Barry's description of cultural beliefs about w om en's passive
and m en's aggressive sexuality—including how those beliefs have been
internalized—as an endorsement of those beliefs. Echols thus seems to share
Butler's assumption that a "muted, passive, and injured" subject-position "would
effectively preclude a critical analysis of its structure and place w ithin the field of
social power." For both Echols and Butler, however, there is a striking elision of
the actual critical analysis engaged in the argument cited as evidence of "cultural
fem inism " or naive representational realism. Given th a t despite this
questionable scholarship, Echols's w ord is taken as authoritative on "cultural
feminism" there is more to scrutinize here than one example of poorly argued
polemic.6 At stake in m y argum ent is a process of academic de-legitim ation of
radical feminism. Furthermore, it is not the simple recovery of a particular
category, radical feminism, that motivates me as much as it is the question, How
and why has radical feminism been devalued as an intellectual and political
tendency? To put it in other words, this process of (de)legitimation points up the
extent to which the construction of "cultural feminism" is a political as well as
epistemological, conceptual strategy.
6Examples o f authors who a p p r o v in g ly cite Echols and accept her categorization o f "cultural
feminism" include Alcoff, Snitow, Freccero, McCaughey, and Phelan Identity Politics.
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Thus I return to the question of "interest" (the "interested story" of the sex
debates) that I posed in chapter 2. In chapter 2 my intent was to call attention to
the postfem inist representation of pornography as this representation w as
implicated w ithin processes of academic legitimation. I argued that the feminist
taxonomy of theory which pits "high" theory against "low" theory represents the
pro-pornography position as theoretically superior and thus obscures its own political
interest in p o rnography w hile establishing (another political interest)
professional legitimacy for the pro-pomography theorist. In the present chapter I
am concerned w ith how this interested story contributes to the impasse w here
feminist theory founders on the question of how to conceive of a subject that can
at once claim and contest victimization. Academic legitimacy is a political
interest that makes radical contestation/negation of male pow er difficult if not
unimaginable.
Both Echols and Butler's arguments display a peculiar lack of imagination
in their inability—or unwillingness—to conceive of a critique which at once
describes and negates the power it describes. From their perspective, to nam e
victimization is to endorse it. Ergo, (according to this argument) the injury could
not be so extreme. Ergo, radical feminist accounts of male pow er reify rather
than challenge traditional patriarchal ideology. And how can one not further
infer that the social reality of violation has been the product of hyperbole
belonging to a victim discourse, rather than the result of clear-headed analysis?
The "pro-sex" representation of "victim feminist" as it is circulated in
feminist academic publishing and teaching resonates disturbingly with a more
mainstream popular "post feminist" discourse associated w ith media-promoted
writers such as Christina Hoff-Sommers, Katie Roiphe, Rene Denfield, and
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Camille Paglia, all of whom challenge feminist critiques of violence for their
"scholarly" credibility as well as for their indulgence in "victim ideology." I
suggest that the characterization of the movement against violence as a discourse
of victimization, w ithin academia, must be understood in the context of this
contemporary popular/political discourse. This is a context in which "victims
have fallen from political grace," and subordinate groups are construed as
whiners clamoring for victim status and hence, on that basis, rights.7 I hope to
show that both discourses share an aversion from the force of feminist critique as
radical negation and interest in professional legitimacy in spite of their divergent
epistemological claims and professional stakes.
Having said as much, however, I also advocate an internal critique of the
m ovement against violence8 and radical feminist ideology, that is to say, a
critique of oppositional thinking and praxis from a position zuithin the
movement. An internal critique requires recognition b y members of the
m ovem ent (including its theorists) of one im portant legacy of the eighties
debates, namely, as feminist sociologist Lisa Brush p u ts it, "still-unsettled
questions of agency, consent and desire" (242). These questions have been
coopted by the popular postfeminist discourse and fill a vacuum w here an
internal activist and academic debate has failed to move forw ard on the issue.
For the eighties debates have resulted in an impasse for activists and critics
challenging sexual violence: w e are boxed in by the same polarity assumed by
the "pro-sex" argument. Unwilling to adopt the libertarianism of a "pro-sex"
7Stephen Steinberg assesses victims' "fall from grace" in "The Politics of Memory."
8Although there are different sites o f struggle against violence in the U.S, I w ill follow the lead of
Renee Heberle who, in an essay in Hypatia on anti-violence activism, refers to "the 'movement' as
including anyone who commits them selves to intervening in rape culture, whether it be through
legal strategies, shelters, grassroots organizing, church supported activities, or making public
policy" (73).
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focus on sexual self-determination, the movement against sexual violence tends

to em phasize violation at the expense of accounting for sexual agency and
transformation.9
The "Power" of "Speaking O ut" Against Violence

To engage an internal critique of radical feminism and the m ovem ent
against violence, from the perspective of the above impasse betw een violation
and self-determination, I re-visit the question of pow er discussed in chapter 1.
But I now examine the power of feminist theory from the angle of theorizing the
subject. How do feminist critics of violence understand and (re)construct women
as subjects? What are the implications of a feminist oppositional theory of pow er
for a theory of the subject, an d vice versa? One locus for exploring these
questions, and for an internal critique of the m ovem ent against violence, is a
discussion of a main strategy of this movement, namely, that of "breaking the
silence," and "speaking out," i.e. speaking out as victim s/survivors of sexual
violence. To begin this discussion, I turn briefly to Renee Heberle's critique of
"speaking out" and her question in a 1996 special issue of Hypatia focused on
violence: W hat if speaking o u t "furthers the reification of m asculinist
dominance" rather than contests it?" (65). The question of w hether speaking out
as a strategy reinforces rather than challenges m ale pow er is (as H eberle
suggests) a "counter-intuitive question" which, in m y opinion, provocatively
turns on its head a commonplace assumption of second w ave feminism: if one
woman told the truth about her life. . . the world would split open;, to p u t it in the
9I am indebted to theorist and activist Ann Russo for this formulation; see Russo, "'Feeding
People in A ll Their Hungers': One W oman's Attempt to Link the Struggle A gainst Violence with
the Struggle for Sexual Freedom" in Pornography: The Production and Consumption o f Inequality by-
Gail Dines, Robert Jensen and Ann Russo.
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words sometimes quoted from poet Muriel Ruckeyser ("Kathe Koilwitz"); that is
to say, telling our stories is the p ath to liberation. H eberle's question,
furthermore, points to the broader question of whether and to w hat extent our
ow n strategies for freedom might be implicated in the social construction of
victims.
This last question reflects a discursive context (in academia) shaped by a
"Foucaultian" challenge to the oppressor/oppressed, m an/w om an paradigm of
social power. In this context, feminists theorizing power draw a cautionary tale
about the n atu re of political resistance from Foucault's critiq u e of a
M aoist/Leninist model of power and resistance. This tale is hinted at by the very
word "revolution"—its moral is that we oppositional subjects should recognize
our complicity in power even as we resist power, lest we merely repeat w hat we
w ould reject.10 In the case of feminism—or so the tale goes—the w orry is not
that a new, external authority in feminism m ay crop up to replace the old
masculinism, but how an originally emancipatory discourse becomes the site of
its own normalization. In other words, how does feminism itself become the site
of disciplinary practices, or, more precisely, to what extent does feminism itself
produce "docile subjects," rather than, alternatively, subjects of w ide-sweeping
change? This question spurs m y internal critique of radical feminist anti-violence
praxis.
An internal critique requires re-conceptualizing radical opposition in
order to trace the ways that feminist contestation of violation has been coopted
into discourses of victimization. In contrast to both popular and academic post
10In fact one could draw the pessim istic inference from Foucault's arguments that w e are
doom ed to repeat what we reject, hence w ide-sw eeping transformation of the social order is
im possible and micro-politics alone viable.
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feminist accounts that root victim-ideology in radical feminism, I argue that a

tendency towards victimism can be traced to both internal problem s w ith
oppositional feminism and to external mechanisms that both radical feminism
and—to an even lesser extent—its critics have only begun to adequately
diagnose. These external m echanism s include self-identified fem inist
institutional practices insofar as these practices show signs of a (postfeminist)
retreat from oppositional and utopian imagination. O n the other hand, radical
feminism as an oppositional imagination risks an absolutism that allows for
cooptation: like any radical negation of existing power, this im agination is
fraught with ethical/political challenges. Internal critique means extending the
oppositional imagination of feminism rather than jettisoning it. In order to move
out of the impasse between violation and self-determination, feminist thought
needs to probe both the force and limits of oppositional thinking/imagining.
PART 2: Feminist Rage: Ressentiment or Resistance?

Radical Feminist Critiques of "Victimism" and Moral Imagination
An early (1979) critique from w ithin the movement was articulated by
Kathleen Barry (in Female Sexual Slavery) who cautioned feminists to beware of
"victimism," an ideology that objectifies a woman as victim and reduces her to
the sum of her damages (35). Barry suggested that feminists replace the term
"victim" w ith "survivor" w hen referring to women who have been sexually
exploited. Victimism, I suggest, points to the further danger of defining and thus
objectifying one's identity as victim, a problem not wholly if at all circumvented
by the alternative of "survivor" since "survivor" as identity also tends to reify the
experience of (surviving) sexual violence. In other words, victimism points to the
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danger, for oppositional subjects, of becoming bound to the oppressor and to

oppression itself as a source of value. Elaborating on this very danger in an essay
entitled, "The Way of All Ideology," poet and theorist Susan Griffin reflects on a
political imagination that becomes snared in a narrative of opposition to an
enemy
I can be angry. I can hate. I can rage. But the moment I have defined
another being as my enemy, I lose part of myself, the com plexity and
subtlety of my vision. I begin to exist in a closed system. When anything
goes wrong, I blame m y enemy. If I wake troubled, my enemy has led me
to this feeling. If I cannot sleep, it is because of my enemy. Slowly all the
power in my life begins to be located outside, and my whole being is
defined in relation to this outside force, which becomes daily more
monstrous, more evil, more laden w ith all the qualities in m yself I no
longer wish to own. The quality of my thought then is dim inished. My
imagination grows small. My self seems meager. For my enem y has
stolen all these. (289)
Does "naming the enem y" dim inish the moral imagination as Griffin
suggests, tuning consciousness to a single, monotonous narrative of blame? By
focusing on an Other as enemy do we potentially lay waste to the imagination,
vesting this Other, as Griffin suggests, with all power for whom we are(are not)?
If this is the case, how can radical feminist thought distinguish itself from w hat
we have scrutinized as masculinist and imperialist oppositional thought? In
other words, how does feminist thought distinguish itself from a patriarchal,
oppositional imagination based on hatred of the Other? In particular, w hat are
the implications for that radical feminist thought which has insisted on "nam ing
the enemy"? Rather than reject the strategy outright, I suggest that feminists
heed Griffin's warning and probe the limits of feminism's moral imagination as
oppositional.
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W hen does opposition to an enemy th w art rather than expand moral

imagination as a source of political action? The theme has been most famously
elaborated by Nietzsche's attem pt to go "beyond good an d evil" w ith his
genealogy of morals, a historical account that diagnoses western morality itself as
ressentiment. Ressentiment provides a paradigm of moral imagination as bound
(destructively) to a category of opposition. Nietzsche critiques ressentiment as an
epistem ology and ethics of resentm ent central to w estern, judeo-christian
m orality w hereby moralism becomes a refuge for powerlessness. Political
theorist W endy Brown's use of Nietzsche for w hat she calls "postm odern
exposures" of feminist epistem ology as im plicated in ressentiment provides a
p oint of departure for my ow n internal critique of the movement against
violence. Brown is also a useful foil for my ow n critique of the uses and abuses
of postm odernism as any kind of corrective to existing dilemmas facing this
movement a n d /o r its epistemological and ethical bases. In the end, my aim is to
distinguish feminist moral imagination from ressentiment, b u t also to theorize
ressentiment as a moral and epistemological trap for this sam e imagination.
N ietzsche's critique of ressentiment is a "cautionary tale" (Brown) for any
oppositional subject that places itself as o u tsid e/in n o cen t of the pow er it
contests, as if ". . .our wants have made all our lies/holy" (Audre Lorde,
"Between Ourselves" The Black Unicom).
Nietsche's Critique of Ressentiment

Ressentiment sums up the problem, indeed sickness of western morality as
oppositional, for this moral imagination is the achievement of the weak whose
suprem e w eapon, lacking the force of deeds, is morality itself. Ressentiment
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implies a form of envy and vindictiveness on the part of the powerless towards
the powerful: a weaker group/individual demonizes a more powerful other as
the enemy to blame for its weakness. Ressentiment suggests a consciousness that
invents its enemy as a repository in which to vent its rancor on behalf of an ever
fresh inventory of im agined injuries. This is the moral im agination of
powerlessness—the consciousness of a group or individual who is, or perceives
itself to be, powerless.
Thus, w ith the concept of ressentiment, Nietzsche excoriates w hat he calls a
"slave morality," an imagination defined by its negation of the masters (the vital
"nobles" in Nietzsche's mythography) hence its "sickness":
While every noble m orality develops from a trium phant affirm ation of
itself, slave morality from the outset says No to w hat is 'o u tsid e/ w hat is
'different,' what is 'not itself; and this No is its creative deed. (Genealogy of
Morals, 1,10)
For Nietzsche, Western Morality is lasting evidence of the slave's success in
its rebellion against its powerful other, for, as Frederic Jameson puts it, morality
is a ruse "whereby the [slaves] infect the [masters] w ith a slave mentality—the
ethos of charity—in order to rob them of their natural vitality and aggressive,
properly aristocratic insolence" (201). With its em phasis on charity, "slave
morality" ingeniously converts its own incapacity to strike back against the
masters (to "act," in Nietzsche's view) into a new virtue, en-coding its very
w eakness/powerlessness as (moral) authority. Such a Morality, then, results
from a strange, and pathetic, alchemy whereby necessity is converted into virtue.
The slave uprising in ethics begins w hen ressentiment itself becomes
creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are
denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an
imaginary revenge. (Genealogy 1,10)
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Morality is, in sum, a slave mentality seeking revenge against the masters
through symbolic means, an imagination that reverses any scale of values that
m ight benefit the powerful and degrade the weak. Proclaiming weakness as
strength, m orality/ressentiment is "imaginary revenge." This is an imagination
defined through a dosed system (Griffin): For the creature of ressentiment, all the
power in her/his life begins to be located outside, and his /her whole being is defined in
relation to this outside force, which becomes daily more monstrous, more evil, more laden
with all the qualities in herself she no longer wishes to own (Griffin). Feminism (and
socialism) for Nietzsche, was a loathsome exemplar of this moral imagination as
was any ideology of equality, due to the fact that such an ideology reviled
hierarchy on m oral grounds—a true sign for Nietzsche of ressentiment (c.f.
Lovibond, "End of Morality"). It is necessary to keep Nietzsche's anti-feminism
in mind while addressing the issue of whether ressentiment is also useful for
feminists (or for those who engage any liberatory/oppositional discourse) as a
critical tool to assess the potentialities and limits of feminism's moral imagination
as oppositional and, indeed, as moral.
Feminism as Ressentiment?
In "Feminist Hesitations, Postmodern Exposures," Wendy Brown invokes
Nietzsche's critique of ressentiment as a provocation to feminists currently
"nervous" about postmodernism. Indeed Brown "exposes" this anxiety as rooted
in ressentiment. Feminism, she argues, is implicated in ressentiment to the extent
that it substitutes m orality for politics and thus flinches from its ow n
complicity—as a historically specific practice and ideology—in power. Feminist
resistance to postm odernism is thus explained as rooted in the belief that
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"powerlessness is truthful (moral) while power inherently distorts" (76) a view

that is at the h eart of ressentiment. For, according to Nietzsche, as Brown
paraphrases his argument,
. . . moral ideas are a critique of a certain kind of power, a com plaint
against strength, an effort to shame and discredit domination by securing
the ground of the true and the good from which to (negatively) judge it. In
this way, of course, morality itself becomes a power, a weapon (which is
how it eventually trium phs).. .(75, emph. in original).
O ne m ight say that, according to Brown, fem inist resistance to
postmodernism is the product of an atavistic attachment to the truth of morality
and morality of truth. Brown's argum ent reflects w hat philosopher Sabina
Lovibond and others have called a postmodern attraction to Nietzsche's call for
"an end to morality" as "end to truth" and vice versa. For example, in On the
Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes.
As the will to truth gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of
that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a
hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe— the most
terrible, m ost questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all
spectacles (IE, 27)
In an essay reflecting on "endism" in post-modern theory—death of the
subject, death of metaphysics, etc.—Lovibond points out that this celebrated end
to m orality is tied to the post-m odernist "debunking conception of truth (or
reason) as such—not a critique of some historically specific cognitive 'reg im e'..."
(67). Nietzsche's "morality," she points out, "consists in an orientation not only
towards goodness, but also towards truth" (64); this morality
comprises not just the sphere of values and conduct, but the whole restless
compulsion to measure reality against our ideals and to labour over the
defects w hich this com parison brings to light. A nd since one of the
realities that we treat in this way is the cognitive state in which we may
162
find ourselves at any given moment, 'm orality7 in this inclusive sense is as
m uch an epistemological as a practical category.. .(64)
Nietzsche's critique of ressentiment is his indictment of this will to truth as
"a kind of self-directed violence/7 Lovibond writes, "the object of which is to
bring our actions (and eventually our thoughts) into line with moral imperatives.
. . . 77 (64). Thus morality has a truth-value an d truth has a moral value, both
inextricably bound to one another zoithin an oppositional narrative of ressentiment.
For Brown, N ietzschean "p o stm o d em ity " offers fem inism an
"opportunity," namely, to disrupt this connection between morality and truth,
that is, "to radically sever the problem of the good from the problem of the true"
(78). She writes,
Surrendering epistemological foundations means giving up the ground of
specifically moral claims against dom ination—the avenging of strength
through moral critique of it—and moving instead into the domain of the
sheerly political.. .(75, emph. mine).
In Brown's view, Nietzsche helps us understand the extent to which
attachm ent to truth is an aversion from pow er and, as such, constitutes an
aversion from the realm of the "sheerly political." Correspondingly—so Brown
proposes—Nietzsche helps move feminism into postm odernism, which, for
Brown seems to mean moving into a realm of hum an affairs driven by sheer
poiver.
While I have no quarrel w ith an argument challenging feminist theory to
re-vitalize, and in fact, to prioritize the political, I'm not sure of the value, for
feminism, of Brown's "sheerly political" realm, i.e. a realm which cuts loose from
morality as such. While Brown challenges, "Could we develop a feminist politics
sans ressentiment (26)," I ask, in turn, does postm odernism mean a feminist
politics w ithout a moral force? If so, to what end? Brown's argument seems part
163
of a postm odern rubric which construes "the creation of norms [to be] the
fundamental act of repression" (Susanna Walters. ."From Here to Queer" 839)
and thus makes normativity in itself irredeemable. Brown's use of Nietzsche
correctly identifies—and disapproves of—feminism's moral investment in its
claims to truth. In m y opinion, this investment is problematic but should be
questioned and re-framed rather than discounted.
Like Brown, I would agree w ith the Nietzschean argum ent that the
imagination of powerlessness produces its ow n ideological snares and ruses (as
m uch as does power and pow erful groups), including, most relevantly for
women, a story of virtue in oppression. A critique of ressentiment calls into
question, for example, specific strategies through which feminists seek to
validate our claims of injury when we "speak out" about violence. Speaking out
means "breaking the silence," a strategy that has particular emotional and moral
force for anti-violence activist practices, such as, notably, Take Back the Night
(TBTN) rallies—events which rely upon the testimonial of survivors of sexual
assault. To what extent do feminist practices such as TBTN reinforce the belief
that, as popular post-feminist writer Katie Roiphe criticizes this practice, "There
is a pow er to be draw n from declaring one's victimhood and oppression" (44).
Brown seems to support Roiphe's contention with her argument that feminist
epistemology defined by breaking the silence is based in a "desire for knowledge
accounts that are innocent of power, that position us outside power" (25) and in
a desire "to make power answer to reason/m orality and to prohibit demands for
accountability in the opposite direction" (25). At stake is a narrative of virtue in
oppression: As if, Brown chides, "truth is always on the side of the damned, or
164
the excluded, hence truth is always clean of power, always reproaches power"
(76). For her, ressentiment is not limited to the testimonial—a specific strategy
that I w ill discuss further below—bu t found in feminism's general, continued
investment in "some variant of consciousness raising as a mode of discerning and
delivering the 'truth' about women" (72).
Consciousness and The Truth of Experience

According to Brown, consciousness-raising assumes a theory of truth
which cannot withstand the postmodern turn in feminist thought. She criticizes
M ackinnon's theory of consciousness-raising, for a prim e example, as
"foundationalist": In its attempt to "deriv[e] from within women's experience the
grounding for women's accounts," MacKinnon's theory constitutes an attem pt to
find a foundation of/in knowledge outside the social (and the domain of power,
"sheer" politics) ("Exposures" 72).11 We are provided, again, w ith an
explanation for feminist resistance to postmodernism: Foundationalism motivates
philosopher Seyla Benhabib when she questions whether postmodernism might
very well remove feminism's "reason for being" in its attack on the "unified self"
(qtd. in Brown, "Exposures" 71).12 In response to this kind of concern, Brown
argues,
[D ispensing with the unified subject does not mean ceasing to be able to
speak about our experiences as women, only that our words cannot be
H-Kate Ellis, in a Socialist Review essay, uses a similar argument in a different idiom —literary
criticism—w hen she expresses skepticism towards "The activism of women in the preceding
decade [which] had conferred on women critics an authority that enabled them to break through
the distorting structures of sexism and to reveal the hitherto hidden truth of our experience as
women excluded from canonical literary texts or concealed within them" (37).
I2 The full quote from Benhabib as cited by Brown: "Carried to its logical consequences,
poststructuralism leads to a theory without addresses, to a self without a center.. . Is not a
feminist theory that allies itself with poststructuralism in danger of losing its very reason for
being?"
165
legitimately deployed or construed as larger or longer than the moments

of the lives they speak from; they cannot be anointed as Authentic or True
since the experience they announce is linguistically contained, socially
constructed, discursively mediated, and never just individually "had."
(72)
In other words, postmodernism deprives women of Truth, capital T, not
agency. Thus, Brown argues, fem inist fear of postm odernism , w hile an
apparently political concern over the loss of (language for/of) agency, is in fact
epistemological at its core, not political. This is an interesting move given that
Brown herself relies primarily on an epistemological claim—about the linguistic
and discursive construction of experience—for her argument. In my opinion,
this approach signals a post(fem inist)structuralist turn characterized by a
prioritization of the epistemological, or, w hat Susan Bordo has criticized as
"m ethodologism ," nam ely a dynam ic in contem porary theory which has
involved "shifting the focus of crucial feminist concerns. . . from practical
contexts to questions of adequate th eo ry ..." (Unbearable Weight 218). It is ironic,
then, that the very argument through which Brown advocates the political (over
the ethical and the epistemological), in fact privileges epistemology as it elides
the political and ideological stakes of feminist contentions concerning the rubric
of "postm odernism "—and the kind of claims that are generated in its name,
including those m ade by Brown herself. In order to elaborate my point, I turn
back to Brown's critique of the category of experience in relation to her critique
of (the foundationalist moment in) consciousness-raising.
166
The Category of Experience

In her argum ent w ith M acKinnon's concept of consciousness-raising,
Brown throw s into question "experience" as evidence for feminist knowledge.
Brown's position here has much in common w ith Joan Scott's poststructuralist
critique of the category of experience; since Scott's essay is influential, a
sum m ary of her argum ent helps elaborate the theoretical context of Brown's
critique of consciousness-raising. Scott critiques a notion of experience that has
taken hold in U.S feminist theory associated with consciousness-raising, namely
experience as an extra-discursive realm implying a (metaphysics of) presence
and authoritative foundation for knowledge. Scott argues persuasively that this
notion of "experience" is problematic to the extent that it "rem ains within the
epistem ological frame of orthodox history" (24) and "precludes critical
exam ination of the workings of the ideological system " w hich produces
experience and identities. I agree w ith Scott that "experience" has become a
reified category in certain kinds o f feminist discourse, by w hich I mean it
som etim es functions to obscure its ow n social dynamics as a concept and
political process via a concealing rubric of authenticity. In this w ay "experience"
denotes a domain of "immediacy"—the realm of the (presumably unmediated)
"stories of our lives." This concept of experience in feminist discourse has had
the effect of concealing its construction through racial and class ideologies: hence
the criticism that white middle class women's "experience" became the norm for
experience-as-such in second-wave feminist contexts. Another crucial issue, I
suggest, is that a feminist discourse of "stories of our lives"—including perhaps
especially those recounted in the survivor's testimonial—has im plied a certain
problematic valorization of feelings and subjectivity as "authentic." A significant
167
question that emerges from Scott's argument as applied to Brown's concept of

ressentiment is this: To w hat extent do authenticated accounts of oppression,
violation, identity tend to hold power to be accountable but prohibit accounts from the
other direction (Brown "Exposures")?
By making experience a problem rather than a given, Scott's argument
shakes up feminist "common sense" insofar as "common sense" means "taken
for granted." However, by the same token, this critique of experience risks
eroding "common sense" in its Gramscian meaning as a mode of knowing
constructed through hegemonic practices. De Lauretis's account of "experience"
as a "social process" suggests this Gramscian "common sense":
. . .by experience, I do not mean the mere registering of sensory data, or a
purely m ental (psychological) relation to objects and events, or the
acquisition of skills and competencies by accumulation or repeated
exposure. I use the term not in the individualistic, idiosyncratic sense of
something belonging to one and exclusively her own even though others
m ight have 'sim ilar' experiences; but rather in the general sense of a
process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed.
Through this process one places oneself or is placed in social reality, and
so perceives and comprehends as subjective (referring to, even originating
in, oneself) those relations—material, economic, and interpersonal—which
are in fact social and, in a larger perspective, historical. (Alice Doesn't 159)
If "experience" implies the construction of "subjectivity" in a w ay that can
obscure its own larger historical determinants, it is also the case that, as a term of
fem inist praxis, "experience" refers to a dem ystification w hich exposed
experience as social process. In this vein, MacKinnon refers to consciousness-
raising as a practice which unpacks "the concrete moment-to-moment meaning
of being a wom an in a society that men dominate, by looking at how women see
their everyday experience in it" (Theory of State 86).
168
To return to Brown, the problem w ith her argum ent is that it prioritizes
the epistem ological over the historical and political and thus abstracts
"experience" (and consciousness-raising) from its context of political
significance—the feminist reconstruction o f common sense at stake in the
historically specific praxis of consciousness-raising. This strategy becomes
pronounced in Brown's use of Foucault to critique MacKinnon.
Consciousness or Confession?
According to Brown, M addnnon is committed to a process of verification
which "in its epistemological-political operations" ("Exposures" 72) depends on
a procedure of unm asking and excavating hidden tru th and a notion of
experience as an interior, hidden realm of women's subjectivity. Thus Brown asks
her reader to note an "inferred homology" (72) between consciousness-raising
and the practice that Foucault critiques as confession:
The m aterial excavated [in consciousness-raising], like the material
uncovered in psychoanalysis or delivered in confession, is valued as the
hidden truth of women's existence—true because it is hidden, and hidden
because women are oppressed, silenced, and privatized. (72)
The inference, however, is flawed. First, if consciousness-raising assumes
that experience—its truth—is "hidden" does it follow that the value of this truth,
once excavated, derives from the fact that it is hidden? Brown's inference is a
fallacy that abstracts consciousness-raising from its historical context of
significance; the effect of this abstraction is (rather than homologous relation) a
conflation of confessionalism w ith consciousness-raising. This conflation
depends, in turn, on a confused concept of "privacy." While the concept of
privacy (and of the privacy of experience) has a significant currency in both
169
confessionalism and consciousness-raising, it has this currency w ithin different

economies, as it were, of meaning.
In Foucault's analysis of confessionalism, power (e.g. pow er of the church)
is perceived to operate through an economy of repression: a private space (of the
"soul" and sexuality) is constructed in relation to a repressive power. Repressive
power is that which silences, thus mandating the privacy of the soul and its
secrets, its truth. In this frame, freedom is construed as revelation—revelation of
a se cret/tru th contained w ithin a private, interior space over and against the
repressive silencing of power. Hence the dram a of tru th against pow er in
ressentiment. Brown thus summizes Foucault's notion of the 'internal ruse of
confession": "Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not
belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity w ith freedom"
(Foucault qtd. in Brown, "Exposures" 73).
Consciousness-raising as the "voicing of w om en's experience," and
"breaking the silence," according to Brown, "acquires an inherently confessional
cast" because women's subordination is privatized. Looking again at MacKinnon's
theory, she writes: "[c]onsciousness raising, as/lik e confession, delivers the
'hidden tru th ' of women and w om en's experience" ("Exposures" 73). This
concept of truth accounts for w hat Brown calls a "paradox" in M ackinnon's
work: "W hile women are socially constructed to the core, wom en's w ords about
their experience, because they issue from an interior space and against an injunction to
silence, are anointed as True, and comprise the foundations of fem inist
knowledge" ("Exposures" 73, emphasis mine).
Brown equivocates here, conflating two notions of the private—that of
psychic inferiority and that of the private, social sphere of w om en's everyday
170
life.13 In confessionalism the private is constructed through the same means that
repress it, through a process of revealing an interior tru th to an authority who
mediates it. The presence of a mediating authority—the church, priest, expert
therapist—is a defining feature of confessionalism w hich distinguishes it from
consciousness raising14—a point that Brown simply omits. In the frame of the
confessional, speaking against an injunction to silence becomes an end in itself, it
becomes the very definition of freedom. But within the paradigm of consciousness
raising, the private realm is not a psychic inferiority b u t the realm of the everyday
of women's subordination, re-defined through speech w hich reveals its political
meaning. There is a difference between speech as disclosure of a hidden,
psychological interior and speech which explodes the "private" sphere of
everyday sexual subordination. Rather than simply revealing male power as a
repressive force, consciousness-raising reveals the operation of m ale power as
imbricated w ithin daily life on a micro-political level. Engaging this micro
analysis as consciousness-raising, feminists practiced w hat Foucault preached
long before it became popular in feminist discourse as "Foucaultian." This point
is made succinctly by Karen Davis who analogizes M ackinnon's concept of
consciousness reusing to Foucault's genealogy.
In its focus on the minutiae of personal interactions and on matters that
had heretofore been marginalized, trivialized or consigned to the private
sphere, feminism developed techniques of analyzing 'the m ost immediate,
the most local power relations.' (138)
13i am indebted to Bonnie Mann's critique of a sim ilar/sam e equivocation regarding the
"private" in Hannah Arendt for my discussion here. Unpublished paper presented at Feminist
Militancy Forum, Northam pton, MA, Spring, 1990.
14 Linda A lcoff and Laura Gray make this point. In addition, A lcoff and Gray and other writers
point to the w ays that CR has been recttperated by confessionalism . See my discussion below.
171
Feminist Uses of Poststructuralism vs. Postffeministlstructuralism:

In sum , Brown's critique of ressentiment fails to register the context of
struggle in which women's experience has its (however problematic) "authority."
Consequently, her account seems to echo a popular postfem inist skepticism
directed at the "cultural authority of feminism" (Patrice McDermott), especially
with respect to accounts of violence as "victim feminist." In an incisive critique
of popular postfeminists, Patrice McDermott shows how these writers have
advanced an "honest positivism" against what they construe as the sophistry—or
sheer irrationality—of feminists who, I would add, include poststructuralist and
radical feminists alike. When positivist postfeminists dispute feminist claims
about violence, the epistemology of their argument contrasts sharply with a
"postmodern exposure" of these same feminist claims as themselves implicitly
empiricist and positivist—as grounded in a notion of women's experience as the
foundation of truth. Indeed some poststructuralist feminists take MacKinnon
and other radical feminists to task for theory that w ould "suspend [. . .]
recognition that women's 'experience' is. . .interpreted ivithout end" ("Exposure"
72, emph. mine), as Brown puts it. Contrastingly, it is this very interpretative
ambiguity that is the bone of contention for popular postfeminist criticisms of
radical feminism.
McDermott points out that writers such as Christina Hoff Sommers
contest the scholarly credibility of feminist academics and activists by mobilizing
a rationalist and empiricist rhetoric (although rarely engaging empiricist method)
that confirms mainstream, mass cultural understandings of "truth" and "reason."
This rhetorical strategy is used to dispute the concept of structural, male power
and, in my opinion, is especially mobilized against feminist research on male
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violence. For example, Hoff Sommers, Rene Denfield and Katie Roiphe question
the credibility of two influential studies of rape—the w ork of Diana Russell and,
more recently, M ary Koss. Both Russell and Koss expanded existing,
legalist/p o sitiv ist definitions of rape by interpreting the "dangerously
ambiguous" (Denfield 67) accounts that their interviewees provided of sexual
force as sexual assault15: Because these interviewees did not always themselves
classify their experiences as "rape," or because they provided contradictory
rather than straightforw ard descriptions of sexual assault, the classification,
"rape" is deemed by the postfeminists to be "pure victim mythology" (Denfield
67). As Hoff Sommers opines, "The women were there, and they know best how
to judge what happened to them" (214) Thus H off Sommers summ arizes
Roiphe's—and her own—"straight-forward human point" (214) in the latter's
criticism of Koss. One m ight say that if We never called it rape16 describes a
common experience for so many women, then it might be the case that this very
failure to classify rape constitutes a common and rational response to a society
that stigmatizes rape victims. Postfeminists, however, hold to a credo that
scholars should take women at their xuord. If we [women] never called it rape, it is
not rape. This is surely a strange twist on—perversion of—the feminist precept,
"always believe the victim," and at one level obviously conflicts w ith a method
of interpretative indeterm inacy advocated by theorists under the name of
postmodernism.
Kate Ellis's advocacy of a postm odern politics of interpretation, for
example, drips sarcasm on MacKinnon's claim that "[R]ape [is] whenever a
15See Russell, Rape in Marriage and Sexual Exploitation and Koss, afterward to I Never Called it
Rape.
1^ Robin Warshaw, I Never Called it Rape addresses this very theme of denial and memory.
173
w oman has sex and feels violated," retorting, "At the time? Afterwards? A year
later?"(45). The idea that violation occurs when a woman says it does presents a
problem for Ellis. "This means," she explains, "that tru th is not endlessly
deferred as Derrida woidd have it. It is located—indeed it is always located—in the
experience of women as silenced victims" (45 emph. mine). Thus Ellis re-frames
a real problem for the feminist movement—speaking-out as an unquestioned
strategy—in terms of theoretical adequacy rather than political priorities, as
Derrida would have it. While Hoff Sommers and company w ould clearly have
none or little of D errida, the post(fem inist)structuralists and p o p u la r
postfeminists find common ground on two inextricable points: First, postfeminist
critics on either side of the academ ic/popular divide seem to find common
ground in a shared aversion to the emphatic normative dimension of feminist
critique as radical negation of male power. Secondly, this aversion from critique
is implicated in specific legitim izing mechanisms of intellectual discourse,
whether positivist mainstream or "deconstructionist" in academic enclaves.
My criticism of a convergence of postfeminism and poststructuralism
m ight become more clear through examination of a contrasting case, a feminist
who uses aspects of poststructuralism to extend rather than jettison a feminist
critique of male power. Laura Ring's critique of Katie Roiphe's The Morning After
uses Butler and other poststructuralist arguments to reveal strikingly different
ideological stakes from those advanced by Butler herself, with respect to similar
issues—victim ization, agency an d consent. Thus R ing en g ag es a
poststructuralist and feminist critique of the voluntarist assumptions, an d the
"fantasy of sovereign subjectivity" behind Katie Roiphe's insistence that w e take
w om en "at their w ord" and that w e therefore construe w om en as choosing
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individuals. Ring points out that Roiphe's individualist argum ent—her claim,
for example, that a woman need only resist harassment with a "good slap in the
face" (qtd in Ring, 62)—elides the contradictions of gender which constrain
resistance vs. passivity, the social obligations for women to be both "good" and
"bad," or (I would add) the "double binds" of oppression, to use Marilyn Frye's
lucid concept (see "Oppression," Politics of Reality). In this context, consent is
indeed complicated, as is refusal. "The inability to resist unw anted sexual
attention is not an individual problem of 'will' or 'strength of character,' b u t the
product of multiple, conflicting desires, shaped by cultural discourses th at are
themselves productive of domination" (Ring 62). In short, Ring clearly invokes
poststructuralism to complicate rather than discount earlier feminist concepts of
violation and agency. Ring assumes that if gendered experience is ambiguous
rather than unitary in meaning, this is due to contradictory forces—double binds
—that are themselves determinants of the experience of violation a n d /o r pleasure.
How would feminists otherwise make sense of the cognitive shift from sham e to
rage that is at stake in feminist re-interpretations of the experience of sexual
v io len ce?17 For surely there is an outer limit to possible interpretations of
experience, a limit disclosed/im posed by the historical specificity of feminism as
a challenge to male domination? The model of interpretative indeterminacy
proposed by Butler (in the context of pornography), and by Brown, Scott and
Ellis is one that abstracts experience from this historical and social context. I
suggest that, in turn, one stake of this (ab)use of poststructuralism is a retreat
from the normative force of feminism as, on the one hand, a critique of reality,
17A lcoff and Gray 280; see discussion, below .
175
sans quote marks— including the reality of domination—and, on the other hand,
as a positive, utopian construction of common-sense.
Silence of the Damned

Is it politically desirable, in the end, to abandon the wager that truth is on
the side of the damned? In answer, I refer back to Said's proposal, discussed in
the previous chapter, that "bearing witness" is a moral task of the intellectual. At
stake, I think, is something like the silence of the "dam ned." In a critique of
postfeminism that Lisa Brush aptly construes as involving a "struggle for the
soul of feminism," Brush argues that "The feminist focus on harm occurs in a
culture that enforces a sexual double standard of victimhood" (242). In this
context, an ethical and political question at stake for the feminist intellectual as
witness—or for she who ensures that truth side with the damned remains as follows:
Whose experience counts as evidence? With respect to Scott's position that "the
evidence of experience. . .reproduces rather than contests given ideological
systems" Deborah Chay suggests "the possibility that it may make a difference
who is testifying as to the evidence and in w hat context" (642). For, as long as
women's claims of harm remain devalued—especially true for women of color—
it seems necessary to account for the moral and political weight of these claims.
The silence of pain is at the root of speaking out as a strategy and explains
the force of its appeal for victims of violence. I draw here on an essay by Renee
Heberle, who, in turn, refers to Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain to argue that
issues of representation—speaking the tru th and exposing the reality of
violence—are built into the social phenomenology of violence and pain. "[P]ain
is ritually used to reinforce the reality of the otherwise phantasmatic pow er of
176
illegitimate political regimes" (66). Torture, a world-making—and un-making—

activity imp lies/involves "the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of
absolute power" (Scarry qtd. in Heberle 66). This conversion is accomplished
largely through the language-destroying force of torture. As H eberle
paraphrases Scarry, "pain may be the one instance where one person, she who is
in pain, experiences something like absolute certainty and another, she who
listens and even tries to empathize, experiences something like absolute doubt"
(66). Drawing on H annah A rendt's concept of "common sense" as a kind of
"worldliness," I would add the notion that torture destroys "common sense,"
that is to say, it destroys experience—a social process through w hich subjects
position themselves in relation to a larger world as a common world. As Heberle
writes,
The prisoner's world is systematically and ritualistically destroyed; she is
separated from the objects in the world, material and ideological. . .She
thus loses her sense of place a n d /o r identity. If she speaks the words of
the torturer, in confession, the world sees her as further split off from what
made her real outside. (66)
At stake here is the effects of torture and violence on speech as a kind of
action, for, in the words of Arendt, "A life without speech and without action . . .
is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a hum an life because it is no
longer lived among men [sic]" (Human Condition 157). The function of torture as
a "cartography of silence" (Adrienne Rich), which robs its victims of nothing less
than the world, leads to an understandably urgent focus on representability and
speech for these same victims.
Heberle derives a parallel—not a "literal com parison" (67)—between
Scarry's concept of torture and the function of sexual violence for male power
and the state. Like torture, sexual violence is world (un)making; Heberle thus
177
compares "the representation of the truth of pain" at stake for victims of torture,
and "women's efforts to describe the experience of sexual violence" (67). She
refers to the way in w hich "the [societal] response to the exposure of sexual
violence, the persistent interrogation of the veracity of w om en's claims, whether
they 'wanted it' and 'w hy d id n 't they leave?"' (67) resonates w ith the ways that
torturer-regimes discredit their victims as "subversives" w ho provoked their
own torture.
In the context of a political phenomenology of sexual suffering and
violence, feminist focus on "speaking out" is, Heberle argues, both justifiable and
inadequate as strategy. H ere I return to Heberle's question about male pow er
cited earlier in this chapter, for, according to Heberle, "speaking out," a strategy
which assumes the epistemological imperative of "exposing the reality of sexual
violence," might ultimately contribute to a reification of the very pow er it w ould
contest. Heberle derives this hypothesis from Scarry b u t her argum ent also
depends largely on a theory of power influenced by Foucault, and thus resonates
with shifts in feminist theory of power discussed above in chapter 1.
Heberle proposes th at sexual violence becomes sexual pozuer as a
consequence of the very "unrepresentability of the pain inflicted" (68). In other
words, if torture props up the otherwise "phantasmic and illegitimate pow er"
(67) of a torturer-regime, similarly, sexual violence shores up patriarchal pow er
as a fiction of totality. "The reality of the pain of torture [sexual violence] is
translated into the spectacle of the regime's power through the struggle over the
terms of representation" (Heberle 67). That is to say, the pow er of torture is real
ized through the very struggle, on the part of its victims, to represent the truth of
sexual violence/torture to the world (67). Thus, in her view, a political strategy
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against violence that attempts to represent power in /as totality is one th at may
end up confirming rather than challenging this fiction. The project of speaking
o ut to expose the reality of pain, assumes, rather than challenges, a (fictional)
view of power as coherent rather than fragmented and contradictory. A
"totalizing" interpretation of male pow er is implied by the movement's reliance
on state (public patriarchal) protection, a tactic which limits women's agency.
In contrast to a totalizing interpretation of power and violence, Scarry's
phenomenology of torture explains torture as a sign of the fragility of the state
who uses it; analogously, Heberle asks, "what i f . . .sexual violence were shown
to be the sign of the instability of masculinity rather than the sign of the totality
of patriarchal power?" (67). In this vein, Heberle urges feminists to re-frame our
strategy of speaking out about violence in new terms—terms that expose the
limits of male power. She proposes a strategy based on "self-consciously
performative narratives" that foreground the "multiple sites from which women
experience sexual violence," as w ell as "stories of resistance which subvert the
images of women as vulnerable" (69).
While I agree with H eberle's proposal for transforming anti-violence
strategy, it is not clear to me that the epistemological shift she names would
bring about this transformation—a shift from totalizing to non-totalizing
accounts of power, an d /o r from strategies focused on "exposing reality" to
"performative" strategies. Heberle fails to theorize "totalizing" in her dismissal
of "totalizing theories." I propose a concept of totality that—as the focus of
feminist strategy—might be part of the solution rather than problem. If "totality"
m eans an emphasis on analyzing male power and patriarchy as systemic and
entrenched, then speaking-out strategies further reify, rather than contest, male
179
power to the extent th at they obscure this totality, and, for example, fixate on
suffering as individual pathology. Thus I refer to Heberle's ow n argum ent that
state-focused strategy potentially contributes to the normalization of violence to
the extent that it
individuates w om en as vulnerable objects of masculinist pow er (women
have to argue their immanent vulnerability in order to prove they were
raped and in need of services) and disallows public acknowledgm ent of
the complex logic of sexual violence writ large. (69).
Reification means taking the part for the whole, and in this example,
abstracting women's pain from the complex logic of sexual violence writ large
—abstracting women's pain from the totality of forces that give violence its social
meaning in relation to power.
In her effort to bend Scarry to fit a poststructuralist frame, H eberle's
argum ent ties itself in a knot w ith her notion of pow er as a fictional,
phantasmatic, and fragile "reality" (reality, always in inverted commas) that,
nevertheless, she qualifies, has "m aterially real effects." W ith this claim,
ideological commitments to an (albeit vaguely theorized) theoretical agenda begin
to supersede w hat had seemed a larger ideological commitment—to an internal
critique of the movement against violence. If male power, like the pow er of
torturer-regimes, creates, in its "solipsism" (a term used by Scarry, qtd in Heberle
67), a fiction of what MacKinnon calls its metaphysical near-perfection, how do
we distinguish critique as negation from description that "shores up" this fiction,
and thus masculine hegemony? (See MacKinnon, Theory of the State 116-17). We
re-join the question, addressed above, of how to conceptualize critique.
In my opinion, the difference between theory that confirms and theory
that contests power does not turn on a difference between a theory of pow er as
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"total" vs. a theory of pow er as contradictory and fragmented. Radical analysis

of systemic pow er hardly precludes analysis w hich exposes contradictions,
including, especially, accounts of resistance. By the same token, there is nothing
subversive in an account of pow er as "fragmented" unless it is an account that
also reveals the extent of the material effects of power, that in short, also focuses
on "totality." By valorizing the fragmented and contradictory and, conversely,
de-valuing "totality," Heberle's argument preserves rather than challenges an
old antinom y (the universal as opposed to the particular); the antinom y is,
furthermore, an illusion of post(feminist)structuralism that gets in the w ay of
Heberle's potential political use of poststructuralism for an internal critique.
In sum , Heberle's critique of "speaking out" has strengths and weaknesses
that are relevant to my project in this chapter. On the one hand, Heberle
provides a necessary counterpoint to Brown's argum ent to the extent that
Heberle weighs the phenomenology of suffering at stake for an oppositional
imagination potentially ensnared by ressentiment. In o th e r w o rd s, an
oppositional imagination invested in exposing the reality of violence is itself a
specific consequence of violence as an erosion of language as a world-making
activity. This argument begins to wedge open a space of theorizing beyond the
impasse in feminist discourse polarized by a focus on violation on the one hand,
and self-determination on the other, particularly in its call for an anti-violence
discourse that exposes resistance to male power as a framework for speaking out
about sexual violence. However, in the end, Heberle (like Brown) blunts the
critical force of her argument with a reliance on theoretical frameworks that gloss
over the historically specific discursive contexts in which "speaking out" as
feminist praxis has been robbed of its meaning as praxis/action .
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The Social Production of "Victim-feminism"

Various critics have assessed the ways in which feminist anti-violence
activism has been domesticated by interlocked social processes revolving around
a model for change that remains uncritical of its reliance on state protection.18
Kathleen Ferraro, for example, cites "the transform ation of domestic violence,
from a liberation to a crim e discourse" d u rin g the eighties an d argues th at
"criminal justice and m ental health" are the two m ain directions into which [U.S]
activism has been re-channeled (85-6). Indeed, a social services m odel for change
is the other side of the coin for a movement relying on a criminal model. The
social services model (which focuses on the battered woman) as much as the
criminal model (which focuses on the batterer), individuates wom en's experience
of patriarchal violence an d tends to re-define (the experience of) violence as
social pathology. This m odel slates w om en for (therapeutic) treatm ent rather
than mobilizes resistance.
In the context of the above critique of anti-violence activism, feminists
have assessed the cooptation of "speaking out" and consciousness-raising. For
example, Louise Armstrong, who pioneered fem inist expose an d analysis of
incest, has criticized a shift from consciousness-raising to therapy in the anti
incest movement as, largely, a consequence of a movement-culture defined by
recovery and twelve-step frameworks. She questions the value of w hat she calls
a new "discourse of breaking the silence" through telling stories, a discourse that
proved to be
. . . a silence more powerful than suppression precisely because it could be
posed to us that the telling of stories was change. It offers the picture of
18These writers include Kaye-Kantrowitz, Ellen Scott, Dobash and Dobash and Fraser {Unruly
Practices).
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change, of a new freedom to speak, a new willingness on the p art of society

to hear (so long as all they are hearing is stories). (76 emphasis mine)
A rm stro n g 's a rg u m e n t reso n ates w ith S co tt's an d B row n's
poststructuralist critique of experience for it suggests that the new discourse of
"stories" precludes critical examination of the historical emergence of the identity
"survivor" as a political identity. Instead, this discourse of stories weighs in on
the evidence of experience as its untouchable (and invisible) cultural capital, and
equates "a new freedom to speak" w ith freedom itself. While Brown roots
confessionalism in consciousness-raising itself, Armstrong's argum ent suggests
that confessionalism is an effect of the cooptation of consciousness-raising by a
therapy model of "praxis." Consciousness-raising in the wom en's liberation
movement, she argues, was "conceptually antithetical to therapy" (11), a "use of
shared stories to extrapolate commonalties" and fuel analysis, "which in turn
[was intended to] lead to activism for sodai change" (11). CR groups aimed to
remove the secrecy that had long protected various violences against women in
order to publidy "raise the issues and raise the kind of outcry that w ould force
measures to reduce their inddence" (11). In contrast, a contemporary discourse
of breaking the silence allows women to feel that if we speak out and tell our
stories,
nothing then has to happen. And seeing this picture of progress, people
feel good, and even the victims, telling their stories, feel they are in the
picture and they feel good. (76)
For example, consider as evidence of Arm strong's point, Katie Roiphe's
description of a Take Back the Night Rally:
The strange thing is that as these different girls—tall and short, fat and
thin, nervous and confident—get up to give intensely personal accounts,
all of their stories begin to sound the same. Listening to a string of them, I
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hear patterns begin to emerge. The same phrases float through different
voices. Almost all of them begin T w asn't planning to speak o u t tonight
b u t.. . / even the ones who had spoken in previous years. They talk about
feeling helpless, and feeling guilty. Some talk about hating their bodies.
(33)
The description which comes from a postfeminist position is deceptively
similar to the radical feminist criticism offered by Armstrong of the m ovem ent
against sexual violence. The significant difference between the two writers—a
difference between an internal critique and a postfeminist critique of anti
violence strategy as victim discourse—turns on their respective interpretations of
this same evidence vis-a-vis a notion of feminism as critique. For A rm strong,
unlike Roiphe and others discussed above, the problem w ith a discourse of
stories, and therefore with confessionalism, is that it severs a connection between
speaking out and action19 —action against rape and rapists—and tends to make
feeling good a substitute for politics. Speaking out about one's pain becomes the
point rather than a confrontation with and critique of specific social structures.
Subsequently, the words spoken by survivors do seem to issue from a private,
interior space of, for example, feelings about violence—trauma, healing, recovery—
abstracted from a political reality of institutions, events, social relations and
social agents. In sum, while postfeminists root victim mythology in feminism's
19 The critique of ressentiment is relevant here as well: As Deleuze explains it, "Ressentimetit
designates a type in which reactive forces prevail over active forces. But they can only prevail in
one way: by ceasing to be acted. Above all w e m ust not define ressentiment in terms o f the
strength of a reaction. If we ask what the man of ressentiment is, we must not forget this principle:
he does not re-act. And the word ressentiment gives a definite clue: reaction ceases to be acted in
order to become something felt (send)" (Nietzsche and Philosophy 111). In a discourse of
confessionalism , it's not so much that speaking out become the act itself, but that speaking out as
an expression offeeling becomes the act in contrast to "disruptive speech" which "violently
confronts" the existing, dominant belief system (Alcoff and Gray, see below). In Pure Lust, Mary
Daly's discussion of "potted passions," em otions abstracted from social context as m ediated by
therapies and other aspects of confessional culture in the U .S. such as "fu lfillm en t" and
"depression" makes a similar point of critique.
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oppositional imagination, Armstrong's critique of What Happened When Women

said "Incest," to cite part of the title of her book on this theme, suggests that a
feminist victim discourse is the consequence of a retreat from oppositional
politics. In order to elaborate this last point, I conclude this chapter by
discussing the distinction between speech as oppositional feminist praxis and the
ways that speech has been domesticated by confessionalism as a consequence of
larger social forces contributing to the depoliticization of feminism.
Survivors' Speech: Distinguishing Ressentiment from Resistance

Ressentiment is a danger that attends feminist praxis to the extent that our
strategies for negating male pow er can reinscribe women's powerlessness. A
m om ent of defiance, in other w ords, can re inscribe one's victim status,
producing a new "victim subjectivity" (Alcoff and Gray). Feminist theorists
Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray engage a Foucaultian analysis of "survivors'
speech" to ask, What are the power-mechanisms of discourse through which
liberatory movements can/do become de-railed and de-radicalized? In contrast
to Brown, Alcoff and Gray's strategy is to salvage the liberatory power of speech.
For them, Foucault helps show how the potentially oppositional force of
survivors' speech becomes subsumed by a discourse of confessionalism. Alcoff
and Gray use Foucault's argument that speech is produced through discourse.
As a contradictory site for political resistance (260) speech is, on the one hand, an
arena of power for social movements. However, on the other hand, "bringing
things into the realm of discourse works also to inscribe them in hegemonic
structures and to produce docile, self-monitoring bodies who willingly submit
themselves to (and thus help to create and legitimate) the authority of experts"
185
(260).20 Alcoff and Gray discuss the speech of those who have survived rape,
incest and sexual assault in the context of this "contradictory space."
Alcoff and Gray suggest a contrast betw een feminist "disruptive speech,"
w hich engenders political subjects dem anding action, and confessionalism,
which produces the docile bodies of victims in need of expert help. To this end,
they cite two key social mechanisms: Feminist speech has been re-inscribed in the
terms of the therapeutic confessional of mental health establishment-discourse on
the one hand, and on the other hand, the sensationalized confessional of the mass
media. Their discussion calls attention to a social mechanism im portant to
Foucault's account of confessionalism yet overlooked by Brown, namely, the role
of the expert m ediator "hearing" the confession. In confession, "the speaker
discloses her innermost experiences to an expert mediator who then reinterprets
those experiences back to her u sin g the dom inant discourse's codes of
'norm ality'" (Foucault qtd. in Alcoff and G ray 261). In this way the speaker is
inscribed into dom inant structures of subjectivity: her interior life is m ade to
conform to prevailing dogmas" (261). Thus, to return for a moment to Brown's
deploym ent of Foucault, an interior life is produced by the confessional—an
inferiority repressed/confessed and valued as truth. It is Nietzsche's discussion
of the role of the priest as mediator of "truth" that, furthermore, provides a clue
(overlooked by Brown) to a feminist critique of confessionalism as the m odem
production of social ressentiment. For Nietzsche, ressentiment implies a mediator-
priest who detonates ressentiment/im ag in a ry revenge before it explodes as
rage/real revenge. Furthermore, key to this strategy of containing rage is the fact
20w e see here a strong echo of N ietzsche's critique o f m orality/truth as a violence to self and
indeed Foucault's notion of the truth/pow er couplet (Stuart Hall) in disciplinary discourse and
confessionalism is clearly indebted to N ietzsche.
186
that the priest, as shepherd to disgruntled herd—a herd seething w ith ressentiment
— invents the wound he sets out to heal. He does this by interiorizing suffering,
directing the sufferers inward:
and the shepherd says to h erd that "you alone are to blam e for
yourself!'—This is brazen an d false enough: but one thing at least is
achieved by it, the direction o f ressentim ent is altered..(Genealogy HI, 16
emphasis mine)
In other words, the reactive nature associated with ressentiment partly
derives from a dynamic of interiorization in which attention is deflected from an
external to internal cause of suffering. In the case of feminism, speaking out as
an expression of rage is rechanneled into an act of confessing vulnerability and
trauma (trauma becomes construed as an entirely internal event rather than an
effect of social causes). The direction of ressentiment is altered: survivor's outrage
is re-directed onto the psyche, not perpetrator, as the site of action. As Alcoff and
Gray point out of the danger of the confessional, "The confessional focuses
attention onto the victim and her psychological state and deflects it away from
the perpetrator" (279). This means that the "survivor's speech gets constructed
as a transmission of her 'in n er' feelings and emotions w hich are discussed
separately from their relationship to the perpetrator's actions and the society's
rules of discourse" (279). A crucial "move from privatization to a public or social
arena does not occur" (280) and, the impact of the personal is political is
reversed.
To extrapolate from Alcoff and Gray I would suggest that confessionalism,
as it subsumes feminist speech, points to the re-production of a new private
sphere. Correspondingly this tren d robs feminism of its force as counter
publicist—as public contestation of dominant institutions (see chapter 2). The
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trends that Alcoff and Gray dte as two forms of confessionalism—the therapeutic
model and the sensationalized, talk-show culture model—are in fact indices of
larger social processes contributing to the decline of public space. Two prim ary
trends are, first, forces of bureaucratization—thus a state-model of action—social
service and criminal—fully reliant on the expertise of a battery of professional
m ediators. Secondly, these are forces of com m odification—thus, the
"Oprafication" of society (to use political commentator Katha Pollitt's term) in
which speaking-out is sensationalized in, contradictorily, public spectacles of re
privatized experience.21 Both developments reverse the impact of politicized
speech as "counter-publicist" insofar as truly politicized speech
serves to educate the society at large about the dimensions of sexual
violence and misogyny, to reposition the problem from the individual
psyche to the social sphere where it rightfully belongs, and to em power
victims to act constructively on our ow n behalf and thus make the
transition from passive victim to active survivor. (Alcoff and Gray 261)
Elaborating further on Alcoff and G ray's argum ent, I suggest that
contemporary mechanisms of confessionalism foster ressentiment by producing
"discursively constituted victim subjectivities" (Alcoff and Gray) through which
the moral authority of a victim without a persecutor—righteous in her expressions
of vulnerability—replaces the moral force of rage, the latter implying direct
attention, for survivors, on the social agents of oppression and violence. As
Alcoff and Gray ask, w hat might constitute "subversive speaking" in a context
where such a shift (to confessionalism) has occurred? One thing is certain: "the
formulation of the primary political tactic for survivors should not be a simple
incitement to speak out, as this formulation leaves unanalyzed the conditions of
21Carl Boggs and Laclau and Mouffe in separate arguments identify these as dual trends in
(post)m odem industrial capitalism; Boggs focuses on the "Retreat from Public Space."
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speaking and thus makes us too vulnerable to recuperative discursive

arrangements" (280). Thus they attem pt to articulate a strategy of "disruptive
speech."
Disruptive speech as Disrupting Discourse

Alcoff and Gray are careful to extricate their notion of disruptive speech
from a repressive model of power, and therefore to counter the pessimist thrust
of a Foucaultian argum ent th at w ould doom all liberatory m ovem ent to
"revolution" of the same. W ithin the frame of a repressive paradigm of power,
all speech is or is like confessionalism, a disclosure of truth against pow er which
ties the speaker to a dynamic of "simple negation," where to oppose the "enemy"
is to exist and w ithout him one is nothing. This same dynamic exempts the
speaker from recognizing her ow n complicity in power. Disruptive survivors
speech, however, can not be reduced to this model for, it means to come into
"violent confrontation with" the dominant order" (Alcoff and Gray 269, emph.
mine). Rather than a simple negation, disruptive speech implies "a transformation
of the dominant formulation" (Alcoff and Gray 269, emph. mine), the creation of
new meanings. It is here that the relation between discourse and speech has
liberatory potential.
Alcoff and G ray invoke Foucault's argum ent th at "discourse,"
distinguished from speech or a collection of speech acts, denotes a particular
configuration of possibilities for speech acts. "Through rules of exclusion and
dassificatory divisions that operate as unconsdous background assumptions, a
discourse can be said to set out not what is true and w hat is false b u t w hat can
have a truth-value at all, or in other words w hat is statable" (265). Alcoff and
189
Gray p o in t to the example of concepts such as "rapist fathers" or "rapist

husbands"—only recently statable. Within a context in which such "objects" are
not statable, survivors are n o t believed. Hence, the disruptive force of
consciousness raising derives from m aking the unstatable statable (265-7).
Breaking the silence is disruptive w hen it presumes objects antithetical to the
dom inant discourse, e.g. "husband rapist," "which in turn will affect how we
understand 'wife', 'woman,' 'sexuality,' 'heterosexuality,' and even 'm an'" (268).
It presents new "objects" of speech and new concepts that challenge existing
"positivities" (267). From this vantage point, it is erroneous to consider silence as
merely "repressive." On the contrary, Alcoff and Gray point out that the silence
which makes concepts such as "husband rapist" unstatable is homologous to
madness rather than repression. Correspondingly—to extrapolate from their
argum ent—if silence is madness—that non-sense excluded from discourse—then
truth-telling, rather than disclosure of hidden depths implies an "expansion of
logical space."22 MacKinnon, for example, writes of consciousness-raising that,
The point of the process was not so much that hitherto-undisclosed facts
were unearthed or that denied perceptions were corroborated or even that
reality was tested, although all these happened. It was n ot only that
silence was broken and that speech had occurred. The point was, and is,
that this process moved the reference point for reality as such. (Theory of
State 87)
As Alcoff and Gray p u t it, fem inist disruptive speech thrusts new
"objects" into the space of their prior conceptual impossibility. New descriptions
clash w ith old, rupturing the dom inant discourse, (potentially) forcing new
^ T h is is Richard Rorty's gloss on MacKinnon's concept of consciousness-raising as method.
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explanations and forms of accountability, and creating new possibilities o f/ for

action.23
Activating Rage: The Moral Force of Truth Revisited

Alcoff's and Gray's argum ent implies th at we ought to distinguish
disruptive speech—speech that violently confronts the existing social order—
from domesticating speech—speech that produces docile, female bodies. In an
attem pt to give form and content to the former, Alcoff and G ray suggest that
survivors find strategies through w hich to "activate rage." They conclude that
feminists need to bear witness rather than confess: "to speak out, to name the
unnam able, to turn and face it dow n" (Nancy Ziegenmayer qtd. in Alcoff and
G ray 287). Their argument resonates w ith Renee Heberle's proposal that
survivors "become subjects of violence, not only by practicing reactive self-
defense techniques but through the concrete practice of intervening in any
^ A lco ff and Gray write, "The simple use of the term 'husband rapist' will. . . have the effect of
calling into question rules of the dominant discourse for forming statements about whether a
rape occurred and how to distinguish rape from sex" (268). This analysis, obviously indebted to
MacKinnon, suggests that the feminist description of "rape" is a rupture in heteropatriarchai
discourse. For Mackinnon, the patriarchal concept of rape presents an epistem ological problem
for fem inists, defying clear boundaries between sex, seduction and rape. The problem, for
exam ple, arises in feminists' effort to define "rape" as forced vs. consensual sex: one might
w onder how to distinguish "rape" from "sex" given that "sex" has been inscribed, by
heteropatriarchai discourse within narratives o f force and (eroticized) female resistance to male
force. Further, if women's prior relationship or intimacy w ith a rapist becomes evidence (to male
law ) of her "consent" to rape, and thus its classification as sex, not rape, what is the meaning of
w om en's consent to sex? (See Chapter 9, "Rape: On Coercion and Consent," in Toward a Feminist
Theory of the State). Feminist descriptions—as rape—of acts conventionally legitim ized as sex
(seduction/dates), creates a new linguistic context through w hich feminists contest a range of
social concepts and relations whether legal definitions or popular common sense regarding
gender and (hetero)sexuality. Charles M ills, in an article entitled "Alternative Epistemologies"
describes the fem inist exposure of "seduction" as rape in terms of a "double shock" and
"knowledge as inversion." The world is shaken, not by disclosure of unknown facts but by
looking at the same facts in an "inverted" way.
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cultural and linguistic inscription of their bodies as always already rapeable"

(71)24
The above proposal means shifting tactics of speaking o u t from
testimonials of suffering (addressed to an audience that includes men) as rites of
female vulnerability, to testimonials of militancy and outrage. Consider, for
example, a contrast between the Take Back the N ight rally described by Roiphe
and a rally organized on Fathers Day by the Survivors Network in Boston, 1989.
"We know who you are, w e know w hat you're doing to women" was the slogan
of the day and the speak-out was called "Naming, Shaming and Blaming" in
which women were encouraged to express outrage and publicly name the agents
(typically protected by their anonymity) of violence. We know who you are, we
know what you're doing to ivomen, the chant of the Boston Fathers Day
protest./rally succinctly expresses the sentiment, as does the slogan of WAC
(Women's Action Coalition): WAC IS WATCHING. I add to this list Alcoff's and
G ray's ow n choice of an example of bearing witness—the graffiti action of
women students at Brown University w ho listed names of alleged rapists on
bathroom walls all over campus.
At this point—to retu rn to my critique of Wendy Brown—I ask, Do
feminists need, then, to relinquish moral force as an obstacle to moving into the
"sheerly political"? The strategy with which wom en confront perpetrators of
violence shows that moral urgency moves feminism into the domain of the
political, in the context of fighting violence against women and other forms of
24Heberle is in fact paraphrasing an argument by Sharon Marcus. See Marcus, "Fighting

Bodies." A related argument can be found in Martha McCaughey, Real Knockouts: The Physical
Feminism of Women's Self-Defense. McCaughey's historical and analytical discussion of fem inist
self-defense is an important contribution which helps move fem inist theory through the im passe
between violation and self-determination. See also other key texts in an emergent tradition of
feminist self-defense theory: Langelan, Back Off! and Delacoste and Newman, Fight Back.
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oppression. Following the work of theorists A udre Lorde, M arilyn Frye, and
others w ho discuss the cognitive and moral dimension of women's anger, I call
this urgency "rage", "a moral emotion," as lesbian-feminist philosopher Barbara
Houston puts it.25 Houston argues:
W hen we experience anger we judge that w e have been w ronged. Our
personal experience of anger presupposes a background of shared norms
regarding who counts as a person, what counts as acceptable treatm ent of
and wrongful interference with persons. ("In Praise of Blame" 151)
In the call to re-activate rage Alcoff and Gray thus underscore the value of
fem inism 's m oral imagination as oppositional. Rage, a collective feminist
em otion is political/ethical and discursive—it expresses an d inscribes a
m oral/political shift from victim to activist, and a shift in interpretations of
experience from shame to rage, from "it happened to me" to "it happened to
us."2*
In conclusion I return to the fact of the impasse with which I started,
namely w here feminism is polarized by a focus on victimization on the one hand,
or a focus on self-determination, on the other. In my opinion, this impasse is
partly d u e to a domestication of rage through historically specific social
mechanisms which have re-produced feminist speech as a victim discourse. An
internal critique of radical feminism as far as it is affected by this impasse and
these social mechanisms, requires going beyond the re-activation of rage in order
to also account for the contradictory nature of women's sexuality as both
constrained by the reality of victimization/objectification and, also, already
resisting these constraints. However, no account of sexual agency is possible
2^See Frye, "A N ote on Anger" in The Politics of Reality 84-94 and Lorde, "The Uses o f Anger" in
Sister Outsider. 124-133.
2*Credit belongs to Sandy Goodman for this formulation; personal communication.
193
without accounting for these constraints, an account which, I have been arguing,
requires m oral imagination—and rage, in its cognitive political sense—in order
to negate, and thus de-limit, that power which creates a fiction of itself as totality.
194
Chapter 4: Some Uses and Abuses of Disenchantment: Re-Thinking the

Utopian Imagination of Lesbian-Feminism in a Queer Era
Introduction: The Disappearing "Magic" of Lesbian as Feminism's Utopian

Sign
They want to make it theirs, to adopt it as a monument

and shelter it within their walls, a gratuitous object whose
only purpose is to be found in itself. But what if it were a
war machine?
—Monique Wittig
A lesbian who does not invent the word is a lesbian in the

process of disappearing.
—Nicole Brossard
"Lesbians are escapees from our class."

—Monique Wittig
The 1970 appearance of a Lavender Menace1 among the ranks of the

w om en's movement marked a particular turning point and discursive shift in
second wave feminism. "Lesbian" had em erged as a political (feminist)
identity—as a new, normative identity based on "woman-identification." As
such, lesbian was w hat Katie King has term ed "feminism's magical sign"
operating both "as a visible sign of change in individual [women's] lives" and as
"the possibility of radical change in all women's lives" (83). As a magical sign,
"lesbian" functioned as something of a Trojan Horse in the body politic of
feminist discourse, as well as w ithin the "walls" of the dominant patriarchal
1In Daring To Be Bad, Alice Echols describes the "Lavender Menace action" of 1970, when a group
of 40 lesbians disrupted scheduled proceedings at the Second Congress to Unite Women and
pushed the Congress to adopt a set of resolutions advanced by "The Lavender Menace: Gay
Liberation Front Women and Radical Lesbians" (214-5). The phrase "lavender menace" was
appropriated from Betty Friedan who had coined the phrase to warn that lesbians were
undermining the women's movement (212).
195
culture. Its symbolic force was due to the following scandal—the attribution of
political content to lesbian. This rhetorical act made manifest the buried logic
haunting the surface of anti-feminist discourse, namely, the meaning of feminism
as a (potentially) radical threat to the heterosexual order.2 The threat became a
prom ise w hen the coiners of "The W oman-Identified-W oman M anifesto"
declared that lesbian was "the rage of all w om en condensed to the point of
explosion" or when, later, Adrienne Rich, in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence" defined lesbianism in terms of a "continuum" of resistance to
male supremacy, what she called the "lesbian continuum."
The very phrase "magical sign" in feminist theory is a sign that lesbian has
lost most if not all of its magic, scaled down by a politics of interpretation which
takes the utopian concept of the lesbian continuum, for example, to suggest "a
cross-cultural and trans-historical continuity of the 'lesbian' to which all women
have access and in which they m ay all be 'spiritually' lesbians" (King 84). True
enough b ut the point begs a further question: w hat did women desire access to
through the sign of lesbian? W hy was lesbian the contentious, yet explosive
symbol of solidarity and sign of collective rage in the context of a women's
liberation movement? Why was lesbian a symbol of feminist freedom? And how
has its symbolic force been neutralized?
"To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way
it was'. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a m om ent of
danger" (255) wrote Walter Benjamin. One memory of "the way it w as" reduces
2In a sim ilar vein, Monique Wittig discussed the shadow of victory in all disavowals o f lesbians
as "real women." The "victory" in both cases is the effect of a symptomatic reading, which, as
Rosemary H ennessy argues is an example of feminist m ethod as critique: "As a strategy of
ideology critique, symptomatic reading draws out the unnaturalness of the text and m akes visible
another logic haunting its surface" ("Feminist Standpoint" 93).
196
lesbian to a specter of m iddle class w hite w om en's desire for a sisterhood

without struggle; as such lesbian is a sign of "access" to a mythical freedom from
social reality. In response, I wish to take hold of a fugitive memory as it
glimmers on the verge of disappearance—lesbian as feminism's utopia.
Concept of the Utopian

. . . every age allows to arise. . those ideas and values in which are
contained in a condensed form the unrealized and unfulfilled tendencies
which represent the needs of each age.
Ideology and Utopia —Karl Mannheim
My use of "utopian" assumes a historically shifting and contested concept,

for, as Bronislaw Bazcko writes in his study, Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the
Idea of Social Progress, the utopian is "not in the least a neutral concept but, on the
contrary, strongly valorized and valorizing" (7). Bazcko's elaboration of the
utopian helps frame my own feminist inquiry into how "the realities of a certain
present, its modes of thought, belief, an d imagination are translated in or by
utopias, how utopias participate in the present while endeavoring to go beyond
it" (Bazcko 5). In the context of feminist discourse, utopianism emerges as a
contested ideal of a world beyond heteropatriarchy. This use of "utopian" for
my own argum ent is both descriptive and normative. As a descriptive category,
"utopian" refers to lesbian as a historically specific identity—lesbian-feminist—
and its "projective force" into the social im aginary of an era, even if this
"projective force into the imaginary is only mediocre and limited" (Baczko 5). In
this same vein, lesbian is utopian in the sense th at it implies "specific
demonstrations and expressions of a particular era," one which shows
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its obsessions, haunting fears, an d revolts; the scope of its expectations as

well as the paths taken by the social imagination; its way of envisaging the
possible and impossible. Going beyond social reality, even if only in
dream and as an escape is p a rt of that reality and offers revealing
testimony about it (Baczko 5).
In this sense, lesbian as a magical sign of access to feminism points to the
dream s and dilemmas of (in particular) the current of feminism historically
identified (and self-identified) as radical feminism especially insofar as the latter
focused on the project of constructing a counter-culture. The utopian meaning of
lesbian was most sharply punctuated by the hopeful hyphen linking lesbian w ith
feminist. In the context of feminist theory and rhetoric, lesbian, to the extent that
it was taken to represent the explosive rage of all women, functioned analogously
to the im agined class subjectivity of marxism—the revolutionary subject.
Similarly to the marxist concept, the utopian m eaning of lesbian suggested a
specific political, moral an d epistemological critique of reality. Thus, the
historically specific social identity of lesbian (like class) is (also) a normative
identity, proposing a specific ideal of lesbian, namely, an ideal of resistance to
heteropatriarchy.
The lesbian feminist normative definition of lesbian has been contested as
moralist—as a regulatory category defined through prescriptions for behavior.
By re-thinking lesbian as a utopian identity I w ant to complicate this critique. I
reject "moralism" while re-claiming the moral imagination at the heart of a
normative (feminist) concept of lesbian. "Moralism" in this context refers to an
ideology that shrinks the ethical imagination to a capacity for rule-making and
practices of regulating lesbian behavior.3 H ow ever, the lesbian-fem inist
3Such "moralism" in lesbian fem inist community practices tends to collapse politics into ethics
and ethics into personal interaction. I will discuss this point, in detail, below.
198
normative concept of lesbian cannot be reduced to moralism. By normative I refer

to the specifically ethico-political dimension of feminist imagination, that is to
say the moral imagination as "general beliefs about what ought to be possible"
(Babbitt 8). As a normative identity, lesbian feminism implied a utopian vision
of how the world ought to be, affirming a "women-identified" culture against the
grain of hegemonic "male identification." Insofar as lesbian feminism projects an
ideal of women's freedom and critique of wom en's subordination this vision is
worth re-thinking.
Lesbian, as feminism's utopia suggests "a set of symbolic meanings which
totalize as negativity a certain social order" (190) to cite Ernesto Laclau and
C hantal M ouffe's concept of the utopian. As a totalizing negation of
heteropatriarchy, lesbian utopianism is m orally and politically ambiguous—
both a sign of force for feminist politics and an obstacle to the same. For, in its
moment of negation, lesbian utopianism has implied an absolutist opposition
between lesbian/fem inism on the one hand, and patriarchy on the other.
Lesbian utopianism mitigates against politics to the extent that in its attempt to
secure a "perfect lesbian space, system, or economy that is altogether elsewhere"
(Jagose, Lesbian Utopics 2) to the here and now, it opts for retreat from the world
rather than engagement with political transformation.
In this respect, lesbian utopianism represents, in Lucien Febvre's words,
"an often pathetic testimony, not only of the fantasy and imagination of [a
predecessor generation] but of the innermost condition of a society" (qtd. in
Baczko, 6, em phasis mine). In this chapter I criticize an idealist moment in
lesbian feminism as pathetic testimony to a political inertia that, in itself, is a sign
of both broader trends of depoliticization in U.S. culture, and of historically
199
specific predicam ents facing feminism. Indeed, however pathetic, lesbian

utopianism reveals more about the innermost conditions of society than can be
attributed to the ideological determinants of euro-american idealism alone. In a
social order where, as Monique Wittig puts it, "Our [lesbians'] reality is fictional.
. .for traditional male culture" (Lesbian Body 9), perhaps lesbian can only appear
as utopian. Theorists such as Wittig claimed this utopianism as a positive force,
suggesting that lesbians possess "an entire fiction into which we project
ourselves and which is already a possible reality" (Lesbian Body 9). In other
words, a position of exclusion from reality becomes the point of departure for a
new, utopian imaginary.
My critical assessment of "uses and abuses of disenchantment" w ith
respect to the "decentering of lesbian feminism" (Arlene Stein) by queer identity
politics privileges this concept of utopianism. I aim at an internal critique of
lesbian idealism that refuses to forfeit its powerful moment of negation. Insofar
as the heterosexual social order remains enveloped by a m yth of its ow n
inevitability as natural—indeed, as a myth of its totality—lesbian as a utopian
negation of this fiction of totality suggests (to turn again to Laclau and Mouffe's
discussion of the utopian) an imaginary without which no radical politics is possible.
A Drama of Identity: An Overview

I chart the disenchantment of a lesbian point of view as stemming from
two developments in or related to feminist theory and culture over a fifteen year
span starting in the early eighties—first, racial and ethnic identity politics and
second, queer theory and cultural activism. In the first case, racial/ethnic
identity politics has complicated the social imaginary of feminist politics to the
200
extent that it seems nearly impossible to discern any uniquely "lesbian" vantage
point and makes likely that any putative lesbian epistemological privilege will
function as an alibi for material privilege—as an escape from the political reality
of women's class (and race) oppression .4
My particular focus is on how queer counter-discourse has displaced
lesbian feminism at the same time displacing the political challenges raised by race
and ethnic identity politics. I assess two significant moments in this shift from
lesbian feminism to queer identity. First, I assess a politics of lesbian identity as
an attachment to authenticity and "home." It is from this angle that my critique
of a lesbian feminist ethos of authenticity proceeds, insofar as this ethos has been
central to lesbian as a utopian identity. While identity politics has unmasked a
lesbian point of view as raced, and class-rooted—thus de-stabilizing a lesbian
authenticity— it has also tended to establish a new home in race/ethnic
authenticity. Thus enter the second moment of m y narrative—an 80s and 90s
queer politics of epistemology and culture (much influenced by and influencing
poststructuralist categories) which advances a protean identity and sexuality.
Indeed a racially/class complicated queer epistemology w ould seem to escape
the drama of identity often represented by turf wars over who belongs to which
category—ethnic, racial or sexual—by flouting rigid borders and flaunting
permeability. "Q ueer" has come to mean flouting identity in general as
constraint, and feminist-lesbianism in particular as identity desirous of a harbor
from danger, one that w ould therefore sanitize an d regulate lesbian/queer
sexuality.
^Numerous works can be dted as the source of this disenchantment. Key texts that have
challenged and extended a eurocentric radical feminism and socialist feminism include
Cohambee River Collective; Angela Y. Davis, Moraga and Anzaldua; Mohanty; hooks, Crenshaw.
201
Both moments, identity politics and queer politics, which in places are
overlapping a n d in places are mutually contradictory, force a reevaluation of
utopian claims for lesbian identity and culture that revolve around the notion of
a special vantage point or consciousness. However, both moments have dulled
the sharp edge of the lesbian point of view as a critique of heterosexuality. Two
m ain questions, then, are at stake for my analysis of the dram a of identity
politics: first, to w hat extent has lesbian functioned as an "escape" from race and
class politics rather than as a spur to imagine a freedom in which race and class
politics are central? Secondly, to w hat extent has the dram a of identity politics—
a term now including queer, lesbian an d /o r racial and ethnic identities—blunted
the sharp ed g e of a lesbian point of view and thus displaced the task of
"inventing freedom."5 I begin by evaluating the utopian imaginary of lesbian
feminism as an ethos of authenticity.
Part 2: Trying to Make it Real: Inventing Authenticity and the Ambiguous

Utopianism of Lesbian Feminism
The Anxiety of Authenticity
As a utopian identity lesbian generates an anxiety of authenticity, at once
presenting itself as an obvious and compelling vision—"as providing an implicit
if not explicit value system for all lesbians"—while also projecting itself as a
vision which "has to be fought for and scrupulously maintained by an iron force
of will in order not to be recuperated back into heteropatriarchy" (Martindale
5The phrase "invent freedom" is from Nietzsche as it com es through W endy Brown in an essay to
be discussed below , "Wounded Attachments," in which Brown uses N ietzsdie to critique identity
politics in terms o f its failure as a politics o f freedom.
202
and Saunders "Mapping Lesbian Ethics" 169).6 In other words, lesbian feminist
thought and culture has often presented a paradoxical view of lesbian as, on the
one hand, the natural expression of authentic selfhood and, on the other hand, a
product of deliberate willful construction. This paradox between lesbian as
spontaneous self-expression and willful construction is a legacy of lesbian as
feminism's magical sign, a sign of access. "Any w om an can be a lesbian," as
Alex Dobkin sang, a once popular position that emphasized a voluntarist concept
of lesbian identity, a matter of politics, rather than desire. Or, rather, from a
lesbian feminist perspective, desire w a s/is considered subject to social re
shaping.
The so-called sex debates of the eighties exploded tensions betw een
"identity" and desire, subjecthood and subjectivity. According to one narrative
resulting from the debates, feminism diluted the unruly and indigestible aspect
of the sexual aspect of lesbianism, and thus, the hyphenated lesbian-feminism
made lesbianism palatable.7 From th e perspective of this narrative—the
perspective of much current queer discourse—the utopian concept of lesbian
amounts to a rigid set of moral prescriptions. To be sure, the voluntarist strain in
lesbian feminism generates anxiety for those who fail to meet an idealized norm
of lesbian sexuality. The ideology leaves a gap where feminist thought has failed
to theorize a relation between normative, utopian and actual subjects, a gap
filled—and thus elided—by a new narrative of queer identity that, flipping over
^De Lauretis makes an interesting distinction betw een the ethical and erotic im pulses/ tendencies
in fem inist discourse (265-6 "Upping the Anti (sic) in Feminist Theory") in relation to the "sex
wars," a debate in which the contested meaning o f lesbian fem inism is central. Kathleen
Martindale and Martha Saunders extrapolate from de Lauretis to "map lesbian ethics." See below
for further discussion.
^For examples of this narrative in academic writing see Bearchell; W endy Clark; Echols, Daring;
"Taming," "Yin and Yang"; Phelan, Politics of Identity; Snitow et. al Powers of Desire; Vance; Arlene
Stein.
203
to the other side of the coin, abandons the normative altogether. For all its
aspirations to perversity, the new narrative forfeits the moral imagination that
made lesbian feminism so monstrous8 to begin w ith—an imagination that dared
to fuse lesbianism w ith feminism.
The Appeal of Authenticity as Utopian

While authenticity may have outlived its usefulness for lesbian/fem inist
discourse, it holds a clue to the tremendous appeal (as well as repulsion) that
lesbian as sign once exerted for women as a new political identity. Stuart Hall,
writing about the "decolonizing" effect of authenticity in the context of Black
diasporic liberation discourses, cautions that
We should not, for a moment, underestimate or neglect the importance of
the act of imaginative discovery which this conception of a rediscovered,
essential identity entails. (224)
"Essential," in this context, means an emphasis on "one shared culture, a
sort of collective 'one true self' hiding inside the many other, more superficial or
artificially imposed 'selves'..." ( 223). In a feminist framework we can think of
Mary Daly's re-valuing of female identity; she writes of women finding our
authentic Selves, and invokes an image of peeling back layers of femininity as so
many fabrications (Gyn/Ecology). Hall is addressing a milieu for whom such a
notion of an essential identity has been disenchanted. "Identity is production,"
Hall affirms, and notes that this is a view which "problem atizes the very
authority and authenticity to which the term 'cultural identity' lays claim"
(222). At the same moment Hall does not want to overlook the liberatory force
8I am inspired here by Bertha Harris's concept of lesbian literature as monstrous. (Fall 1977).
"What We Mean to Say: Notes Toward Defining the Nature of Lesbian Literature." Heresies 3.
204
of authenticity for oppressed groups. Thus he dtes Frantz Fanon to suggest that
the recovery of an "authentic" identity is often the object of what Fanon calls a
passionate research. . .directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond
the m isery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration,
some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us
both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others (223).
Hall points out that the "'hidden histories' of oppressed groups have
played a critical role in ... important social movements of our time" (224). In the
context of the w om en's liberation movement, for example, "woman" was a
"struggle concept" (Mies) and the category of (female) experience took on w hat
one second w ave writer called a "fantastic coherence" (Nel Morton qtd. in Daly,
Gyn/Ecology). The "discovery" of self and sisterhood through consciousness-
raising im posed (to cite Hall) an "im aginary coherence on the experience of
dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all forced diasporas" (224).
In a specifically feminist context, the "discovery" of a coherent female subject—
e.g. the discovery of a "continuum" of women-identified experiences—meant,
simultaneously, conceiving of women as dispersed people. This view resonated
for women who, involved in consciousness-raising during the seventies second-
wave movement, experienced an explosion of the ideology of the "personal"
w hich had locked women into their separate, individualized spheres of private
lives. As Anne Koedt p ut it,
the original genius of the phrase 'the personal is political' was that it
opened up women's private lives to political analysis. Before that, the
isolation of women from each other had been accomplished by labeling a
w om an's experience 'personal.' (qtd. in Freeman 139)
Lesbian feminism extended this analysis w ith the claim that the taboo
against lesbianism was a prim ary mechanism for separating women from one
205
another. The corollary and more utopian claim was, of course, that lesbian was
the site of a new and fantastic coherence through women-identification.
The Lesbian Self as Authentic Self

The writers of the "Woman Identified Woman" declared that to embrace
lesbianism was to
find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we
confirm in each other that struggling, incipient sense of pride and
strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this grow ing
solidarity w ith our sisters.. .(245)
The project of discovering one's "authentic self" as female, lesbian, Black,
Chicana, etc. has been subject to critique in recent years, not least by a post
structuralist disenchantm ent with identity and a rejection of the kind of claim
made by the writers of the Woman-Identified Woman, that in lesbianism,
We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves, (emphasis
mine, 245)
Shane Phelan, in her 1989 criticisms of "The Woman-Identified Woman,"
for example is struck by its definition of a lesbian who "acts in accordance with
her inner com pulsion to be a more complete and freer hum an being than her
society. . .cares to allow her" (240). Her criticism is shaped decisively by a
Foucaultian framework of interpretation:
We are faced w ith a society that exists to repress, on the one hand, and, on
the other w ith an authentic being fighting for freedom , defined in
opposition to that society. This 'inner com pulsion' to be free, and the
society that opposes it, move within the metaphor of power as repressive,
as silencing. Power functions, we are told, by lim iting, quashing this
authentic being. The inner self is left unexamined; it simply is, in the
tradition of abstract individualism. So we see here a rejection of Freud
206
and his followers, but not of a discourse th at refers to internal,

psychological drives. (Identity Politics 42)
In Phelan's reading, memory ceases to flash up at a moment of danger—
the m anifesto becomes a dead docum ent. "A bstract individualism ,"
"Freudianism," and (implicitly) "Foucaultianism" is noted by Phelan b ut not the
moment of struggle through which these ideas may have been reappropriated as
historically useful and oppositional. With respect to its historical usefulness
Phelan does concede the "definitive appeal" of the manifesto, and its portrayal of
lesbianism as a "more positive self-understanding than that offered by the
psychological establishment" (42). In this vein, she addresses the manifesto's
concept of a lesbian as the expression of female rage, arguing that
rage at least suggests internal integrity, w hereas earlier accounts
portrayed a tortured, pitiful victim of a dysfunctional childhood. While
still a battlefield, in this portrayal the lesbian's life is a meaningful struggle
rather than a pathological response. (42)
Thus the dead document now psychologized, is som ewhat resuscitated
through a gratuitous injection of "personal growth." Following Allison Jaggar's
taxonomy of feminisms, Phelan assesses radical lesbianism as a "psychologically
based account of women's oppression," a phrase relying upon a theoretical
framework in which rage fails to resonate except as something like a tactic of self
esteem. Phelan's account fails to register particular epistemological and political
shifts as stake in "rage," where rage is a process parallel to w hat Fanon called
"decolonization" for subjects overcoming the psychological effects of colonizing
207
regimes.9 My parallel is not intended to conflate political processes b ut to

foreground an aspect of women's oppression which like colonization, according
to Frantz Fanon
is not satisfied merely w ith holding a people in its grip and em ptying the
native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it
turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys
it. (qtd. in Hall 224)
A case parallel to second wave feminism (and partly the inspiration for a
feminist ethos of authenticity) can be found in U.S. black liberation movements,
where authenticity meant the power of the "discovery" that "Black is beautiful,"
a claim radically oppositional vis-a-vis a w hite hegemony constructed partly
through Euro-American contempt for black skin. The effect of white hegemony
on Black Americans has been detailed in its poignancy and horror by Toni
Morrison's m odem political Gothic, The Bluest Eye in which a "A little black girl
yeams for the blue eyes of a little white girl" and, Morrison writes ".. .the horror
at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by its fidfillment" (158 "Summer").
The capacity to name this horror, furtherm ore, is at the heart of any
historically useful critique of authenticity. Hall reminds us of the "sombre
majesty" of Fanon's insight, namely, that oppression is not only a "m atter of
imposed will and domination" b ut the "pow er of inner com pulsion" and
subjective con-formation to the norm" (Hall 226). Similarly, U.S radical feminists
have referred to what Daly (Gyn/Ecology) calls "m ind binding" and what
9Julia Lesage in an essay entitled "Women's Rage," reads Fanon's concept of decolonizing as
parallel to rage in a western feminist context.
What Fanon describes to us is a specific historical moment at which mental colonization
can be and is surpassed. As I look at women's mental colonization, I see our internalized
sense of powerlessness, our articulation into masochistic structures of desire, and our
playing out of personae that on the surface seem "passive," "self-defeating," "irrational,"
"hesitant," "receptively feminine," or even "crazy." Much of this behavior stem s from
internalized and suppressed rage. (426)
208
MacKinnon (Feminism Unmodified) calls "trained w eakness/' in short those

obstacles to liberation that feminists once discussed more broadly as forms of
"internalized oppression," the consequence of which is, the radicalesbians wrote,
"an enorm ous reservoir of self-hate" (244). The reclam ation of w hat Janice
Raymond has nam ed "integrity," viz. "an original wholeness that is rightfully
ours to begin with" (Transsexual Empire 163), is a liberatory process w hen "the
inner expropriation of [cultural] identity cripples and deform s" (Fanon qtd. by
Hall 226). In this sense, the ideal of fem inist/lesbian authenticity has implied a
m om ent of transgressing institutionalized and internalized, crippling and
deforming norms of femininity and compulsory heterosexuality.
Lesbian as "Homeland of the Mind"

In a lesbian feminist context, women took on the "fantastic coherence" of a
political imaginary in which "lesbian people" were soon central, and lesbian
writers such as Wittig conjured fantastic pasts: "There was a time w hen you were
not a slave, remember that" (Les Guerilleres 89 ), thereby projecting a home for
feminism in a present and future of w om en's (read: lesbian) culture and
community. In this way, many a second w ave feminist such as w riter Bertha
Harris undertook an "amazon expedition" in search of a cultural identity across
tim e/space. It is noteworthy that on this journey Harris w ent on to claim what
she called "the more profound nationality of her lesbianism " in the face of
striking differences between her personal history and physiognom y—"poor and
grubby" "lower class" "short and peasant-made" ("Nationality" 78)—and the
aristocratic pedigree of some of her "rich. . . long lim bed" (79) foremothers.
Acknowledging this dissonance in the genealogy of her personal lesbianism,
209
Harris nevertheless claimed that , "[l]ike every other dyke with a book in her
hand, I know that these [aristocrat and peasant alike] are the women o u r fathers
had stolen from us" ("N ationality" 79). For, as H all w rites of a similar
"discovery," "Such texts restore an imaginary fullness or plenitude, to set against
the broken rubric of our past," (225), or, I would add, present. Hall stresses that
such texts of imagined plenitude provide a resource "of resistance and identity,
with which to confront the fragm ented and pathological ways in which
experience has been reconstructed..." (225).
But the utopian quest for wholeness and authenticity can also militate
against resistance to the extent that "it always maintains that fascinating vitality
to which no historical reality can do justice" (Scholem 14). I cite Gerschom
Scholem's description of the messianic in the Judaic tradition. The concept of the
messianic, he w rites, "counterpoises the fulfilled image of wholeness to the
piecemeal, wretched reality available to the Jew" (14). Scholem thus elaborates a
dynamic of the utopian for oppressed groups who subscribe to w hat Hannah
Arendt has dubbed, in a different context, "two w orld theory," a Platonic,
"metaphysical fallacy" which assumes the existence of a world elsewhere to the
world of appearances, an other-world that is yet more real than the existing,
present world (Life of the Mind). The problem here is in a tendency to project a
utopian elsewhere outside of history and to thereby forfeit a "worldliness"
indispensable to politics and political freedom. Janice Raymond parallels a
tendency in lesbian culture that advocates "dissociation" from the w orld and
from political action.10 "Dissociation gives women the illusion that they can
retreat into an undisturbed time and space where a semblance of freedom can be
10Raymond is influenced here by Arendt's discussion of the w orldlessness and "inner

emigration" of the Jews in few as Pariah and Men In Dark Times.
210
preserved" (.A Passion for Friends 154). Thus Raymond succinctly characterizes a
main liability of utopian, lesbian thought. Dissociation points to the ambivalence
of utopianism for those of us who—as Djuna Barnes poignantly described one of
her characters in Nightwood—
[live] as all Jews do, who, cut off from their people by accident or choice,
find that they must inhabit a w orld whose constituents, being alien, force
the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace. (9; ch. 1)
The experience of m arginalization can compel a group's retreat into
"hom elands" of the mind—as Jenny Bourne puts it in her critique of identity
politics. Embracing this imaginary hom eland some feminists have held to the
precept that, as Virginia Woolf once wrote, "As a woman I have no country, as a
wom an my country is the whole w orld" (Three Guineas).11 However, m any
feminists no longer desire a "more profound nationality" in lesbianism or in
"w om an." Reflecting this disenchantm ent w ith lesbian (feminist) nation,
Adrienne Rich's critique of the notion of lesbian nation deliberately echoes
Woolf's phrase:
As a woman I have a country; as a w om an I cannot divest myself of that
country merely by condemning the government or by saying three times
'As a woman my country is the w hole w o rld .' ("The Politics of Location"
212 )
The worldlessness of marginal groups has led to a retreat from political

participation into the warmth of inner, ethical space and the charmed circle of
group identity.12 This utopian space has sometimes been theorized as a cultural-
nationalist ideal of a separate "state," as was more commonly the case in the
11W hile in the context of its publication, the original words represented Woolf's sharp critique of
m asculinist, European and militarist nationalism, a sim ilar view , abstracted from this context and
dehistoridzed, has ironically crept into lesbian/fem inist forms of "cultural nationalism."
12In Men in Dark Times, Arendt talks about the "warmth" of worldless groups, describing a state
of what she calls inner emigration for stateless people.
211
context of sixties and seventies liberation m ovem ent discourses; but more
recently, in a lesbian feminist context, this space is construed as an ideal of
com m unity.13 In either case, the criticism of worldlessness and dissociation
suggests that a utopian identity such as "lesbian," as defined through an ideal of
authenticity, can become an ambivalent site of social change.
Authentic Freedom
Images of authenticity may have once signaled, for lesbian feminists, a
quest for freedom. We wanted No More Masks! as an anthology of women's
poetry proclaimed. However, insofar as we cleave to home in identity and
community we may "betray our quest" (Phelan, "Jargon" 44) by conflating
authenticity with freedom. Extrapolating from A dorno's critique of a "jargon of
authenticity," Phelan examines two ideals of freedom that have been central to
le sb ian /fem in ist culture, namely an ideal of freedom as "subjective
transparency" and an ideal of freedom as "mfersubjective transparency." In both
cases, the quest for freedom turns us inw ard tow ard a goal of authentic,
unm ediated knowing of self and others. The goal of subjective transparency
means that the
[t]he w orld of things is for [the individual subject] neither part of the
subject nor independent of it. Rather, the w orld is omitted. It supplies the
subject with the mere 'occasion' for the deed, with mere resistance to the
act of faith. (Adorno's critique of Kierkegaard, qtd. in Phelan, "Jargon" 41)
From this perspective, the lum inous discovery of the authentic
female/lesbian self loses some of its luster as it shrinks back to what Spivak calls
13Sometime in the mid-nineties a friend told m e that she had come upon a classified ad in a
feminist newspaper—she couldn't remember which paper—announcing that lesbians were
searching for a state to take over. My friend w as struck by the fact that the question at hand was
not whether w e should be looking for a state at all and why, but which one.
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"ideology in action": history in its "sedimentedness" (for, example, the multiple

ways that a subject is located) drops out from an individualist portrayal of a
choosing subject set against a world that recedes to mere backdrop (see chapter 2
above).
W ith our quest for freedom through community, w e reject individualism
but embrace an ideal of mfersubjective transparency: A problematic ideal of face-
to-face, unm ediated relations becomes the model for politics. As Iris Marion
Young argues, this com m unitarian ideal sets up a "totalizing" opposition
between com m unity and world, viz. an "opposition betw een authentic and
inauthentic social relations" ("Ideal of Community" 302).
The problem w ith both ideals of freedom /authenticity, subjective and
intersubjective, is an assumed opposition between self and world or community
and world that obscures the ways in which subjects and communities are of the
world that they oppose. Most significantly, this oppositional imagination implies
a redefinition of freedom as home rather than praxis. Utopianism occludes praxis
insofar as it projects "the desired society as the complete negation of existing
society," a negation which "provides no understanding of the move from here to
there that would be rooted in an understanding of the contradictions and
possibilities of existing society" (Young 302). In its negation of an (imagined)
totality, the utopian can, as Young writes, "detemporalize[. . .] its conception of
social life"(302) by abstracting social change from its contradictory and
processual nature. Thus, utopianism, as a critique of totality, can mitigate against
politics, w hen it redefines freedom as authenticity.
To extrapolate from Phelan and Young I w ould argue that an ethos of
authenticity is depoliticizing when it redefines freedom as escape from, rather
213
than engagement with the world. Dissent becomes dissociation (Raymond) and
the utopian site of this "politics" of worldlessness is the ethical imaginary where
we have dream ed of a common language—of sisterhood, solidarity, selfhood. To
elaborate, I will further "map lesbian ethics" (Martindale and Saunders), turning
next to Phelan's critique of lesbian "expressivism" in Identity Politics: Lesbian
Feminism and the Limits of Community.
Lesbian Expressivism
Drawing on Charles Taylor, Phelan explains expressivism as a "pattern of
thought" which collapses the "private" into the "political" by "challenging all
p riv ate relatio n sh ip s" and m aking the "'n o rm a l' sphere of politics
epiphenomenal" (48). In other words, politics is recast as the consequence of a
supposedly external pow er rather than seen as a "locus of any real change"
(Identity Politics 48). "Real change" is sought, not through politics, but through
relations between community members an d /o r in one's self, both of which (self,
community) is thought to exist oppositionally to the "outside" world. In this
way, the expressivist collapse of politics into the private/personal implies a
communitarian resignation in the face of power, an attem pt to hold to a refuge
from the world (Identity Politics 49).
In a lesbian feminist context, the expressivist collapse of politics into the
personal/private assumes a special "consistency between theory and practice"
(Identity Politics 46). Indeed—to extrapolate from Phelan—the political/m oral
ambiguity of lesbian utopianism (or utopian lesbianism) in particular derives from
a dem and for a magical consistency of lesbian "practice" and feminist "theory."
The result is something like the claim once popular w ith lesbian feminists that
214
"sleeping w ith women" as Phelan puts it, expresses "a commitment to a world
that values women, and conversely, heterosexual wom en reveal themselves a s ..
.not entirely to be trusted" (49). Phelan argues that this kind of assumption
confuses the implication of an act with its expression:
This collapse of politics results in the perception of one's sexuality as a
m atter of politics, not just at the level of implication—certain relations may
lead one to make particular alliances, to view one's public interests in a
certain way—but at that of expression. (49)
In other w ords, the valorizing claim for lesbian sex as "political" is an
"expressivist" claim, and as such based on a world-view that dissolves the split
between public and private realms by assuming that all acts express political
principles.
While in some respects Phelan's criticism of expressivism is trenchant it
also misses its target, for her concern with re- or ouer-politidzation, e.g. of the
"personal" domain, overshadows a bigger problem, namely, expressivism as
depoliticization. For Phelan, the m ain problem w ith expressivism seems to be
th a t in d em an d in g a "special consistency" of political ideals and
individu al/p erso n al behavior we remove "any ground for a more critical
reexamination of the relations between public and private structures and action,
of the gaps and spaces as well as the connections" (49). In other w ords, we
subject behavior to repressive scrutiny and lesbian becomes a set of rigid
prescriptions for behavior—"political correctness." However, in my view,
political correctness is part of a larger problem: The expressivist collapse of the
political into the personal removes a ground for (political) action, because
expressivism re-defines "politics" as everything a lesbian (an d /o r feminist
a n d /o r woman) does or says. All acts are seen "as equally expressive of self"
215
(49) and freedom is defined as "'synonymous with self-realization'" (Taylor qtd.

in Identity Politics 49). Thus expressivism defuses the concept, "the personal is
political," a concept which had exploded the relation between the personal and
political w hen it exposed the extent to which the personal was shot through with
power. Rather than explode the public/private relation, expressivism implies an
implosion, a turn to the inner space of inter-subjective relations. The problem,
then, is not in attributing political meaning to all acts—as Phelan's distinction
between "im plication" and "expression" suggests. The problem is when
politically meaningful acts, mis-understood as "expressions," are taken to be the
equivalent of political activism. The appropriate distinction, in that case, is not
between expression and implication but between expression and action. If
everything is political, politics in the sense of action becomes irrelevant and
culture can be taken as sufficient as a motor of change.
In sum, expressivism is depoliticizing because it implies a turn to ethics as
the m odel for social change. This raises the follow ing questions: w hat
specifically links lesbian ethics —as a self-consciously elaborated ideology—to this
expressivist retreat from politics and is there a way to re-construe ethics outside of
an expressivist paradigm? To answer I turn to Kathleen Martindale and Martha
Saunders' typology of lesbian ethics.
Lesbian Ethics in Two Cases

M artindale and Saunders invoke a (valorizing) distinction between
separatist "upper case" lesbian ethics and so-called "lower case" ethics: the first
is a separatist ethics preoccupied w ith securing "safe space" and clear
boundaries in lesbian identity and community, the latter, a lower case ethics that
216
would "mess" these same boundaries. The crucial, corresponding distinction is

between an ethics based on safety and on justice.
The au th o rs identify separatist ethics w ith a sectarian tendency for
retrenchm ent an d w ithdraw al from the w orld and w orldly (political) action.
From the vantage point of a sectarian lesbian ethics, justice becomes a matter of
how com m unity members are victimized by "external" power rather than
"moral responsibility for anyone other than [the community's] ow n members"
(169). By prioritizing "lesbian" over other aspects of identity—and thus
obscuring the w ays that lesbians are already within existing power relations—a
separatist ethics tends to individualize "systemic injustices such as racism or
class oppressions" and interpret these as "moral failures of sensitivity to other's
feelings" (169). The notion of complicity thus narrows into the interior space of
(inter)subjectivity; change can only mean change of attitude.14 In other words,
this is an ethics w hich—to bring back Young's p o in t—desires a complete
negation of the existing dom inant society and assum es a (utopian) position
altogether outside of and exempt from the pow er relations of this society.
In response to "upper case ethics" M artindale and Saunders herald a
"lower case" ethics based on the "messy complexity" (Minnie Bruce Pratt) of a
lesbian identity th at is multiply situated (in realities of class, race, ethnicity, etc.)
and contradictory. A lower case ethics acknowledges complicity in the system
criticized, and assumes, like Pratt, that one can never be wholly "safe from evil;
there is no place to which to retreat, and therefore the only way to live is to live
in the midst of the danger" (172).
14This is of course the flip side of a similar tendency in queer discourse, one which I w ill discuss
as an aesthetidzing voluntarism . Change is redefined as change o f "attitude," as in "having an
attitude," or "bad attitude," a display, a performance, a playful spectacle.
217
I suggest that Martindale and Saunders' lower case lesbian ethics raises
two im portant questions: First, how does a specifically lesbian point of view
articulate w ith other struggles? Second, how do we acknowledge a messier
relation betw een ethics and eroticism than allow ed by a sectarian lesbian
discourse? These are the right questions; however, M artindale and Saunders'
specific concept of lower case lesbian ethics provides the w rong answers. On the
contrary, a sleight of hand in their argum ent allows them to slip and slide
betw een questions of racial/class complicity and questions of complicitous
sexuality, if you will, in a problematic, confusing way.
On the one hand, acknowledging complicity requires an ethics that would
relinquish a dream of lesbian as a special subject position som ehow immune
from the external world of race and class power, and re-conceive lesbian as one
"entry point into awareness of oppression" (172), and into "solidarity with and
accountability to other oppressed peoples" (173). This is an im portant goal;
however, as that which makes home impossible (de Lauretis "Eccentric")—insofar as
"hom e" rem ains w edded to a normative ideal of heterosexuality—lesbian
constitutes a point of trespass as well as entry into broader struggles for justice.
By glossing over this historically specific aspect of lesbian ethics, namely, its
negation of heterosexual ideology, the authors prom pt the suspicion that their
"justice" in fact masks a liberal-pluralist ideal of tolerance, an ideal which
assumes a definition of lesbian as one more identity among others. My suspicion
deepens w hen turning to the issue of the relationship betw een ethics and
eroticism, for here acknowledging complicity turns out to mean acknowledging and
accepting lesbian sadomasochism as a sexuality that is "the basis of a materialist,
world-affirm ing ethics that is oriented toward the creation of justice" (176).
218
Lesbian sadomasochism is "here and now " ergo lesbian sadomasochist sexuality
is good.15 Yet the opposite conclusion is draw n w hen we are directed to examine
our complicity in race/class realties.
While in one case, acknowledging complicity means acknowledging and
presumably changing the here-and-now of race/class hierarchies in the nam e of
justice, in the second case, acknowledging complicity means celebrating the here-
and-now as a m atter of justice. With this sleight of hand, M artindale and
Saunders elide rather than grapple w ith the specific (if contested) meaning of
lesbian as a negation of heterosexuality. It is this aspect of lesbian ethics "upper
case" that complicates the ideal of lesbian as an entry point into solidarity w ith
others and it is this aspect of lesbian ethics that makes blanket affirmation of the
here-and-now of sexuality problematic.
Obstacles to a Worldly Lesbian Ethics

The argum ents of Martindale an d Saunders and Phelan map sim ilar
tendencies in lesbian thought and practice; what one calls expressivism, the other
identifies as sectarian retreat. While I share aspects of their critique, I diverge
from their diagnoses of the problem in crucial respects. In my view the problem
with lesbian expressivism is as follows:
Lesbian expressivism, in its retreat from politics into ethics, from praxis
into expression, suggests the utopian face of the fem inist oppositional
15Thus Martindale and Saunders laud feminist theologian Carter Heyward's defense of
"sadomasochist eroticism" as no less than a "relational conduit" to God, because, as Heyward
puts it, "we can reach one another and God only from where w e are here and now" (qtd. in
Martindale and Saunders 176). Does the fact that sadomasochism is here and now make it a
conduit for relationship? The logic is, to say the least, spurious. Nevertheless, according to
Martindale and Saunders, Heyward's tolerance o f sadomasochism is an example of "an ethics for
those w ho are immersed in the world, not cut off from it." (176)
219
imagination as ressentiment. This imagination is a dream of opposition that

leaves the "outside" world unscathed by its radical point of view while getting
snared in its ow n safety net. A preoccupation w ith safe space, w ith goals of
clarifying com m unity, w ith ethics, displaces politics and "forgets" that the
relation between marginal communities and domination is a tenuous one. The
ironic consequence of this logic of authenticity is th at an insistence on an absolutist
opposition in the long m n presupposes a (myth of) peaceful co-existence with the system
of domination opposed.16 In short, a discourse of authenticity obscures, indeed
mystifies, the question of praxis, projecting it altogether outside of politics. Yet
this question is altogether dropped by Phelan and others w ho, rather than
rethink praxis in a way that breaks through the absolutist oppositionalism of
sectarian separatism, offer in its stead a vague liberal pluralism.
Phelan faults a dual drive for unity and against difference as the "central
weakness" and "metaphysical turn" in lesbian feminism (Identity Politics 57). In
response, I cite a "jargon of difference" as a central weakness in all the arguments
under consideration here, a jargon that conflates difference per se—e.g. in the
sense of any diversity, whether of interests, tastes, ethnicities—with difference in
the sense of systemic pow er differentials. The pandem onium of the "sex
debates" is a decisive framework for the argument that "[the] denial of racial and
cultural difference [in lesbian feminist ideology and community] is bound to the
general denial of significant differences am ong lesbians," (Phelan, Identity
kindred, internal critique of this idealist tendency of lesbian separatism, first written in 1980,
was re-published in the 1989 anthology, For Lesbians Only. The authors argued,
too often the construction of a new lifestyle and institutions becomes an end in itself. So
the strong community base which is a valuable part o f separatism (and feminism in
general) comes to be a substitute for a movement, instead of a support for i t . . . Instead of
pushing forward more we stop at defensive positions of survival, self-improvement and
shelter from the outside world. (Ross, Hess and Langford 131)
220
Politics) am ong which differences Phelan counts lesbian sadomasochism. The

argument, advanced by Martindale and Saunders as well as Phelan, that lesbian
ethics constitutes a repression of difference, is motivated by ideological factors (a
defense of—or am bivalent position w ith respect to—lesbian sadomasochism)
that obscure a deeper issue.
The deeper issue is the predicament of feminism underw riting an idealist
lesbian ethics, w here feminism faces or fails to face the question of how to
theorize a relation between ethics and the erotic. Insofar as feminism aims at
transform ing culture, and insofar as sexuality is p art of culture, it is both
inescapable and desirable that feminists ascribe values to sexual practices. Can
we do so w ithout conflating the normative—ethical and political—w ith the
actuality of empirical subjects, the latter caught up w ithin existing fantasies and
desires as well as political ideals? The last point returns m e to de Lauretis's
critique o f Butler (as discussed in chapt. 2) w here de Lauretis distinguishes
between subjecthood, a m atter of political will, and subjectivity, a m atter of
fantasy. A similar distinction recurs in de Lauretis's discussion of tensions in
feminist theory between an emphasis on ethics and on fantasy. Both discussions
refer back to a notion of the subject of feminism as contradictory, at once w ithin
and outside of dom inant ideology/pow er, a concept of the lesbian/fem inist
subject th at suggests a creature of both fantasy and political will, distinguished
by a tension between the two.
De Lauretis's concept of a contradictory subject helps us understand the
expressivist dem and for consistency between theory and practice as one cause
and consequence of past and current predicaments in feminist theory that, in
turn, flow from the contradictory nature of the subject of feminism. One such
221
predicam ent, I suggest, is that feminism founders on the question of how to

theorize tensions between normative, utopian assumptions about the w orld as it
ought to be and concrete subjects/practices as they actually are, in the here and
now .17
A utopian expressivist lesbian feminism has led to the voluntarist
assum ption that women can alter our desires and transform social reality by an
"iron force of will" (Sandra Bartky). The problem with voluntarism is that it
leaves a v o id betw een the actual and the ideal w here a praxis of
(self)transform ation has not been articulated (see Bartky, Femininity and
Domination ch. 4).18 An ethos of authenticity, in its absolutist negation of the
here-and-now, tries to fill the gap with its normative lesbian subject (e.g. based
on an idealized sexuality) but in effect preserves it by collapsing, rather than
grappling with, the distinction/tension between the normative and the actual.
However, a "worldly ethics" defined by simple tolerance—for sadomasochism,
for "difference" in some vague, and abstract sense—neutralizes the moment of
negation at stake in a separatist ethics. By valorizing (complicity with) the here-
and-now this "worldly ethics" equally imperils the possibility of praxis. As
based on an enchantment with difference that, in effect, depolitidzes difference,
this "pragm atic realist"19 ethics at best removes the ground for a more forceful
critique of w hat I am calling utopian discourse, but, at worst substitutes its own
form of idealism.
17Benhabib discusses this tension in marxist theory of class: a tension and confusion between
class as a normative and empirical subject that steins from the influence on Marx of Hegel's
norm ative "subject of history." See the next chapter for further discussion.
18A sim ilar point has been made by bell hooks, in a more general criticism of how white
fem inism , to the extent that it is shaped by a liberal individualist m odel of analysis fails to
provide a notion of praxis (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center 8).
19This is Karen Rian's term. Rian contrasts the "utopian idealism" of lesbian feminist critics of
sadom asochism w ith the "pragmatic realists" who defend it.
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One w ay to break through the impasse defined by a jargon of difference at

one end and a jargon of authenticity on the other, is to more deeply examine
w hat I w ould call the depoliticization of difference in a contemporary discourse of
identity politics—a discourse that includes but is not restricted to lesbian identity
politics. An ethos of authenticity central to a utopian lesbian imagination with its
fantastic elsewhere, is not unrelated to a moral imagination showing a more
"worldly" attachment to home in identity, an imagination riveted to dreams of
inclusion, rather than separation.
Part 2: Political Identity and the Depoliticization of Difference

Homeward Bound?
Depoliticization of difference is a dynamic of a contemporary politics of
identity that redefines politics as acquiring safe space/hom e for difference(s) in
a system it leaves uncontested as a whole. This "attachment" to identity-as-
home m ight take the form of the expressivist ideology discussed above—an
ideology characteristic of sectarian an d separatist tendencies that redefine
freedom as retreat. However, this attachment to identity might also manifest as
a politics of inclusion via a demand for rights within a universalistic framework
of justice. In this vein, political theorist Wendy Brown theorizes identity politics
in term s of a "w ounded attachm ent" to identity—a politics based on
ressentiment. When read with and against the critiques of utopian and sectarian
tendencies discussed above, Brown's argum ent helps further unfold the dram a
of contemporary lesbian identity.
Freedom is to justice in Brown's frame, as justice is to safety in Martindale
and Saunders' essay. For Brown, the way that subjects become inscribed,
223
through identity politics, in a liberal notion of justice is the counterpart to what

Martindale and Saunders discussed as safety and what M artin and Mohanty, de
Lauretis, Pratt and Phelan call home. Brown's argument provides a new angle on
w hat I have thus far discussed as a politics of group-identity—a politics of
attachment to identity that obscures a group's complicity w ith broader social
processes. Brown helps further criticism of this identity politics to the extent that
the latter is defined increasingly by a task of securing safe space w hether
in/through community, identity, a n d /o r through (as Brown discusses it) legal
measures of protection/rights.
Brown's argum ent returns us to Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment (see
chapter 3)—the dynam ic w hereby a gro u p becomes stuck on its own
powerlessness as its only site of power, i.e. through that moralizing (Judeo-
christian) alchem y w hich transform s w eakness into virtue. For Brown,
ressentiment is a "stru c tu re of desire" in m odern society ("W ounded
Attachments" 396). This desire drives a politics of identity—for marginal and
subordinate groups in post m odem (capitalist) society—that comes to be bound
more fiercely to a goal of inscribing one's pain (to break the silence, be heard, be
compensated for one's injury) than by a desire for freedom. It might seem as if,
with this focus, I have strayed from a critique of lesbian utopics in its project of
constructing an elsewhere to the heteropatriarchy. Indeed lesbian utopianism
emphasizes eccentric subjectivity and a logic of ecstasy underscores its desire to
retreat elsewhere to that vital other-world of community, self, language (Daly,
Brossard). In contrast, Brown's N ietzschean critique of political identity
emphasizes its "logic of pain" Further, Brown's focus is an identity politics that
moves more explicitly w ithin the domain of liberal discourse—the discourse of
224
universal justice—than does the utopian politics of lesbian identity that I have
thus far been discussing.20 The contrast here is between an identity politics more
associated w ith "cultural nationalism"—emphasizing separation from the existing
system of rights and justice—and one more associated w ith movements for
reform. A lthough focusing on the latter, Brown's historicization of identity-
politics as a development of "late" capitalist, disciplinary21 society is relevant to a
politics of lesbian-feminist identity that has m oved in both directions. The two
directions converge in a shared quest for safety rather than freedom.22
In short, a dream of escape and a dream of inclusion come to mirror one
another as flip sides of an originally liberatory identity that has become reified.
By reification, I mean that such an identity becomes a "w ounded attachment" in
ways that mystify and obscure those structures and processes of power in which
the identity emerged as historically ambiguous, i.e. as both emancipatory and a
form of accommodation.
20M artindale and Saunders point out that the very concept o f justice is eschew ed as patriarchal
by lesbian-fem inist ethics (171).
2•'■"Disciplinary" is Foucault's term for power in m odem (and postmodern) capitalist, industrial
societies and em phasizes that as much as through repression, coercion and force, power operates
through know ledge/pow er regimes ("discourses" where intersecting institutions make their
com peting claim s for power, such as medical, psychiatric, legal discourses). Power is exercised
by regulating, classifying, surveying human subjects, and, in particular, through the ways in
w hich subjects regulate, classify, and survey them selves. W hile Foucault and his followers too
often stress disciplinary power at the expense of coercive pow er as the latter operates through
social totalities of capitalism and patriarchy, the force of disciplinary power, in turn, cannot be
underestim ated and has special implications for the regulation of wom en's bodies in postmodern
patriarchy (see chapter 1). See Joy James, Resisting State Violence for a critique of Foucault insofar
as his work underestimates the repressive and coercive force of the state in its control and
regulation of African American bodies.
22 Such a quest m ight oscillate between securing a good lifestyle on one pole and, on the other,
embracing an inner emigration through sectarian retreat(s). Janice Raymond's typology of
"obstacles to female friendship," or what I w ould call obstacles to lesbian politics calls attention
to dissociation on the one hand, and assimilation (A Passion fo r Friends). In "Putting the Politics
Back into Lesbianism" she uses the term "lifestylism" to address the assim ilation of lesbian as a
once-political stance into lifestyle. Below I draw on H ennessy to discuss the marketing of
"lifestyle" as a reification of capitalist patriarchy that has been a basis of "queer visibility."
225
Political Identity. Class and an Escape from Freedom

Brown w ants to historicize "politicized identity," by which she means
provide a genealogy which shows identity politics to be the "illegitimate
offspring" (396) of a parentage it remains indebted to yet ignorant of. Politicized
identity forgets its debt, its history, at the peril of its potential "deconstructive
cultural claim "—namely to contest the transparent, unencumbered universal
subject of w estern discourse. In Brown's view, identity politics is the specific
progeny of a liberal discourse of universal justice as it intersects with the
disciplinary mechanisms of late capitalism. Thus Brown moves from Marx's analysis
of liberalism (especially in "On the Jewish Question"), to a Foucaultian analysis
of bureaucracies and discourses which normalize and regulate subjects through
systems of classification and surveillance. She invokes Nietzsche as key to her
argument that this intersection between liberal individualism and disciplinary
mechanisms in late capitalist society is a veritable minefield for detonating
ressentiment.
The category of class in particular is crucial for analysis of an identity
politics that, according to Brown reacts to, rather than critiques a class-stratified
society in its late twentieth century crises,23 thus producing "class resentment
without class consciousness or class analysis" (394, emph. in original). In other
words this id en tity politics wants class comforts w ithout class critique.
Contemporary capitalism is a system in which, thus, "the late modem liberal
subject quite literally seethes with ressentiment" (402). Indeed ressentiment
23 The term "reaction" here. Brown writes, "acquires the meaning that N ietzsche ascribed to it,
namely, as an effect of domination that reiterates impotence, a substitute for action, for power, for
self-affirmation that reinscribes incapacity, powerlessness, and rejection" (Brown, 402).
226
comes easily to a subject snared by a paradox of liberal individualism excoriated

by Marx in "O n The Jewish Question"—the paradox of formal equality and
socially real inequality. In this context subjects are hooked to "a dream of self
making" (Brown)—e.g. the American Dream—which especially "incites" pain of
failure in a context of rabid inequality. A key point, and most important insight
of Brown's argum ent is that this logic of pain—ressentiment—is as much a
product of w hat Foucault calls "disciplinary society," as it is a product of, and
reaction to, class stratification.
The disciplinary mechanisms of contemporary capitalism are prime levers
in the process which detonates class resentment. The framework for identity
politics is a proliferating construction of social categories of identity24 which
become at once the objects of social control (as sites of new forms of surveillance
and classification, etc.) and sites of contestation (claims for rights). The specific
forms of contestation available to a framework of identity politics, Brown argues,
feeds into the forms of social control that help define this framework.25 She
invokes an example that epitomizes for her the problem "of the universal
juridical idea of liberalism and the normalizing principle of disciplinary regimes
conjoined and taken up w ithin the discourse of politicized identity" (399),
namely an anti-discrimination ordinance passed in Santa Cruz. Ridiculed in the
national media as "the purple hair ordinance," the law banned discrimination
in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of
sexual orientation, transsexuality, age, height, w eight, personal
24Brown refers to the disciplinary production of a "fantastic array of behavior-based identities

ranging from recovering alcoholic professionals to unrepentant crack mothers" (393).
^B row n's argument here parallels, even invokes, Ladau and Mouffe's argument in Hegemony &
Socialist Strategy regarding the development of new sodal movements, but from a strikingly
different angle. Where Ladau and Mouffe are optim istic about this development. Brown is more
than waxy. See chapter 5 below for detailed discussion of Ladau and Mouffe's argument and this
point.
227
appearance, physical characteristics, race, color, creed, religion, national

origin, ancestry, disability, marital status, sex or gender. (399)
Brown points out that in this framework, "African American" "obesity" and
"fuschia haired, tattooed" become juridical equivalents. In sum , the Santa Cruz
ordinance shows how identity politics can imply (in my words) a depoliticization
of difference: it works to render every "difference as non-difference" and every
"potentially subversive rejection of culturally enforced norm s as themselves
normal," to classify differences as positivist definitions of attributes measurable
by law a n d normalize these through law (399). In this way the depolitidzation of
difference implies a domestication of politics and a supposed discourse of
visibility and acceptance becomes, as Brown argues, a "vehicle of subordination."
It becomes, in other words, a containing strategy that tames potential radicalism.
To digress slightly, at this juncture I w ant to return to the question of the
relevance of Brown's criticisms, thus far, to a utopian im aginary and the
separatist leaning politics of those groups for whom reform measures are not
central to their strategies for social change. To extrapolate from Brown's critique
of the Santa Cruz Ordinance, I suggest that one face of the depoliticization of
difference at stake in this discussion, is the anxiety of authenticity that attends
each "difference." In the kind of case discussed by Brown, this anxiety is
inscribed through disciplinary mechanisms of legal discourse. A similar anxiety,
how ever, attends a discourse of identity in more "utopian" contexts of
com munity building. Two stories of lesbian feminist identity politics illustrate
the dynam ic I am calling the depoliticization of difference. By this dynamic I
mean a desire for a home in authentic identity that comes to override all other
concerns and thus domesticates lesbian identity. First, I think of a story told to
me a few years ago, in which a member of an Italian-American lesbian group
228
protested the use of spaghetti by another lesbian group for the latter's potluck
fund-raiser as "cultural appropriation." The second story concerns an altercation
in the early nineties or late eighties at a women's music festival over the presence
there of a boy infant. I refer here not only to the protest at the festival of (some)
lesbian separatists against the infant but to a counter-protest at the same festival
at which lesbians sported placard-wielding baby-carriages and, last but not least,
the publication of letters and columns regarding the conflict by O ff Our Backs for
three to six m onths running. The two scenarios, the potluck and the festival,
suggest the expressivist ideology discussed above, whereby every expression
comes to be taken for activism. In this context, a jargon of authenticity is
param ount, an d freedom is redefined as w resting for control over an ever-
shrinking hom eland of the mind. A search for utopia devolves into ressentiment.
We can see how expressivist identity politics and those identity politics
discussed b y Brown overlap in a depoliticization of difference and politics of
resentment. In both cases, political claims are neutralized (a n d /o r rendered
absurd) through the logic of commensurability: all identities are taken as entities,
"positivist attributes," to be circulated as cultural capital, currency of the group
in question. The stakes are no longer resistance b u t (an idea of ) "safe space."
The process betrays a desire to inscribe pain that overshadow s the desire for
freedom. The identity politics discussed by Brown is inscribed through the
juridical system of rights in its interface with disciplinary mechanisms of the
capitalist state. The expressivist politics of identity at stake in the cases culled
from my ow n lesbian lore is inscribed through disciplinary mechanisms internal
to a community and a discourse that tends to construe itself as outside the system
of rights.
229
Phantom of the Drama: Class and / or Heterosexuality and / or Whiteness?

In the above scenarios draw n from lesbian community politics, it is clear
that lesbian identity, even in its exposed ethnic/racial differences, is taken as
stable— or strived for as an ideal of stability—and thus implicated in w hat
Martindale and Saunders call a domesticated ethics. This ethics contrasts sharply
with the kind of worldly politics/ethics suggested by an "eccentric subject" for
whom "home" is impossible. Lesbian is "that which exposes the extreme limits
of w hat passes itself off as sim ply human, as universal, as unconstrained by
identity, namely, the position of the white middle class" (Martin and Mohanty
qtd. in de Lauretis, "Eccentric" 136). Correspondingly, to extrapolate from
Brown's argument, a domesticating politics of identity can leave the "phantasm "
(Brown's term) of the white middle class intact, even as it denaturalizes gender
an d /o r heterosexuality. Again, the moment of negation in a lesbian imaginary is
neutralized by a dream of escape that—in the end—tacitly assumes a peaceful co
existence between a marginal, lesbian community and the dominant, patriarchal
system. This tacit assumption, is, in part, a class assumption. In order to
elaborate this relation between a dom esticated/utopian lesbian identity and the
category "class," I'll turn first back to Brown's argument that class is elided by
contemporary identity politics.
Brown argues that identity politics is "tethered to a formulation of justice
which, ironically, re-inscribes a bourgeois ideal as its measure" (394) viz., the
white m iddle class as a phantasm of desirable normality. "Without a recourse to
[this] ideal," she claims, "politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their
claims to injury and exclusion" (395). She dtes, for example w hat she calls
230
"bourgeois norms of social acceptance, legal protection, relative material comfort,

and social independence" (394).26 Brown wants to problematize the way in
which these norms are articulated as part of an agenda for social change. Insofar
as identity politics aspires to a "bourgeois" (i.e. decent) standard of living but
lacks a radical critique of the system that preserves that standard for the few at the
expense of the many, politicized identities "require a standard that preserves
capitalism from critique and sustains invisibility of class, not accidentally but
endemically" (395). In other words, identity politics not only elides class but
might very well derive its very "political purchase," as Brown puts it, through
this elision, that is to say through w h at she calls "a certain discursive
renaturalization of capitalism that can be said to have marked progressive
discourse since the 1970s" (394, emphasis in original).
Brown is suggesting here that political identity is a particular reification: it
naturalizes w hat is socially constructed, m aking class invisible in a network of
relations—gender, race, disability, sexuality—that it otherwise exposes/contests,
tacitly accepting the capitalist system, on the whole, as a given. H ow is this
played out in a utopian, separatist politics of identity, in contrast to a rights-
based identity politics? First of all, class has been elided by a utopian lesbian
identity that advocates a community without an analysis of the economic barriers
between lesbians that make real "lesbian" community (one that does not imply
26 She discusses "homosexuals who lack the protection of marriage, guarantees of child custody
or job security, and freedom from harassment; single wom en who are strained and impoverished
by trying to raise children and hold paid jobs sim ultaneously; people of color disproportionately
affected by unemployment, punishing urban housing costs, inadequate health care programs,
and disproportionately subjected to unwarranted harassment and violence, figured as criminal^
ignored by cab drivers" (395).
231
race and class exclusions) impossible.27 One m ight ask, when is the political
(ethical/ideological/cultural) purchase of utopian lesbian feminism such that
lesbian means an escape from class? "As if we could secure an isle of freedom by
leaps of the imagination, or the category of 'lesbian' itself offer magical sanctuary
from the material conditions of the w orld" (Miriam, "From Rage to All the Rage"
86 ).
At this juncture, the question becomes how to explain the sort of mystical
idealism evidenced in a romanticized notion of community28 on the one hand,
and the kind of liberal-pluralist idealism evidenced in the "purple hair
ordinance" on the other—to explain it, as Brown puts it, beyond mere (naive or
ignorant) complicity with power? According to Brown, we need an account of
the relationship between the phantasm of class and the structure of desire in late
capitalist, disciplinary society; we need an account of ressentiment to explain w hat
"politicized identity wants" where an account of "misguided complicity" sim ply
fails to explain such a "strikingly unem andpatory political project" as the Santa
Cruz ordinance. Brown brings in Nietzsche to fill in the gap left by a Foucaultian
account in order to ask why modem liberal subjects come to loath freedom (398)
and in order to theorize w hat Brown claims is the desire for a politicized identity
27I addressed this topic in an earlier work:

W ithout strategies of fighting the dominant, capitalist system as w ell as a strategies for
the redistribution of resources, the question of survival (who w ill make it, who w ill not)
becom es individualized. A conception o f freedom as psychological, spiritual, intellectual
freedom alone, tacitly resigns itself to a world in which every individual woman is
condem ned to her collective fate in a class system. ("From Rage to All the Rage" 86)
28The poet Judy Grahn was eloquent on this point, when writing on the theme of lesbian love in
"Confrontations w ith the Devil in the Form of Love":
not until w e have ground w e call our o w n / to stand on / & weapons of our own in
h an d / & som e kind of friends around u s / w ill anyone ever call our name L ove,/ & then
w hen w e do we w ill all call ourselves/ grand m uscley nam es:/ the Protection of L ove,/
the Provision of Love & th e/ Power of L ove./ until then, m y sweethearts, /le t us speak
sim ply o f/ romance, which is so much / easier and so m uch less/than any of us deserve.
(158)
232
to inscribe its pain—the pain of an inevitable failure built in to the dream of self
making—"rather than conjure an imagined future of power to make itself" (400).
The situation, the pain of failure, is exacerbated under conditions w hich
"accelerate" ressentiment—by destroying vestiges of resources that h ad
previously provided relief from the brute individualism of late capitalism—and
consequently produce "an utterly unrelieved individual. . .starkly accountable,
yet dramatically im potent" (402).
Starkly accountable yet dramatically impotent: Thus we have the paradox of
expressivism as it defines a lesbian, utopian politics of identity, suggesting a
subject "starkly accountable" as it burrow s into projects of creating self and
community w ith an optim ism of the will that masks an implicit defeatism.
Whether embracing a utopian identity or politics of inclusion, the individual here
is seen in that sometimes silly and sometimes grotesque disproportion in which
her means for pow er is miniaturized while her scope of accountability and (self)
blame enlarged. She seeks a form for control—a "direction for the will"—over
the only materials available to her. Whether legal imperatives of inclusion and
normalization pro v id e a channel and form for the voicing of her pain, or
whether, on the other hand, an idealized sanctuary provides it, the imperative for
safe space that overshadow s all else indicates a resignation before pow er, a
relinquishing of politics as a struggle with and for power.
However, having said the above by w ay of elaborating and using Brown's
argument, I now w ant to qualify my remarks. I want to interject three objections
to, an d /o r modifications of Brown's critique of identity politics as a w ounded
attachment to identity and as an aversion from freedom. First I address the
notion of w ounding, second, class, and third, freedom.
233
Wounding. First, Brown's notion of a "logic of pain," glosses too facilely

over the depth of wounding suffered by many groups and, in particular, the
ongoing nature of that wounding:29 she has a tendency to see identity as anchored
in past injury.30 Further, she is too reductionist in her approach to w hat she calls
universalistic justice, assimilating too glibly all desires for justice into a desire for
goodies ensured by a white m iddle class status. Finally, connected to this last
point, her use of Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment elides crucial distinctions
between moral righteousness as a condition of action and the kind of righteousness
which becomes an end in itself, as evidenced in the case of the "p u rp le hair
ordinance" or the case of "the spaghetti potluck." That is to say, as evidenced in
any social movement, righteousness—passion and urgency on behalf of one's
cause, including outcries of pain and rage—mobilizes as well as demobilizes
politics.31
This last is related to my second problem with Brown's argument, namely,
how she privileges class in a way that elides the differences between different
29John Sanbonmatsu makes this point (Theorist A s Stranger)

30In this way, her argument resembles those that oppose affirmative action by construing it as a
strategy based on compensating "past" injury, rather than on the requirements of equality in the
present. Her argument also does not distinguish itself from the current backlash against
affirmative action and other rights campaigns as based on so-called victim ideology.
31The critique of ressentiment, for example, exposes what Nietzsche calls the anesthetizing
function of moral righteousness in a dynamic through which an oppressed group relieves itself
through its projected culprit as the repository of blame. The strength of this kind of analysis is
that it exposes the thin line between scapegoating in general and any political imaginary in which
a political enemy is central. The danger o f this analysis is that it can erase this line com pletely,
and elide the liberatory power of rage as w hat Fanon called "decolonizing." In the latter instance,
naming a culprit is the opposite of anesthetizing for a group for whom "loving the enem y" is
prescribed, a group which thus breaks a central taboo, "Manhating," and names men as agents.
Such rage is de-anesthetizing and essential for political clarity. I would argue that fem inist theory
and action might be enriched by an account which scrutinizes tensions in group rage betw een
ressentiment and liberatory rage. The criteria for distinction would flow from a social m ovem ent
context in which inscribing pain in the social text (through testimonies, legislation and various
actions) is not its own end but a component of justice. Such rage would then be essential to
im agining/loving rather than averting from, and loathing freedom.
234
political identities. As Brown's own argument shows, contemporary identity

politics makes more than class invisible. Equally important is how this politics
obscures its ow n genealogy vis-a-vis a "fantastic array" of disciplinary
mechanisms. An analysis of these mechanisms is crucial for distinguishing not
only "African American" from "fuschia haired" but "gender, race, sexuality"
from "fuchsia haired, disabled, fat" in my opinion. While rightly excoriating the
move which reduces all differences to non-difference, Brown herself comes close
to doing just that by conflating all identity categories. This conflation is
suggested by her focus on "class" as the decisive dividing line between
"identity" politics and another politics, one that, in her view, would more
radically contest and denaturalize the capitalist system.
Although class and capitalism take on a privileged marker for good
reasons in Brown's critique, I think it more accurate to criticize identity
politics—including the politics of lesbian identity in both its utopian and
"liberal" formations—for its discursive re-naturalization of identity in a way that
obscures oppression in its interlocking (local and global) structural dynamics. In
other words, the problem with identity politics is when identity becomes its own
end (Sivanandan, Bourne) dissociated from its dynamic in its social milieu,
(mis)taken as a naturalized, pregiven foundation of politics in a way that
displaces a focus on systems of oppression. Class, and its absence, is an
important marker of this process insofar as identity politics sticks especially to
the terms of liberalism for its political purchase. But the phantasm of
"normality" integral to a dream of self-making, and thus of ressentiment, is
constructed through an ideology of race and of heterosexuality as well as class. In
turn, institutionalized heterosexuality—considered here as a naturalization of
235
the power differences between m en and women—is constructed in p a rt through

the "norming" of whiteness an d m iddle class. As long as heterosexuality
remains invisible—as "nature" and as "home"—within racial and class as well
as within gender formations,32 lesbian will not be a simple "point of entry" into
broad political struggles. For lesbian poses a potential threat to n atu re and
home as these are presupposed by even progressive struggles. O n the other
hand, for lesbian to make "hom e" truly impossible, its moment of negation
needs to be politicized, or, th at is to say, recovered for a critiq ue of
heterosexuality that shows how this institution intersects w ith other systems of
oppression, including capitalism.
Finally, the question that will lead me into the second act of the dram a of
identity, what does Brown herself mean by freedom? W hat is this im agined
power to make oneself, that, she claims, identity politics is an aversion from?
Does Brown distinguish this self-making, the goal she lauds, from th e one she
criticizes, namely, the American Dream of self-making? I don't think she does.
Brown invokes Nietzsche's "profoundly psychological" account to elaborate a
notion of freedom impoverished in Foucault. She cites Foucault's inadequate
notion of freedom—his notion of resistance as ultim ately voluntarist, even
mechanistic. Foucault's account of freedom, she points out, fails to ask: freedom
for what ends?(398). However, her own account begs the same question. Can a
psychological account which, as she puts it, explains what political identity desires,
answer the question of the ends of this desire? It cannot do so in any normative
32Lynda Hart's analysis, in Fatal Woman, shows this construction of heterosexuality through class
and race, when she shows the construction of the "aggressive woman" in criminology and mass
culture as marking both working-class wom an and lesbian in terms of one another and in terms
of aggression. Jacqui Alexander show s how the state in neocolonial regimes (her focus is the
West Indies) mobilize myths of heterosexuality to inscribe a m asculinist nationalism and prop up
its own legitimacy at a time of crisis.
236
sense of ends: Such an account can provide/identify motives but not reasons—it
cannot advocate for politically/ethically right ends. If freedom can only be
accounted for as desire motivated by psychological ends, w e're in the same boat
w ith Foucault, viz. what Brown criticizes as Foucault's "quasi-empirical concern
w ith .. capacity or space for action" (398). And yet this is precisely the boat that
queer counter-discourse, with its post structuralist critique of identity, ultimately
takes us on to its "freedom"—its freedom from the ethical utopianism of lesbian
feminism.
Part 3: Performance Anxiety: Queer Identity and The Aestheticization of

Politics
Queer Theory and Tudith Butler's Subversion of Identity
". .[W] hether or not resistance is possible is a different question from
w hat its aim is, w hat it is for. ." (398). Wendy Brown's point underw rites my
own critique of a queer politics of identity. What resistance is for is a normative
question, viz. a question of political ends and goals that is not addressed when
we simply name the desire at stake in a particular practice, and ask, as Brown
proposes, "what does political identity want?" Naming desire might tell us what
we aim at but not whether w e should aim at it. Yet the question of w hat we
should aim at and what resistance is for is begged by a tendency of queer
theorists to redefine resistance as a "subversion of identity." I cite the subtitle of
Butler's Gender Trouble, a work that has been pivotal in the development of queer
theory. The title and the book points, in my view, to trouble in a "feminist"
theory without feminism, or, to be more accurate, a queer theory w ithout lesbian
feminism. Indeed, Gender Trouble and other more recent w ritings by Butler
237
illuminate the theoretical underpinnings of a recent paradigm shift, namely, the

queer disenchantment with—and of—lesbian as feminism's sign.
As discussed above, the utopian ("magical") meaning of this sign is a
definition of lesbian as resistance—resistance to heteropatriarchy—hence the
hyphen connecting lesbianism to feminism. I have argued that this utopian
notion has been implicated in an idealist ethics that projects freedom outside of
the domain of social struggle and reifies identity in a way that domesticates
difference and gives rise to an anxiety of authenticity. O n one level, queer
discourse succeeds in shaking up a reified/idealized lesbian identity by
em phasizing the social construction of identity and insisting rightly that
sexuality and desire are not always amenable to political will.33 However, on
another level, by rejecting the lesbian feminist normative model tout court, queer
theory forfeits the ethico-political dimension of lesbian as an oppositional subject
position. In this way queer theory reflects the predicament referred to above,
namely, the question of how to theorize tensions between normative concepts
and actually existing subjects. Rejecting the lesbian-feminist negation of the
actual, a queer ethos tends to valorize the actual with its worldly eroticism. Thus
a queer ethos is the flip side of a version of lesbian feminism that redefines
freedom as exclusively a m atter of ethical will. Without an ethico-political
dimension, can "queer" have anything to do with the ideal of freedom? On the
contrary, queer counter-discourse promotes a notion of freedom and resistance
detached from a notion of praxis vis-a-vis material conditions of actual
33 My own re-thinking of lesbian discourse departs from queer discourse where the latter seem s
to suggest that sexuality is never amenable to political will. I do think that sexuality is, in part, a
potential object of political will. If sexuality is not thought in terms of tensions between ethics and
desire, on either side, feminists lose the opportunity to truly implement revolutionary change at
the level of culture.
238
oppression. Thus queer counter-discourse is as idealist as lesbian feminism. Its

idealism is not ethical, but aesthetic—as I will argue—advancing a notion of
"gender trouble" as artful play in the sanctuary of discourse.34
Resisting Utopia. Repeating Power

Butler's influential theorization of resistance is useful for underscoring the
paradigm shift in lesbian/fem inist theory from "first" w ave lesbian feminist to
contemporary queer counter-discourse. Butler herself obliquely points to this
shift in her introductory pages and elsewhere when she invokes the so-called sex
debates and the development of pro-sex theory out of these debates as the
reference point for her own insights and by framing the debates as an argument
over the issue of authenticity. Bracketing the issues of sadomasochism and
pornography—which were key points of the sex debates—Butler focuses almost
exclusively on drag and role play as exemplary sites of gender subversion, thus
launching an explicit polemic against what she takes to be key presuppositions of
lesbian thought prior to the "sex debates," namely that drag and role play are
copies/im itations of heterosexuality a n d /o r that they dem onstrate "the
pernicious insistence of heterosexist constructs within gay sexuality and identity"
a n d /o r are "male identified" (Gender Trouble 31). Butler attem pts to turn the
latter assumption on its head. Flouting male identification as an "anachronistic
n o tio n .. .that ought to be discarded from a feminist vocabulary" (31), she claims
that the repetition of what she refers to as "phallic conventions" in lesbian and
34This is not to say that queer counter-discourse doesn't promote its ow n ethics, i.e. its ow n
rubric of collective life and values, as critics of Buder, for example, have pointed out (Ebert;
Hennessy, "Queer Visibility"; and Cotter); queer ethics displaces politics as the task of collective
resistance with a notion of "negotiating inter-subjective readings" (Cotter). But for queer
counter-discourse, as I w ill argue further below, "the goal of ethics is art" as H ennessy argues in
"Queer Visibility" (59).
239
gay contexts, rather than consolidate heterosexism, "may well be the inevitable
site of the denaturalization a n d m obilization of gender categories" (31).
Subversion is redefined as repetition (vis-a-vis heterosexuality) because "the
replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames" as she puts it,
brings these frames "into relief" as "utterly constructed" (31).
Butler's argument turns o n a distinction between a social constructionist
view of sexuality on the one hand and w hat she attributes to a utopian view on
the other—sexuality as it was understood by feminists prior to the sex debates.35
The utopian view holds that there is "a sexuality freed from heterosexual
constructs" which, she adds, is a view of "a sexuality beyond 'sex'" (29). Like
other critics writing from a "pro sex" position, she assumes that an idealized view
of sex is at the root of lesbian fem inist criticism s of pornography and
sadomasochism, for example, the view that equality can and has been eroticized
in lesbian sexual practices (Echols, Daring, "Yin and Yang," "Taming"; Phelan
Identity Politics). Contrasting a utopian to a social constructionist view, Butler
attributes the latter to "[t]he pro-sexuality movement within feminist theory and
practice" which, she claims
has effectively argued th at sexuality is always constructed w ithin the
terms of discourse and pow er, where pow er is partially understood in
terms of heterosexual and phallic cultural conventions. The emergence of
a sexuality constructed (not determined) in these terms w ithin lesbian,
bisexual, and heterosexual contexts is, therefore, not a sign of a masculine
identification in some reductive sense, (emphasis mine, 30)
35 This is in striking contrast to Butler's discussion of pornography as valuably utopian in the

essay, "The Force of Fantasy" (see chapter 2). W hile in that context pornographic fantasy is
conflated with utopianism to suggest "an im agined futurity," here the terms are reversed so that
utopianism designates a problem —i.e.. w ith view s of sexuality prior to the sex debates—and is
im plicitly juxtaposed to "fantasy' (which is the stuff of role play, sadomasochism, drag etc.) as
more realistic/pragmatic!
240
Indeed, Butler suggests, not only is the sexuality at issue here n ot "male
identified," but no other form of sexuality exists as a site of liberation: "If
sexuality is culturally constructed w ithin existing power relations, then the
postulation of a normative sexuality that is 'before,' 'outside,' or 'beyond' power
is a cultural impossibility. . ." (30). In other words, there is no elseiuhere to
heteronorm ativity. How then, w ould Butler conceptualize resistance and
change? Butler's distinction between "constructed" and "determined" sexuality
implies that constructedness does not preclude change within the terms of power.
What, then, is the contrast between determ ined and constructed? W hat sort of
weight does "constructed" carry, if we are on the one hand not determ ined by
heterosexual convention, but, on the other hand, because we are constructed by
heterosexual and phallic convention, we can only resist zvithin this convention, as
there is no beyond phallic and heterosexual convention?36 What, then, does the
term zuithin designate? What kind of resistance happens within existing relations
of power? And further, are the implied options (resistance w ithin vs. resistance
outside of power) a useful framework for theorizing resistance at all?
The issue for Butler is partly a contested, utopian definition of lesbian:
Butler, and the tendency in queer theory that she is influential in shaping, rejects
as utopian the notion of an authentic (feminist) sexuality beyond patriarchal social
reality. The effect is a disenchantment of lesbian as feminism's magic. With
respect to lesbian sexuality, this disenchantment means that lesbian ceases to be
the site of an elsewhere to the kind of sexual culture critiqued by feminists as
central to the maintenance of (hetero)patriarchal power relations, a culture which
36As Kate Soper has pointed out, in a review of Bodies that Matter, Butler fails to make a
distinction between what is and is not a culturally constituted constraint on body, a failure which
puts her at risk of reproducing biologism as cultural determinism (119).
241
eroticizes domination and subordination. The dream of an elsew here is

"impracticable" because, in the framework used by Butler, it is a dream of
sexuality beyond the social, hence, beyond sex. The impossibility of a sexuality
beyond power relations is the prem ise/condition for theorizing sexuality
"w ithin" power as the only possibility for subversion. “If there is no radical
repudiation of a culturally constructed sexuality, what is left is the question of how to
acknowledge and 'do' the construction one is invariably in" (30- 31, emphasis mine).37
Repudiation is futile because "pow er can be neither w ithdraw n nor
refused, but only redeployed" (124). Given that "redeploying" power—and thus
presumably doing it differently—at one and the same time means "doing" w hat
one is in, invariably, the notion of re-deploying as resisting power remains elusive.
Yet, in Bodies That Matter, Butler advances performativity as a concept of resistance
which can get around this apparent conundrum:
Performativity describes this relation of being implicated in that which
one opposes, this turning of pow er against itself to produce alternative
modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not
a "pure" opposition, a "transcendence" of contemporary relations of
power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably
impure. (241, emphasis mine)
The problem, however, is that the distinction between impurity and purity
fails to provide the substantive criteria for distinguishing "alternative" from
dom inant modalities of pow er, and therefore, for conceptualizing resistance to
power. Whether it is accurate or not that feminists outside the pro-sex camp
37De Lauretis has a notion that contrasts with both the lesbian fem inist utopian elsewhere and
Butler's insistence that we can only do the sexuality we are invariably in. In "Technology of
Gender" she discusses a feminist space, or, rather a "space off" in the "interstices of institutions,
in counter-practices and new forms o f community." This "space off" is defined by a "movement
between the (represented) discursive space of the positions made available by hegem onic
discourses and the space-off, the elsewhere, of those discourses: those other spaces both
discursive and social that exist, since fem inist practices have (re)reconstructed them" (26).
242
"repudiate" culturally constructed sexuality, or attem pt to "transcend" it, as

Butler suggests they do, the question remains—how a m atter of "doing" the
construction one is in invariably, i.e. inevitably, can at one and the sam e time
constitute "forging a future." W hat is the nature of this subversive identity that
depends on a difference between constructed and determined sexuality? What is
granted by a n d /o r through its nature as constructed that distinguishes it as
resisting? Resisting w hat and for w hat ends? Butler seems to acknowledge this
dilemma in Gender Trouble when she writes,
This critical task [the task of rethinking subversive possibilities for
sexuality and identity w ithin the term s of pow er itself]presumes, of
course, that to operate w ithin the matrix of power is not the sam e as to
replicate uncritically relations of domination. (30)
Indeed, the critical task w ould seem to be to distinguish replication from
subversion of domination. But this task requires asking ethical and political
questions that, as Nancy Fraser points out, Butler's framework solicits b u t cannot
answer. Fraser points out that Butler's use of "resignification" carries a strong, if
im plicit positive charge (Feminist Contentions 67), that nevertheless begs
normative questions:
Why is resignification good? C an't there be bad (oppressive, reactionary)
resignifications? In opting for the epistemically neutral "resignification,"
as opposed to the epistem ically positive "critique," Butler seems to
valorize change for its ow n sake and thereby to disempower feminist
judgment. (Fraser, Feminist Contentions 68)
If Butler falls short on her notion of subversion this is due to a more
fu n d am en tal problem w ith h er arg u m e n t, nam ely her th e o ry of
heterosexuality/gender, a theory which lacks an account of the relation between
heterosexuality in psycholinguistic terms and heterosexuality as organized,
institutionalized social relations between men and women. If it is true that some
243
sexual practices, such as drag, denaturalize heterosexuality as a "style of the flesh"

(Gender Trouble 139) does it follow that these sam e practices contest the
institutionalized power of heterosexuality, or even lead to practices which do so?
Despite Butler's frequent referencing of "existing power relations" her account of
gender as a "m etaphysics of substance" provides no m aterial analysis of
(hetero)sexuality, thus, in the end, no account of power relations at all.
The Poverty of a Discourse Theory of Heterosexuality

Butler's deconstructive critique of gender (in Gender Trouble) as a
"metaphysics of substance" shows how "intelligibility" and "coherence" of self
are inextricable from the intelligibility and coherence o f gender. According to
this critique, there is no original "presence," or in sexologists' terms, no gender
"core" that is expressed by a n d /o r causing identity and desire. On the contrary
the "heterosexual matrix," as Butler puts it, means constructing a metaphysical
fiction of
causal or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally
constituted genders, an d the "expression" or "effect" of both in the
manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice. (17)
Rather than construe sexual desire, feminine or masculine bodily gestures,
etc. as expressions of an inner core, Butler suggests th a t there is no identity
subsisting like a real substratum beneath such expressions, that in fact identity is
constituted through these expressions. Hence gender is in and through its
"doing" rather than in the expression of any interior essence. From this
perspective the "persistence an d proliferation" of "unintelligible" genders can be
seen to
provide critical opportunities to expose the limits and regulatory aims of
that domain of intelligibility and, hence, to open u p within the very terms
244
of that matrix of intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of gender

disorder. (17)
While trenchant in some respects, the problem w ith this account of
"gender trouble" is in how it privileges the "domain of intelligibility" as the site
of action, as if underm ining gender/sexuality were prim arily an issue of
epistem ology rather th an of b o th epistem oiogy and politics. "D oing"
heterosexuality is not just a matter of w hat is made intelligible or unintelligible
b u t is also a matter of constructing interests.38 However, concepts such as
hegemony and ideology, which seem crucial to an account of the construction of
interests, are curiously dropped out from Butler's theory. If she were to engage
these concepts, perhaps Butler's account could open a way to think of "doing"
heterosexuality in the w ay that other social theorists have discussed "doing"
culture, i.e. making and re-making, producing and re-producing culture. For
example, R.W. Connell's distinction between structure and practice in some ways
resonates with Butler's theorization of power.
[Pjractice, while presupposing structure [. . .] is always responding to a
situation. Practice is the transformation of that situation in a particular
direction. To describe structure is to specify w hat it is in the situation that
constrains the play of practice. Since the consequence of practice is a
transformed situation which is the object of new practice, "structure"
specifies the way practice (over time) constrains practice. (Connell, Gender
and Power 95; emphasis in original)
38 ^ tins vein, Sheila Jeffreys criticizes Butler's notion that drag could provide the above cited
"critical opportunity":
Butler has a liberal and idealist understanding of the oppression of wom en. Male
supremacy does not carry on just because people don't realise gender is socially
constructed, because o f an unfortunate misapprehension that we m ust som ehow learn to
shift. It carries on because men's interests are served thereby.
And she adds pungently, "There is no reason w hy m en should give up all the real advantages,
econom ic, sexual, emotional, that male supremacy offers them because they see that men can
wear skirts" (Lesbian Heresy 103-4).
245
The point seems similar to Butler's notion of performativity, which, as

developed in Bodies That Matter, theorizes gender in terms of a convergent force
of discourse and power, a force which is "an accumulated effect of usage that
both constrains and enables their reworking" (224). The overlap between Butler
and Connell here is also in a conceptualization of resistance, understood not as a
transcendence of power b u t as construed via practices or situations that can be
"turned against w hat constrains it; so structure can be deliberately the object of
practice" (Maharaj 53).
In light of the above theory, the task for a lesbian theorist would seem to
be to theorize forms of cultural practices th at have deliberately made
heterosexuality its object. In that case, a notion of "male identification" should
perhaps be rehabilitated rather than jettisoned. Nicole Brossard conveys the
spirit of this task when she writes,
I work here toward dis/integrating the convulsive habit of initiating girls
to the male, a contemporary practice of lobotomy. (Aerial Letter)
Brossard's aphorism captures the urgency of the insight expressed by the
term "male identification,"39 suggesting a relation betw een practices and
structures that can be theorized in terms of heterosexuality as hegemony. Indeed it
is in the sense of "hegemony" as lived relations of domination and subordination
(Williams)—something akin to "doing patriarchy"40—that the concept of "male
identification" could be seen as meaningful for feminist theory today, rather than
39Suzanna Danuta Walters writes, "Do w e really want to relinquish a critique of male
identification? After all, the fem inist insight that a central im pedim ent to wom en's liberation
(yes, liberation) is an identification with and dependence on m ales and male approval, desire,
status, and so on is so obvious as to be banal. Charges of male identification may have been
spuriously made at times, but the analysis o f male identification is central and important" ("From
Here to Queer" 847-848).
40"Doing patriarchy" is a phrase I once heard used by Sonia Johnson, although she intended by it
a very individualist sense of "doing."
246
dismissed as anachronistic. The concept might be urgent for a theory that needs
an account of how (hetero)patriarchy is produced and reproduced through
practices (as hegemony), and as such is, and has been, the site of both resistances
and structural constraints upon resistance. However, since Butler's model limits
any account of structures a n d /o r practices of sexuality and gender to a discursive
account of sexuality, it fails to provide a way to theorize how we "do"—or un
do!—sexuality (hetero/queer, lesbian) or gender. What Butler's theory lacks is
an account of how heterosexuality as a social structure is reproduced through and
or resisted by cultural, economic and social/sexual (not only discursive/sexual)
practices. As Suzanna D anuta Walters comments, "Theories of gender as play
and performance need to be intimately and systematically connected w ith the
power of gender (really the power of male power) to constrain, control, violate and
configure" (855 "From Here to Queer").
Political Structures and Psychic Structures: A Critical Conflation

Butler loses a critical opportunity to assess the m eaning of lesbian
feminism as potentially counter-hegemonic. Insofar as she reconceptualizes sex,
gender and lesbian identity within the frame of the "sex debates," her account of
resistance in psycholinguistic terms misses its target, namely, the utopian and
thus (supposedly) "impracticable" ideal of a sexuality freed from heterosexual
constructs. Part of the problem is, as we saw with de Lauretis' critique of Butler's
"Force of Fantasy" essay, that Butler conflates subjecthood and subjectivity in her
account of lesbian, gay, a n d /o r queer identity. As a consequence, Butler objects
to a lesbian/fem inist norm ative, political identity (e.g. an identity based on a
cultural practice and project of women-identification) by addressing a normative
247
psycho-sexual identity. On these grounds she is critical of the lesbian feminist

notion of "male identification," e.g. as applied to "historical sexual identities,"
and cites Jacqueline Rose regarding "the subversive operation of 'identifications'
that are, within the pow er field of sexuality, inevitable"(30); nam ely, "phallic
relations of power that [this is the subversive part] replay and redistribute the
possibilities of that phallicism" (30). In other words, w ithin a psychoanalytic,
discursive frame, male identification is inevitable and cannot be "radically
repudiated." W hat remains, failing the possibility of repudiation is "to enact an
identification th at displays its phantasm atic structure" (30-1). W ith such a
proposal—"enact phantasm atic structures"—we have traveled far indeed from
incitements such as Valerie Solanas' call to revolution in the SCUM (Society For
Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, for "thrill seeking females"
to overthrow the governm ent, eliminate the money system , institute
complete automation, and destroy the male sex. ( 514)
If Butler's proposal seems rather thin by comparison, this is due to the fact
that her re-definition of resistance as "resignification" m irrors w hat Phelan
discussed as expressivist ideology in its idealist notion of change. Butler's
discursive approach to gender fails to relate gender to an account of either
oppression or social transform ation. H er argument begs the question of the
relation between "resistance" at the level of "psychic structures"—to use Butler's
phrase—and resistance in the political sense. Butler's conflation of these two
kinds of resistance makes her notion of resisting "within" the term s of pow er
conceptually vague at best and politically ineffective at worst. In Bodies that
Matter she again seems to acknowledge the problem w hen she asks, "How will
we know the difference betw een the pow er we prom ote and the pow er we
oppose?" (241). A nd she answers:
248
Is it, one m ight rejoin, a matter of "knowing"? For one is, as it were, in
power even as one opposes it, formed by it as one reworks it, and it is this
simultaneity that is at once the condition of our partiality, the measure of
our political unknowingness, and also the condition of action itself. The
incalculable effects of action are as much a part of their subversive
promise as those that we plan in advance. (Bodies That Matter 241)
However, the fact that our political judgments are partial and rooted in
the context of action fails to address the question of w hat our desires ought to
aim at when w e make judgments, w hat we oppose and why? Again, as with the
authors discussed above, the argum ent turns on a slip p ery notion of
"com plicity." A cknow ledging complicity, for Butler, comes to mean
acknowledging the inevitability of the structures of pow er at stake, and
acknowledgment here means accepting or at best "playing" w ith these structures
rather than resisting them. "The structuring presence of heterosexual constructs
within gay and lesbian sexuality," Butler writes, constitutes "a site of power that
cannot be refused" (124, em ph. mine). Yet, she adds, as such, "these n o rm s.. .can
and do become the site of parodic contest and display that robs compulsory
heterosexuality of its claims to naturalness and originality" (124).
One cannot imagine Butler arguing that an acknow ledgm ent of our
complicity w ith the "structuring presence" of racism is an acknowledgment that
these norms cannot be refused but can only become the site of parodic contest.
While the difference between "racial formation" (Omi and Winant) and "sexual
formation" is outside of the scope of the present discussion,41 one can still ask:
what differentiates the power of sex and gender from the power at stake in other
social formations such that subverting sex/gender, in contrast to, say, contesting
41In Bodies that Matter Butler notes the need for an analysis of sexual formation along the lines of
Omi and Winant's “racial formation."
249
racial formation, m eans m aking it a site of parody rather than politics? (or
politics is redefined as "parodic contest"?). Would Butler argue that "black face"
white minstrels robs whiteness of its power through parodic play? If sexuality is
to be theorized as com plidt, e.g. as already in power, then w hat is the meaning of
acknowledging that one is in power, in this context, if to know it is to do it rather
than resist?
If the problem w ith the lesbian-feminist utopian claim was that it
idealized politics by m aking change a matter of transcendence of history through
ethical will, Butler's "gender trouble" (which underpins queer notions of
subversion) aestheticizes politics. "Gender trouble" u nderpins a notion of
queemess which magically converts necessity into virtue—a m atter of doing
w hat we are invariably in. Indeed queer produces a new alchemy: lesbian
identity is disenchanted of its ethical ideals, while queer identity is invested with
comparable pow ers of subversiveness, this tim e via a discursive and
aestheticized rather than ethical or spiritualized model of change, which grants
identity a magical capacity to (re)signify itself within the term s of power. In
contrast to the lesbian-fem inist ideal—an ethical m odel contextualized by
feminist struggle w ith its legacy of political correctness—the queer ideal
disavows political correctness, dissociates lesbian identity from feminism, and
promises radical transgression via resignification. Resignification is "that
practice which occludes revolution" (Cotter 229). The aesthetic is the privileged
idiom of queer counter-discourse regarding notions of sexuality, identity and
gender: upholding parody as its principle and drag, role play a n d /o r "scenes" as
its metier, queer counter-discourse casts resistance as camp.
250
A Slight Digression: Lesbian Kitsch and Queer Camp

From a "queered" vantage point, the lesbian-feminist attachm ent to
authentic identity can only be kitsch, a painfully naive a n d /o r retrogressive
yearning for authenticity—for a self, sexuality, com m unity "free" from
patriarchal artifice. What is kitsch? Kitsch is what Czech dissident writer Milan
Kundera criticizes as a stock set of enchanted images, phrases and emotions at
the basis of all political movements.42 It is also the residue of a will to paradise
that turns into its opposite: a form of subordination and social control. In the
case of American identity politics, lesbian included, we have the "pathetic
testimony" of a silly utopia rather than the terrible (gulag) utopia that haunted a
w riter like K undera. Kitsch is w hen magical cliches in the "jargon of
authenticity" (Adorno) come to substitute the w arm feeling for thinking and
action, and are used as means of wresting control over a homeland of the mind
that has become very small indeed. In this context, epistemological privilege is
the "gut feeling" or "gut check"; knowledge-claims validated only through a
clicking into place of intuition for those "in the know."'43 Kitsch is the warmth of
worldless groups, an interior f(r)iction of sorority/solidarity m ost "sisters" have
burned ourselves out on (see Arendt, Men in Dark Times). It is w hen we become
so attuned to the authenticity of our identity—"cleaving to the timbres of who we
are" (Rich)—that we lose sight of our identity as historically constructed.
Queer identity, on the other hand, could be said to tout a camp sensibility:
it is that vantage point which slips the world through its distancing grammar of
irony and parody, a grammar and style typified by the quotation mark (Sontag).
^K undera, Unbearable Lightness of Being, see p. 256 for example.

43 Mary Hawkesworth criticizes knowledge claims based on intuition in her Signs review essay
on theories of fem inist epistem ology. Adorno criticizes a "jargon of authenticity" which valorizes
knowledge as "clicking into place" of intuition.
251
It is the identity w hich holds the w orld in quotes, suspending m eaning

indefinitely, not least the meaning of identity. The freedom implied by queer
culture is freedom from identity, including lesbian identity. The utopian "Any
w om an can be a lesbian" becomes "Anybody can be a lesbian," even a male
b ody.44 In other w ords the ethical utopia of lesbian feminism becomes the
epistemological jouissance of queer politics, a shift from an ethical normative
ideal to an aesthetic, normative ideal.
The dichotom y I have contrived, Kitsch vs. Camp, is a provisional,
rhetorical device intended to highlight tensions in lesbian identity and politics in
the past ten years or so, rather than to provide an ontology of absolute divisions
betw een lesbian feminism and queer politics; or even less between specific
lesbians w ho, in reality, hold political positions and cultured styles that fluctuate
between, overlap a n d /o r underm ine the two poles contrived here. Kitsch vs.
camp and, in turn, tensions between ethics and aesthetics, are terms through
which to unfold and scrutinize deeper issues in identity politics that turn on
competing conceptions of freedom and resistance.
As we have seen, lesbian-feminist ideology tends towards idealism to the
extent th at ethics displaces politics and defines freedom as (inter)subjective
transparency—aiming for self realization on the one hand and m erging w ith
others in com m unity on the other. This is an idealist ethics that conceals
^Jacqueline Zita analyzes the case of the "male lesbian" as an exercise in "postmodern body
politics," exposing the lim its of an ontology granting bodies an infinitely protean character,
similar to w hat Bordo (Unbearable Weight) has discussed as the "epistem ological jouissance" of
postm odern body politics. Zita points out that this ontology (in which m en can "be," not only
"pass" as, lesbians) derives from an epistem ological paradigm in which gender and sexuality are
abstracted from a larger field of power and understood exclusively as the effect of "reading
practices." H ow ever, the fact that a "male lesbian" loses his ontological status as lesbian once he
steps outside the m agic circle of postmodern lesbian "readers" show s that there is a broader field
of power in w hich bodies have meaning than is allowed for by a discursive model. See Zita,
"Male Lesbians and the Postmodern Body."
252
complicity of self and community with the world that it opposes and conceives of
change as changing an attitude. In sum, lesbian-feminist ethics can be criticized
as invested in an expressivist ideology based on the assumption that all acts are,
or ought to be, authentic expressions of ideals and (as I augm ented Phelan's
account) that such expressions of ideals are (the same as) political actions. While
queer counter-discourse eschews the expressivist model of self at stake for
lesbian feminism, it prom otes an equally voluntarist notion of identity based on
"visibility."
Visibility Trouble in a Spectacular Culture

The concept of visibility is central to the paradigm shift where queer
discourse makes its cam py appearance, in part repudiating "depth" as "kitsch."45
Thus Rosemary Hennessy argues that queer counter discourse, in its subversion
of identity, aims to destabilize identity as "grounded in an em bodied or
empirical visibility" while at the same time recasting visibility as "performance ..
. drag, masquerade, or signifying play" (36). To extrapolate from Hennessy,
then, we can partly understand flash-points of a shift from lesbian feminism to
queer in terms of a contested notion of "visibility": With queemess we move
from a desire for positive images of lesbians—the latter understood in terms of a
stable, given identity—into practices which, allegedly, destabilize identity when
they "enact the phantasm ic"—sadomasochism, butch femme role play, an d /o r
drag. Rather than disclose the self as authentic, the queer credo requires making
45 My own version of a paradigm shift from lesbian feminist kitsch to queer camp is inspired by
Frederic Jameson's discussion of the "cultural logic of late capitalism," i.e. "postmodernism," in
terms of a repudiation of "depth models"—essence and appearance, alienation and disalienation,
authenticity and inauthenticity—which are replaced by "a conception of practices, discourses and
textual play" and where "depth is replaced by surface, or by m ultiple surfaces" (70).
253
a spectacle of one's self. Beautiful souls are out, beautiful people are in. Against
authenticity, "drag"—which serves as trope and idealized m odel for this
discourse— is defined as a copy without an original. As Butler puts it, ".. .gay is
to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy" (31).
B utler's concept of d rag echoes B au d rillard 's d efinition of a
"sim ulacrum "—an identical copy w ithout an original. According to Frederic
Jameson the simulacrum is a key sign of a w orld ordered/dis-ordered by the
cultural logic of late capitalism—a world transform ed into sheer images
(Postmodernism 74). From this perspective, the touted subversive implications of
"enacting the phantasmic" for exposing gender as un-natural m ay have another,
less liberatory, m eaning. Enacting the phantasm ic may also reiterate,
inadvertently, w hat Guy Debord criticized as "the spectacular character of
industrial society" where the image is the final form of commodity reification
(qtd. in Jameson, "Postmodernism" 74). In this spirit Hennessy questions the
value of queer visibility in a commodity culture, (the title of her 1994 essay) insofar
as (queer) visibility "is often a matter of commodification, a process that depends
invariably on the lives and labors of invisible others" (31).
H ennessy's aim is to interrogate "an imaginary, class-specific gay
subjectivity" (32), a "fiction of visibility"—as Hennessy cites Marx's notion of the
fetish —which "conceals the social relations new urban gay and queer identities
depend on" (36). Hennessy argues that a fetishization of identity underwrites
both queer counter-discourse (theory and activist tactics) and a new, capitalist
appropriation of queemess (lesbian chic for example). In this sense, queer
theory/activism , despite or indeed through its subversion of identity, enacts a
"phantasmic white middle class" (Wendy Brown) no less than the politics named
254
by Brown in its attachment to identity. A queer discourse's "deconstructive

claim" (Brown)— to de-naturalize gender—is neutralized insofar as the same
discourse re-mystifies the material conditions that enable—or prevent—queer
subversions. For Hennessy then, queer implies an escape from class—an escape
from its "m ateriality," insofar as "material" implies "an ensemble of human
practices," including "econom ic divisions of labor and w ealth, political
arrangem ents.. .ideological organizations of meaning-making" (33).
Queer theory fetishizes identity when it relies on a discourse model that in
effect collapses the social into the cultural/ideological and abstracts identity,
sexuality, gender (and resistance to all three) from "social totalities like
capitalism and patriarchy.. .in favor of an exclusive emphasis on the specific and
the local (a la Foucault)" (Hennessy, "Queer Visibility" 41). For example, Butler's
theory of drag as parodic-and-therefore-subversive depends on a specific middle
class context of address: Beyond the discrete, charm ed boundaries of this
bourgeois gay audience, some subjects engaged in drag are historically secured (by
capitalism and patriarchy) in a way that makes "drag, not so m uch playful
subversion as a painful yearning for authenticity, occasionally w ith brutally
violent results" (Hennessy, "Queer Visibility" 42). Such violence was the fate of
transgendered prostitute Venus Xtravaganza filmed in Paris is Burning— a
poverty-class "w om an" of color, m urdered by a trick, w hether for failing or
succeeding at passing it is difficult to know, and in either case disenchants the
notion of parody at stake for Butler.
At this juncture, I w ould argue that Butler's performative theory suggests
a model of identity which merely replaces one form of voluntarism (associated
with an expressivist model of depth) w ith a new, aestheticized voluntarism.
255
There is a corresponding shift from a lesbian discourse of ethics aiming at inter-

subjective transparency to a queer "ethics" as "a pragmatic, strategic undertaking
without foundations—as a project of inter-subjective negotiation" (Cotter 229).
In both cases we have a "shift away from politics as the principled action of a
collective struggling to transform existing social configurations" (Cotter 229.
emph. in original) to a voluntarist notion of resistance as a m atter of changing—
or, in the case of queer culture, "having" an "attitude," as in "Bad Attitude," to
cite the title of a defunct lesbian pornography magazine. More specifically,
whereas the project of ethics for lesbian feminism tends to be one of "processing"
the dynamics of a com m unity,46 the project of inter-subjective negotiation at
stake for queer counter-discourse is construed in discursive a n d /o r aestheticized
terms.
In Bodies that Matter Butler disclaims the interpretation of her notion of
performativity as voluntarist; b u t this brings her no closer to a historicizing
account of drag. To the extent that she abstracts drag performances from a wider
historical context, h er interpretation rem ains voluntarist, and suggests a
conflation of performativity in a theatrical sense and perform ativity in the sense
of citationality over time.47 This conflation enhances the aestheticizing aura
46Janice Raymond criticizes a phenom enon where lesbians become "professional relaters."
Relationships between lesbian lovers or friends are reduced to "relationships that get constantly
'examined' and 'dealt with' in much the same way that [an over-therapized culture] examines
and deals with all sorts o f feelings" and in which lesbians "channel the bulk of their energy into
relationships" (A Passion fo r Friends 161-2).
47 In Bodies that Matter Butler draws on J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words w hen she
writes, "Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: m ost perform atives, for instance, are
statements that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power"
(225). These include legal sentences, inaugurations, marriage cerem ony, Le. "statements which
not only perform an action, but confer a binding power on the action performed" (225).
Furthermore, "If the pow er of discourse to produce that which it nam es is linked w ith the
question of performativity, then the performative is one domain in w hich pow er acts as
discourse" (225). Unfortunately, in Butler's framework, the performative and discursive becomes
the privileged if not exclusive dom ains in which power acts at all.
256
already granted to "performativity" both by central tropes in the discourse

(parody, role play, masquerade) and by queer cultural politics itself, for which
symbolic, theatrical action—making a spectacle—is its metier. Indeed Butler
invokes this political style to reinforce her notion of performativity (Bodies, 233-4)
as if the theatrical style of queer politics automatically proved the political value
of "performativity" rather than its short-coming as a politics reliant on spectacle.
Queer Visibility and The Life as Lifestyle

This last point returns me to the question of the meaning of visibility in a
com modity culture, and the overlap between a "gay m arketing moment"
(Gluckman and Reed)—for example, the marketing of "lesbian chic"—and
existing styles of queer everyday life. In this vein, my question is: Does "lesbian
chic" take the "life out of the life style" as a San Francisco journalist once
quipped?, or is the line between queer/lesbian culture an d "commodified
lesbianism" (Danae Clark) already blurred in a problematic way? When lesbian
chic is indistinguishable from a queer resignification of identity, "the life"
becomes "Life style," in other words a "marketing strategy" that suggests the
"general aestheticization of everyday life in consumer capitalism" (Hennessy,
"Queer Visibility" 57). A historidzed notion of "life style" thus helps further
historidze and critique queer visibility as aesthetidzed idealism.
Queer visibility—as a particular ideal and practice of queer counter
discourse—betrays a legacy of avant-gardism as the latter has overlapped with
capitalism. H enessy's use of "avant-garde" echoes A ndreas Huyssen who
discusses the latter as a dynamic of movements in Euro-American art assodated
257
w ith "the m ost extreme form of artistic negativism —art itself being the first
victim" (Calinescu qtd. in Huyssen 222) as well as w ith the "positive" or
"constructive" effort to "subvert art's autonomy, its artificial separation from life,
and its institutionalization as 'high art'" (223). Hennessy, suggesting a parallel to
contemporary queer discourse, argues that the critical force of avant-gardism
was sabotaged by a failure to move beyond "cultural experimentation as [its]
principle political forum" ("Queer Visibility" 56). The goal of the "reintegration
of life and art" (Huyssen 223) at stake for avant garde movements such as
Dadaism, surrealism and situationism once h ad a political edge that has now
been neutralized, Hennessy argues. Capitalism has its ow n way of integrating
art and life in a way that mystifies and conceals its ow n social process. Hence we
have the society of simulation which transforms the w orld into sheer images
according to the dictates of the market; this society dissolves the boundary
betw een im age and reality in a way that mystifies the social relations of
capitalism, concealing or backgrounding the labor that has gone into making
these relations possible (57).
One such simulation is "life style" which, Hennessy points out, was
historically constructed in the 80s to promote cosmopolitanism and consumption
for a new class of middle class professionals (57-8). The concept of lifestyle is a
fiction of visibility, a fetish which
functions to structure a relation betw een m iddle class as cultural
formation and its economic functions [that] further mystifies and conceals
its internal race and gender hierarchies by an ideology of individualism
and by a notion of the self as "fashion." ("Queer Visibility" 57-8)
In a queer context, the notion of self as fashion is central to visibility. The
line between marketing self as fashion and resignifying queer identity becomes
258
blurred by an explicit Queer Nation (QN) strategy which aimed at "inserting

queer spectacle... into centers of straight consumption" through actions at malls
and producing Queer commodities like Queer Bart Simpson tee shirts (Berlant
and Freeman, qtd. in Hennessy, "Queer Visibility" 52). Lauding such tactics,
queer theorists Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman claim that QN addresses
"the consumer's own 'perverse' desire to experience a different body and offer[s]
itself as the m ost stylish of the many attitudes on sale at the mall" (Berlant and
Freeman qtd. in Hennessy, "Queer Visibility" 164, emphasis in original). In
response to this kind of claim, I juxtapose Danae Clark's critique of the marketed
"chic" of lesbian visibility, and the attem pt by some critics to resignify
commodified lesbianism through subversive readings. Clark cautions against a
critical practice that "in [its] desire and haste to attribute agency to the spectator"
risks "losing sight of the interrelation between reading practices and the political
economy of media institutions" (191), in other words, risks fetishization.
When 'the life' becomes lifestyle—becomes, in other words, a spectacle of
commodity culture—queer identity betrays its own attachment to home, enacting
the phantasm ic norm ality of consumer society. For w hen visibility means
making
the pleasures of consumption available to gays too and to commodify
queer identity as 'the most stylish of the many attitudes on sale at the
mall, then inclusion [in U.S. mainstream culture] seems to be precisely the
point. (Hennessy 52-3 j48
Following Hennessy's argum ent here, I suggest that "queer visibility"
suggests the limits of queemess as a "worldly" ethics, an ethics that eschews a
48 Although H ennessy doesn't address lesbian commercial enterprises such as Girl Spots, Olivia
Cruise, etc., this burgeoning bourgeois culture could be comparably scrutinized w ith respect to
its main product: lesbian lifestyle as fashion—sexual lifestyle/fashion in particular, or what
Janice Raymond critiqued as "life stylism."
259
utopian refusal of power and pragmatically attem pts to "redeploy" power. Thus
I bring back, for further scrutiny, Butler's distinction between withdrawing from
and redeploying power. Can any progressive theorist or activist really accept as
liberatory those tactics which re-use the pow er of the commodity, i.e. those
tactics which "mak[e] queers good by m aking goods queer" as Berlant and
Freeman p u t it, indeed which make queers goods'. Do such tactics contest the
systemic exploitation which secures the com modity and its fiction of visibility?
Perhaps the m ost stark example cited by Hennessy of this fiction is the marketing
of queer visibility by the Levi-Strauss Corporation. While Levi's promoted "gay-
friendly" policies of employment and advertising, its practice of sweat-shop
labor conditions for poor w om en in Asia and the Caribbean persisted,
uncontested. Queer visibility in this case structurally depends on the invisibility
of poor wom en's labor ("Queer Visibility" 67-8). As such, queer visibility implies
an aesthetidzed idealism and an ethos which valorizes, rather than acknowledges
or contests, the complicitous relation between queemess and the dominant social
order.
Queer Theory As Postfeminist

As I've argued throughout this dissertation, radical lesbian/fem inism 's
major contribution to feminist theory is its critique of heterosexuality as central to
the organization of male dominance. If the "poverty" of queer visibility suggests
that queem ess may be a dream of escape from class, this is partly due to a
discourse m odel which, in its critique of heterosexuality, not only abstracts
heterosexuality from the material reality of capitalist commodity culture but, in
260
striking contrast to radical lesbian/feminism "disavow[s].. .the relationship between

heterosexuality and patriarchy" (Hennessy, "Queer Visibility" 65, emphasis mine).
But if, as Hennessy acknowledges, (normative) heterosexuality is pivotal to
patriarchy (as well linked to capitalism, influenced by it and influencing it), an
omission in her ow n account of queer visibility is rather puzzling, namely, her
failure to address the relation between queer visibility and a "com m odity
culture" defined by sexual commodification and sexual consum erism .49 It is
strange indeed that in an article that cites "commodified lesbianism"(Clark) as an
example of queer visibility as fetishization, the development of a "lesbian sex
industry" goes un-noted. By the lesbian sex industry I mean the production of
paraphernalia (e.g. sex toys), media (lesbian pom a n d /o r lesbian fan and
glamour magazines, complete with centerfolds), performances, sex clubs—a
commercial culture with its (s)experts occasionally funded by the old boys'
sexpert network (Susie Bright writing for Penthouse) and its strip joints, its lesbian
"sex workers."50 Indeed, commercial sex provides queer culture with a central
paradigm for its self-representations and practices as queer. Hennessy's failure to
acknowledge this aspect of queer visibility points to the limits of her
"materialism." In the end, H ennessy's materialism remains constrained by
marxist—or postmarxist—categories rather than extended by feminism. A
radically feminist critique of a commodity culture would not only scrutinize the
developm ent of the lesbian sex industry but, more im portantly, theorize
49By sexual commodification and consumption I refer to the social processes where h u m an
sexuality/bodies are constructed as desirable commodities. This process is, in my opinion,
constitutive of gender yet is complicated by the prostituting of male youth.
50Detailed discussion of the lesbian sex industry is beyond the scope of my current project but in
forthcoming work I hope to theorize a lesbian feminist m aterialism that w ill include an account of
this kind of historical development.
261
intersections between capitalism, heterosexuality, patriarchy and a w orld-wide

boom in sexual commodification—international trafficking in women and youth.
From a m aterialist fem inist perspective, the spectacle o f sexual
consumerism in queer culture reflects a larger social reality of sexual power. By
sexual power, I mean the power discussed in chapter 1—relations of appropriation
(Guillaumin) defined by asymmetric relations of access that produce sex as
capital and capital as sex, relations through which the com modification of
wom en and the commodification of sex is central to the social production of
normative gender. Since queemess plays with, rather than deconstructs sexual
pow er (in the sense that I've just defined it), does queer de-naturalize or re-
naturalize gender and heterosexuality? In other words, w hat is the relation
between queer theory/discourse and feminism?
To the extent that queer theory disavows the relation betw een
heterosexuality and patriarchy, queer theory is postfeminist.51 Postfeminist queer
counter-discourse undercuts the possibility of a m aterialist account of
heterosexuality as a political regime. This is pronounced in Butler whose
discursive account of heterosexuality as naturalizing gender, ironically occludes
Butler contests the value of the concept of "patriarchy," writing

the patriarchal system of domination is a phrase [that] has become permanently disabled
in the course of recent critiques of (a) the systematic or putative universality of
patriarchy, (b) the use of patriarchy to describe power relations relating to male
dominance in their culturally variable forms, and (c) the use of domination as the central
way in which feminists approach the question of power. See "Feminism by Any Other
Name."
In contrast to this critique of the concept of patriarchy as totalizing and problematic in its
approach to power, Hennessy argues that
Patriarchy is a variable and historical social totality in that it its particular forms for
organizing social relations like work, citizenship, reproduction, ownership, pleasure, or
identity have had a persistent effect on heterogendered structures in dom inance at the
same time that these structures vary and are the sites of social struggle (63 "Queer
Visibility").
See chapter 1 for a detailed discussion of these issues.
262
the meaning of heterosexuality and gender as that which naturalizes a power

differential between men and women.52 However, of equal importance is the feet
that the queer discourse of denaturalizing gender is bound to its de-mythologizing
of lesbian feminism. In other w ords, queemess as a "pragmatic undertaking"
exists largely through its vaunted demystification of a utopian ethos it deems
"impracticable"—the utopian, ethical imaginary of lesbian feminism. With this
last point, and by way of conclusion, I return to the theme of the central
predicament of this chapter—the shift from lesbian feminism to queer and w hat
I consider the central conflict spotlighted by this shift, namely, a conflict in
values and the distinct world-views implied by these values.
52Butler's account of heterosexuality is just short of tautological—conceptually air-tight and

barren, offering no new , substantive insight into heterosexuality as an institution. For exam ple,
Butler discusses the incest taboo and the taboo against homosexuality in terms of the
"disciplinary production" of gender which "effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests
of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality in the reproductive domain" (135).
Thus a fiction of gender stability is produced in the interests of heterosexual control but what are
the interests of the heterosexual construction of sexuality outside of "a false stabilization of
gender"? In other words, there is no account of the power relations of heterosexuality, i.e. of
what "in the interests of heterosexuality" m ight mean, outside of its normatmity. Yet its
norm ativity (how it sim ultaneously im poses itself as the norm and compulsory and natural) is
not placed in larger context of power relations. Defining gender and (hetero)sexuality in purely
discursive terms, the argument is that heterosexuality is what norm alizes/naturalizes gender and
gender is what norm alizes/naturalizes heterosexuality, but there is no account of gender and
heterosexuality outside of the claim that they norm alize/naturalize one another. Hence the
tautology—the two terms are defined in terms of each other.
263
Conclusion: Utopia as "Lie"—Compared to What?
.. .theirs was an alienated consciousness

transformed into commodities without their even
knowing it— they disregarded the terrible events
which were looming on the horizon, even and above
all when they brought the new, abstract,
metaphysical themes of "adventure" and "risk" to
the fore.
The Critique of Everyday Life—Henri Lefebvre
The guideline, "enact the phantasmic" directs an arrow into the heart of
an ethics that bases itself on authenticity. If queer suggests a simulacrum in a
commodity culture, the invariable character of this society as spectacle makes
"authenticity" a lie. And gorged as many of us are on a compendium of bland
images of goddess culture and other faded metaphors of a once vibrant
feminist/lesbian counter culture, the "new fuck you"53 represented by
queemess may hold the fleeting appeal, of—paradoxically—frankness.54
Nowhere is this ethos of frankness so pronounced as by the same discourse that
trades on simulation as its raison d'etre and supreme style, and which finds the
"sex debates" its ideal forum for exposing the lies of lesbian feminism. 55 For
5377ie New Fuck You : Adventures in Lesbian Reading is the very a la queer mode title of a recent
anthology of lesbian fiction. Eds. Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz. New York: Semiotext(E), 1995.
^M annheim discusses a daw ning "prosaic attitude," "the transformation of utopianism into
science," of which he also comm ents, "It is possible that the best that our ethical principles have
to offer is "genuineness' and 'frankness' in place of the old ideals. 'G enuineness'. . .frankness
seem to be nothing more than the projection of the general 'matter-of-factness' or 'realism' of our
time into the realm of ethics. Perhaps a world that is no longer in the making can afford this. But
have w e reached the state where we can dispense with strivings? W ould not this elim ination of
all tension mean also the elim ination of political activity, scientific zeal—in fact of the very
content of life itself?" (256-7).
55"Liberty is the right not to lie," Camus' phrase, is the epigraph that Pat Califia chose for the
introduction to her collection o f sadomasochist stories. Macho Sluts. Starting from the first
sadomasochist lesbian publication in which the writers named them selves The M inistry o f Truth
("the truth hurts"), "truth" has been a key buzz word of the lesbian sadomasochist text. For "Jan
Brown" in a 1990 OUT/LOOK article entitled, "Sex, Lies and Penetration, a Butch fesses up"
264
there a utopian discourse of egalitarian woman-identification is "unmasked"

and ground down to its ideological determinants as Western, conservative,
essentialist, etc.
But in the discourse of disenchantment in which lesbian feminism is
"queer-ied," "truth" and "lies" in relation to the terms of utopia an d /o r fantasy
have a dialectical meaning deriving from shifting political and historical contexts
of significance and use. In an aphorism entitled "Culture as Lie," Adorno's
dialectical interpretation of "ideology critique" suggests a parallel to m y own
assessment of uses and abuses of disenchantment. In his reading, "ideology
critique" attacks "culture" as utopian in its demand "that relationships be
entirely reduced to their material origin, ruthlessly and openly formed according
to the interests of the participants" (43, Minima Moralia). The very dem and seems
a premise of queer discourse in its disenchantment of a more "romanticized"
model of relationship. For, as Jill Dolan defends sadomasochism "desire is not
necessarily a fixed, male-owned commodity, but can be exchanged, with a much
different meaning, between women" (qtd. in de Lauretis, "Indifference" 152).
This is a contention that de Lauretis reads as either "the ultimate camp
representation" or "rather disturbing. For unfortunately—or fortunately, as the
case may be—commodity exchange does have the same meaning between
"truth" becomes one more sex toy—or weapon. Brown aims to disarm her reader with truth, she
likes the "whiff of truth," a "dick hard as truth between her legs." The goal of her "confession" is
to come out sadomasochist in a way that surpasses the best/w orst of sadomasochist fantasies.
Whereas other bad girls had always insisted on a critical boundary between fantasy and real life,
Brown breaks the final boundary, writing:
Remember when w e all agonized over our fantasies?... We em phasized the sim ple
difference between fantasy and reality... Well, we lied. The power is not in the ability to
control the violent image. It is in the lust we have to see how close w e can get to the edge.
It is in the lust to be overpowered, forced, used, objectified.
It is not sadomasochist illusions that Brown aims to bash, however, but the fem inist
"lies," or rather the feminist hypocrites w ho made Brown and others like her "lie" for their own
survival.
265
women as between men by definition, that is, by Marx's definition of the

structure of capital" ("Indifference" 152). The position excoriating (a
romanticized, utopian) lesbian-feminist culture as a lie becomes itself ideology
viz. its re-enchantment of commodity culture. Adorno, again:
If material reality is called the world of exchange value, and culture
whatever refuses to accept the domination of that world, then it is true
that such refusal is illusory as long as the existent exists. Since, however,
free and honest exchange is itself a lie, to deny it is at the same time to
speak for truth: in face of the lie of the commodity world, even the lie that
denounces it becomes a corrective. {Minima Moralia, section 22)
Following Adorno's dialectical interpretation of "culture," I would argue
that the "illusory" refusal of existing conditions implicit in idealist utopian
lesbian discourse (its retreat into expressivist interiors of the soul, psyche, etc.)
nevertheless refuses an even deeper, more defeatist illusion. For utopian lesbian
discourse refuses the myth of the given (Hegel).56 Hence, I defend a crucial
moment of negation implied by the moral imagination of a lesbian-feminist ethos
even in its myth of transcending existing power.
The transcendence imagined by lesbian-feminist utopianism may be a
"lie" yet it denounces a more dangerous lie, viz. a self-interest model of hum an
relationships. This self-interest model is implicit in queer culture as a pragmatic
undertaking—enacting the phantasmic becomes pragmatic and realistic when
real-izing (practicing) utopian solidarity (sisterhood) seems unimaginable. The
force of fantasy for queer discourse is w hat utopia was for lesbian-feminism:
These terms, utopia and fantasy, point to contrasting forms of self-representation
56 I take the term "myth of the given" from Benhabib's study of Marx's appropriation of H egel in
Critique, Norm and Utopia where she discusses that critique which "is first and foremost a critique
of dogmatism and formalism, that is, a critique of the myth of the given," a critique which
assum es, also, that "Theoretical critique is also the critique of a w ay of life implied or projected
by theories" (42-3). I w ill discuss this theme in more detail in the follow ing chapter.
266
for lesbian and queer as new social subjects constituting themselves vis-a-vis
normative heterosexuality. The consequence of a shift from utopian self
representation to an identity based on fantasy reveals a dis-enchantm ent which
denounces transcendence yet re-installs a myth of the given. In particular, queer
counter-discourse ever so pragmatically upholds a myth of sexual power, namely,
the m yth that appropriation is a given of sexuality rather than something we ought
to imagine changing in a foreseeable future.
The myth of sexual power is especially deployed through a discourse—a
"lie"— of "free exchange." This particular "lie" seems to be far too easily
accepted by (post)modem intellectuals such as Dolan and Butler who would
represent our repetitions as acts of transgression or subversiveness—As if in
choosing to make o u r own forms of commercial sex or, in contracting for sex—in
devising even "slave contracts"—queers not only altered sexual pow er but were
advancing beyond their conservative foresisters, the utopian lesbian feminists.
Consenting to the Same is cast as the ultimate transgression. Yet this fantasy of
transgression is precisely what allows the "modem [fem inist/lesbian/queer]
intellectual" to far too easily "push far from [her] lips the bitter chalice of an
everyday life which really is unbearable—and will always be so until it has been
transformed, and until new foundations for consciousness are established"
(Lefebvre 120). Such "new foundations" requires asking how utopianism might
articulate with everyday life and thus with feminism as praxis. If lesbian was once
the sign of a utopian fusion between feminism and lesbianism, where feminism
was the theory and lesbian the practice, a necessary dis-enchantment ought not
lead feminist/lesbian scholars to thereby abandon the utopian m om ent of
267
critique and culture at stake for lesbian feminism, a utopianism w ithout which a
radically feminist imaginary is impossible.
268
CHAPTER 5: Escaping the Class o f Women: Lesbian-Standpoint as a

Feminist Plot
Introduction: The "Lesbian Point of View7'

"The particular m aterial reality of lesbian life m akes political
consciousness more likely" ("Not For Lesbians Only" 55). These were the words
in 1975 of Charlotte Bunch, a founding member of the radical lesbian group the
Furies. While adding the proviso, "I'm not saying that all lesbians are feminists;
all lesbians are not politically conscious," Bunch nevertheless argues that lesbians
"can build on the fact that it is not in the interests of lesbians to maintain and
defend the system as it is" (55). This claim, which linked a lesbian social position
(material reality) to political interests, suggested a definition of lesbian as—to d te
Monique Wittig—"escapees from our class," the class of women. As discussed
above (see ch.4), this utopian definition of "lesbian" is both hopeful and
troubling for feminist/lesbian thought. It hopefully links the category "lesbian"
to a whole new social imaginary—as a utopian rupture in the dominant ideology
of heterosexuality. It is now clear, however, that the "category 'lesbian' [has not
overthrown] systems of gender and compulsory heterosexuality" (6-7), as critic
of "lesbian utopics," Annemarie Jagose, puts it. Indeed, as I argued in chapter 4,
the history of radical lesbian politics in Euro-American culture points more to
"lesbian" as a troubling escape from class in the sense of an (imagined) escape
from material conditions, than it does to a moment of radical negation of existing
conditions.
The utopian lesbian subject position implied by Bunch and Wittig, among
others, is driven by a notion of "epistemic privilege," a notion that invests the
category "lesbian" with symbolic force as a "revolutionary subject." As such,
269
"lesbian" shows a legacy of the marxist notion of revolutionary subject. In this

chapter I examine utopian lesbian/feminism in terms of this marxist legacy, that
is to say, in term s of the theory that some groups (e.g. the proletariat) are
positioned in such a way that they are paradoxically em powered vis-a-vis their
exclusion from the dominant system. A premise of my argum ent is that the
theory of a "lesbian point of view" an d /o r a "feminist standpoint" helps unravel
a dilemma for radical lesbian thought noted above: a (marvelously liberatory)
lesbian point of view seems resistant to translation into political praxis.
To begin, I call attention to a central problem w ith the notion of epistemic
privilege as pointed up in Bunch's claim, namely her assumed relation between
the social position of lesbians and their political interests, between lesbians'
marginalih/ and lesbians' disinterest in the dom inant system. Even if it were the
case that a lesbian social position implies disinterest in a heteropatriarchal system,
this position hardly guarantees disinterest in those other systems of oppression
in which heteropatriarchy is "interlocked."1 W ithout further analysis of how
these systems intersect, Bunch's argum ent tends to assum e, explicitly or
implicitly, a unitary conception of power and, in turn, a unitary, coherent subject,
"lesbian"; this glosses over the different interests that class a n d /o r race-
privileged lesbians would continue to have in the system as capitalist and white
supremacist, in contrast to (and at the expense of) poor lesbians and lesbians of
color.
1The phrase, "interlocking oppressions" is from the Cohambee River Collective Manifesto, one of
the first documents of contemporary "identity politics," and one which, against the grain of what
now goes by identity politics, elaborated identity as the vantage point from which to theorize
interconnections betw een oppression, rather than as a way of (however unintentionally)
fragmenting identity groups/positions ("A Black Feminist Statement").
270
The notion of an epistemologically privileged vantage p o in t tends to

imply or lead to an absolutist opposition between the subject position/identity at
stake and the dominant ideology from which it is excluded. This is the problem
w ith a utopian identity I discussed above. We hold to an absolutist opposition
between "lesbian" and "patriarchy" at the peril of obscuring the fact that "even
critique is complicitous because it is inevitably entangled w ith pow er and
domination," as feminist philosopher Bat-Ami Bar On argues in her critique of
"epistemic privilege" theory (94). As Bar On suggests, standpoint epistemology
tends to be besotted w ith a single, fixed center of pow er ( e.g. gender, but not
race, or the reverse) and its distance from that center—its marginality—gives the
standpoint its energy, its special claims to knowledge. Thus from the vantage
point of a politics exposing w hat Audre Lorde called the "house of difference"
{Zami 224) in which all lesbians dwell, one might ask, To w hat extent have social
relations other than gender been invisible, even forced fu rth er into the
background, by a so called fem inist or lesbian point of view? Standpoint
epistemology—whether marxist, feminist, Afrocentric, etc.—has been thrown
into perm anent doubt by the contemporary "discovery" that oppression is
multiple rather than unitary (Bar O n 94).
Teresa de Lauretis's notion of an "eccentric subject" responds to some of
the above problems w ith standpoint theory. The eccentric position at stake for de
Lauretis—which she encounters in a range of critical fem inist an d lesbian
writings—is not only off center vis-a-vis the dom inant system, b u t implies a
decentering within the subject insofar as it is a subject th at investigates its own
determ inants. A lesb ian /fem in ist subject that investigates its ow n social
conditions "discovers" that it is multiply organized along w hat d e Lauretis
271
discusses as different, but not co-equal, axes of racial, cultural and class
specificity. This discovery is one valuable lesson, as de Lauretis points out, of
feminist theory generated in the eighties by women of color. The latter criticized
an earlier feminism for failing to investigate its ow n conditions of thought as
situated, i.e. as mediated by social relations other than gender. Thus de Lauretis
theorizes displacem ent—"a dis-placement and a self-displacem ent"—as a
condition of feminist theory/consciousness that confronts the impossibility of
any safe "place" in identity a n d /o r community, including especially feminism
(an d /o r lesbian-feminism), w hen the latter fails to investigate its own race/class
mediations (Eccentric 138).
Yet, w hat does then distinguish the sharpness of lesbian insight, its special
critical vantage point—its "eccentricity"? If a multiplicity of margins exists, what
makes one more privileged than another? If they are equally privileged, why
does privilege matter? (Bar On 94). Does the fact that a subject is multiply
organized—that oppression is multiple for most social subjects—belie the claim
of epistemological specificity for a lesbian point of view? De Lauretis argues the
contrary, namely that a lesbian point of view can be theorized as a "crucial stake"
in the exposing and unsettling of "interlocking oppressions." Rather than
presuppose a coherent identity, "lesbian" is at least potentially that position
w hich can, de Lauretis argues, "call into question the notion of a coherent,
historically continuous, stable identity" (Martin and M ohanty qtd. in "Eccentric"
135). She refers to Minnie Bruce Pratt's autobiographical essay about the
m eaning of "hom e" for a white southerner lesbian. Pratt's essay refuses a
problem atically utopian notion of lesbian as an escape from the w orld, and
reconfigures lesbian as that vantage point which can show home to be
272
an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific

histories of oppression and resistance [and on] the repression of
differences even within oneself. (Martin and Mohanty qtd. in "Eccentric"
134)
As the above writers argue, "home" implies family, community, nation of
origin, a space of mythic safety and belonging, in the present and past, a myth
belied by a history of violent exclusions. Home has been lost to lesbians who,
historically, have been expelled (to p u t it simply) as perverts. Yet, de Lauretis,
among others, suggests that this very exclusion is the vantage point from which
to expose the fact that "home" (in the past, in a stable identity) is a place too often
"secured b y terror" (M artin and Mohanty qtd. in "Eccentric" 136). In this
analysis, the meaning of "lesbian" as a privileged vantage point is precisely not
any essential, unifying identity, but rather
that w hich exposes the extreme limits of w hat passes itself off as simply
human, as universal, as unconstrained by identity, namely, the position of
the w hite middle class. (Martin and Mohanty qtd. in "Eccentric" 136)
However, if, as Bar On rightly points out, m arginality in itself is no
guarantee of disinterest in the system for a marginal social subject, what qualifies
a "lesbian" as such an "extreme limit," this crucial stake unsettling the safety of
the status quo? In provisional answer I return to a point made in chapter 4,
namely, that the advantage of a lesbian point of view is not due to some special
property or to any essential lesbian identity but to its critique of heterosexual social
relations. In this respect, the utopian meaning of lesbian is in its potential to
expose rather than obscure the interconnections betw een heterosexuality and
other forms of oppression, in other words in its meaning as a position of critique.
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Utopia, Critique. Lesbian

The value of a utopian theory of the lesbian subject (or theory of the
utopian lesbian subject) is in, I suggest, the "emphatic normative dim ension" of
feminist critique. My use of critique is informed by Seyla Benhabib's discussion
of the M arxist/H egelian tradition of critical theory (Critique 5). Benhabib
distinguishes between two tendencies in critical theory—a politics of fulfillment
which extends the emancipatory potential of existing (e.g. democratic) norm s
and a politics o f utopia which implies a "qualitative break" and "radical social
otherness." While in both cases critique is explicitly normative—it proposes an
ideal for how the world ought to be—a politics of utopia implies that "The society
of the future is viewed to be, not the culmination, but the radical negation of the
present" (Critique 41-2). Utopia here implies the radical negation of existing social
relations and proposes their replacement with a new order:
The m ain premise underlying my defense of a utopian lesbian subject-
position is that it suggests a qualitative break w ith the social o rd er as
heterosexual and "emphasizes the emergence of qualitatively new needs, social
relations, and modes of association, which burst open the utopian potential
w ithin the old" (Critique 13). However, this very argument also prom pts my
internal critique of utopian lesbian thought: lesbian feminist thought inherits a
problem from marxist theory of the revolutionary subject when it founders on
the question of the relation between critique and praxis. In other w ords, how
does the insight that there is no hom e/no safety, translate into a politics of
resistance? Rather than answer, my aim is to make this question relevant to
feminist/lesbian theory. The question of the relation between critique and praxis
becomes relevant if fem inist/lesbian theories can recover a fem inist/lesbian
274
"standpoint" for a politicized critique. To proceed, I will assess w hat I consider

to be key radical feminist and lesbian theories of the subject beginning w ith
Adrienne Rich's theory of a lesbian continuum. I move from the debate around
the continuum theory to a discussion of the theory of the lesbian subject as
epistemological standpoint in Frye and Wittig; I consider this theory, in part, as a
legacy and revision of marxist concepts of the revolutionary subject. To conclude
this chapter I address the question of how to re-think a collective subject of
critique (and of struggle) after the fall of the Subject, taking as both springboard
and foil the argum ents of Rosemary Hennessy and of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe—both of w hich scrutinize a radical imaginary without a unified subject.
In the end I draw on aspects of these poststructuralist thinkers to re-think the
lesbian subject as a standpoint of critique w hile also criticizing the discourse
analysis that their arguments advance.
The Lesbian Continuum

The awareness that they are about to make
the continuum of history explode is
characteristic of the revolutionary classes at
the moment of their action.
"Theses on the Philosophy of History"—
Walter Benjamin
The Lesbian Continuum Debate and the Contested Concept of Lesbian

Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"
and the exchange that followed in Signs is notable for its crystallization of a key
theme in radical fem inist/lesbian feminist thought—the redefinition of lesbian in
terms of resistance to male power. As a fram e for theorizing resistance as a
275
"central fact of w om en's history" (195), the concept of the "lesbian continuum"
suggests a notion of critique as utopian transfiguration. In other words, the
continuum implies a radical negation of compulsory heterosexuality at one and
the same time that it aims to "remember and invent" (Wittig) a qualitatively
different social reality in "lesbian existence." As a frame for affirming lesbian
existence, the continuum discloses hitherto "invisible" forms of resistance to
com pulsory heterosexuality in the experience of w om en for whom female
friendship is one of "primary intensity," whether or not such friendship includes
sexual intim acy. This project suggests w h at S tuart H all affirms as an
essentialist—and essential—moment of cultural identity, namely a "positization"
of identity for groups whose history has been stolen ("Cultural Identity"; see
above, chapter 4).
Secondly, the projective force of an im agined/recovered female solidarity
implies an oppositional, negating moment, viz. Rich's critique of compulsory
heterosexuality. Indeed, it is through framing lesbianism within a critique of
heterosexuality as male sex right that Rich aims to politicize (and reconfigure)
lesbianism as resistance:
Looking at the schema [of com pulsory heterosexuality] w hat surely
im presses itself is the fact that we are confronting not a sim ple
m aintenance of inequality and property possession, b u t a pervasive
cluster of forces, ranging from physical b ru tality to control of
consciousness.. .(185)
Rich enum erates these forces—they include m en's denial of women's
sexuality, men's forcing of their own sexuality upon women, men's exploitation
of women's labor and men's physical confinement of women—and concludes:
. . . whatever its origins, when we look hard and clearly at the extent and
elaboration of measures designed to keep wom en w ithin a male sexual
276
purlieu, it becomes an inescapable question whether the issue we have to

address as feminists is not simple "gender inequality" nor the domination
of culture by males, nor mere "taboos against homosexuality," but the
enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male right of
physical, economical and emotional access. (191, emphasis mine)
This critique of heterosexuality (which has been extended by the materialist
radical feminists discussed in chapter 1) is at the crux of the debate that
surrounded the continuum w hen it was first published.
In the exchange that Signs published in response to "Com pulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" philosopher Ann Ferguson criticizes the
continuum as transhistorical, claiming that the concept glosses over the historical
specificity of lesbian identity: In her view the definitional category, "lesbian,"
emerged only under specific social conditions, those "necessary for one to be
conscious of sexual orientation as part of one's identity" (154). These conditions
include, primarily, shifts in capitalist patriarchy that expanded women's sexual
choices and gave rise to a discourse of sexology. Consequently, Ferguson
restricts "lesbian" to the very terms th at the radical feminist discourse of
Adrienne Rich would contest, namely, the sexologist's categories of normality
and deviance. Indeed Ferguson's assum ed definition of "lesbian" as
"consciousness of sexual orientation" leads her to conclude that there were no
lesbians prior to the twentieth century, that there was only the category of
"sexual deviance" (155).
Ferguson suggests (as an alternative to Rich's lesbian continuum) a quasi-
tautological definition of lesbian as a definitional strategy used by a woman who
first, having prim ary sexual and emotional ties to women, identifies herself as
lesbian, and secondly, who belongs to a community of others who identify as
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such (155).2 Her argument assumes that the concept of lesbian identity depends
on a historically specific linguistic com m unity of use (Zita, "C om pulsory
H eterosexuality" 165) and thus restricts "lesbian" to a sheerly descriptive
category. From this perspective, Rich conflates "lesbian" and "resistance" in a
problematic way: Ferguson writes, "Calling wom en who resist patriarchy the
lesbian continuum assumes, not only that all lesbians have resisted patriarchy,
b u t that all true patriarchal resisters are lesbians or approach lesbianism"
(Ferguson 159). In other words, Rich makes an empirically disprovable claim
(about actual lesbians) and a problem atic norm ative claim (about "true"
resistance).
But the problem with both arguments, in my opinion, is a tendency to
confuse the normative and the empirical. As I argued above (in chapter 4),
lesbian discourse in its expressivist turn confuses actual lesbian subjects w ith a
normative concept of identity in a way that occludes praxis and can not account
for tensions between everyday life and utopian ideals implicit in political
identities. Ferguson (like other critics of this discourse), on the other hand, fails
to acknowledge the extent to which all political identities are normative concepts
of identity and as such proposals about what is to be done rather than descriptions.3
2The exact definition is, "Lesbian is a wom an who has sexual and erotic-emotional ties primarily
with wom en or who sees herself as centrally involved w ith a community of self-identified
lesbians whose sexual and erotic-emotional ties are primarily with women; and who is herself a
self-identified lesbian" (155). My em phasis on the word or points to her slide from a definition of
lesbian as sexual orientation into tautology—lesbian is som eone who identifies herself as such.
3Philosopher Alessandra Tanesini questions the assum ption by critics of the category, "woman"
that "claims about the gendered character of meaning m ust be descriptions of the uses of certain
terms, and, specifically, descriptions that bring to light how these uses are related to facts about
gender" (206) These critics wrongly "assume that claims about meanings explain how w ords are
used. The second but closely related assum ption is that normative concepts function as
descriptions of the endorsements of a society. That is, this is an analysis that attempts to explain
concepts as determined by past usage" (206). One of her main points of disagreement w ith this
argument is that it "does not allow the possibility of disagreem ent from within a community"
(206) and furthermore, the argument fails to see that the "purpose [of normative concepts] is not
278
Ferguson seems to assum e that any definition of lesbian identity m ust

include what every self-defined lesbian does or does not do. (The existence of
lesbians who do not perform acts of resistance would thus disprove Rich's claim
that lesbian can be defined in terms of resistance). But Rich's "lesbian" is a
political/ethical identity and as such analogous to other political-identity
concepts such as "black" or Chicana": it is not intended to "cover" the practices
of every existing self-defined lesbian (any more than political identities such as
Black or C hicano/a have aim ed at a description of every subject socially
designated as Black or Chicano/a). The utopian re-definition of lesbian against
the grain of normative pathologizing definitions is a normative feminist concept
and proposal, i.e. that women ought to resist compulsory heterosexuality.4 Just
as a normative concept of "black" in a social movement context of resistance to
w hite suprem acy becomes a "lens" for retrieving/im agining a history of
resistance, "lesbian" in a context of the w om en's liberation movement becomes
an interpretative framework through which to project into reality an invented
a n d /o r rem em bered "continuity of resistance that w om en have always
undertaken in independent, nonheterosexual, and woman-centered ways. .
(Zita, "Compulsory Heterosexuality" 165).
that of describing anything" but "that of proposals about how we ought to proceed from here"
(207).
4The normative, feminist concept of lesbian as resistance can lead to a prescriptivism th at, like
the pathologizing definition is repressive (albeit lacking the same institutional backing). I
addressed this in ch. 4 and w ill return to it below when I discuss a parallel problem in the marxist
norm ative notion of the subject of history. Having said as much, a central argument in this
dissertation as a whole is that "normative" in itself is not repressive but refers, minimally, to the
ethico-political dim ension of fem inism thought—in other words, the aspect of feminism that
projects ideals about the way the world ought to be, including ideals o f the subject(s) of feminist
struggle.
279
Resistance. Counter-hegemony and Structure of Feeling

With the continuum, the concept of lesbian becomes a frame through
w hich w om en's resistance to the institution of heterosexuality is m ade
intelligible; in turn, the redefinition of lesbian existence as lesbian resistance
illuminates the social reality of compulsory heterosexuality. The epistemological
and political difference between Ferguson and Rich lies as much in their
contrasting views of heterosexuality as their concept of lesbian. Ferguson, for
example, claims that Rich ignores the fact that Black, single, heterosexual
m others are oppressed in ways other than by the mechanisms of compulsory
heterosexuality and may in fact "escape or avoid th ese.. mechanisms" altogether
(160). Ferguson seems to conflate heterosexism, viz. a range of behaviors,
attitudes, practices, etc. that discriminate against a n d /o r violate the rights of
lesbians and gay men w ith compulsory heterosexuality—a range of forces and
mechanisms that are central to the sex stratification of society in general (Zita
"Compulsory Heterosexuality"; de Lauretis "Eccentric").
Rich's concept of com pulsory heterosexuality suggests a notion of
heterosexuality as hegemony. Hegemony is a notion that "goes beyond 'ideology,'"
to conceptualize domination/power as a "whole lived social process" (Raymond
Williams 109), specifically " the lived dominance and subordination of particular
classes" (110). The contribution of Rich's argument, and indeed of lesbian-
fem inist theory generally, is its exposure of heterosexuality as the lived
experience of male dominance and female subordination.
To theorize heterosexuality as hegemony is to expose a variety of
mechanisms of power compelling a force that is apparently natural and
inevitable. From this demystification of heterosexuality Rich draws w hat is
280
possibly her most compelling and surely most contentious inference—that the
extent and refinement of m en's social controls over women "suggest[s] that an
enormous potential counterforce is having to be restrained " (185).5 This notion
of "counter force" is critical to the magic of a lesbian sign that failed to enchant,
however, those critics who have construed lesbian feminism to be a domestication
of lesbian, and who, correspondingly, often argue that lesbian feminist theory
assumes a monolithic and immutable notion of heterosexuality. However, Rich's
notion of women-identified experience as a "counter force" implies the notion
that hegemony, as Raymond Williams writes,
. . . in the extended political and cultural sense. . . while by definition. . .is
always dom inant,. . .is never either total or exclusive. At any time, forms
of alternative or directly oppositional politics exist as significant elements
in the society. (113)
The concept of hegem ony em phasizes the extent to w hich the
reproduction of culture is an ongoing process, that dominating power
does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to
be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually
resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own. (112)
Thus the "concepts of counter-hegemony and alternative hegemony" (113)
are especially important for identifying forms of resistance that although
. . .dearly affected by hegemonic limits and pressures, are at least in part
significant breaks beyond them, which may again in part be neutralized,
reduce, or incorporated, but w hich in their most active elem ents
nevertheless come through as independent and original. (114)
As a utopian politics of interpretation, the theory of the lesbian continuum
identifies women-identified experience as "active" forms of resistance, for
5This insight is certainly a utopian moment absent in the work of the materialist radical fem inists
and the question of whether the utopian and materialist tendencies in radical fem inism can be
synthesized animates my whole project, as a still unanswered but hopeful question.
281
"[tjhese elements then become the explosive material for bursting limits of the
existing order" (199).6 Or such is the hope. The lesbian continuum exemplifies a
pattern of lesbian/feminist thought which vests female solidarity w ith the power
to explode the limits of the existing order as heterosexual. In this vein, for
example, Janice Raymond theorized female friendship as "an immense force for
disintegrating the structures of hetero-reality" (Passion for Friends 9). Concepts
such as Rich's lesbian continuum and Raymond's genealogy of female friendship
reflect a utopian longing—that women-identified consciousness (or experience)
"subsists in latent forms until conditions are right for the em ergence of a
revolutionary subject" as Zita describes the continuum. Some lesbian feminists
(myself included) once held explicitly to the belief th at "lesbian-identified
consciousness parallels indirectly the Marxist notion of class consciousness"
(Zita, "Compulsory Heterosexuality" 171). The parallel conjures up something
like a lesbian demiurge shaping/m odeling history;7 like the proletariat, this
lesbian-subject position seems more a specter of big theory than an account of
how groups are mobilized into consciousness and struggle.
I now reject this "revolutionary subject"; however, I w ant to recover
aspects of the utopian imaginary that produced it. The lesbian continuum, for
example, illuminates oppositional elements in culture that have not yet coalesced
(perhaps never will coalesce) as a fully formed counter hegemony, but that exist as
inchoate areas of experience or w hat Williams discussed as "formations" or
"structures of feeling." These are "conscious movements and tendencies" in
intellectual and artistic life "which can by no means be wholly identified with
6Mannheim, "The Utopian Mentality" in Ideology and Utopia.

7 According to Benhabib, "The philosophy of the subject" at stake for Marx, as appropriated from
H egel, "presented true communism as the triumph of a humanity conceived as a dem iurge,
shaping, transforming, and reappropriating the world as its product" (Critique 59).
282
form al institutions, or their formal m eanings and values, an d w hich can

sometimes even be positively contrasted w ith them" (119). Nevertheless these
tendencies and m ovem ents "play an increasingly im portant role" in the
formation of a culture as a whole" (119). For example, "lesbian existence" as
conceived and lived within a certain feminist/lesbian imaginary m ay have a t one
time suggested a "social experience still in process" (Cocks 34)—one w hich
played an important role in the formation of second-wave feminism and thus in
the culture as a whole. This structure of feeling has been thematized by lesbian
discourse as a paradigm (an d /o r narrative) of "lesbian insight."
Something Happens
For Rich, the lesbian continuum means "tum[ing] the lens of vision" (195)
on history; the concept of the continuum is significant as a proposed fram e
through which resistance to the heterosexual norm can be brought into focus, to
thus discover, in woman-identified experiences, eventfulness where nothing was
supposed to have happened. Hence a narrative pattern of fem inist/lesbian
epistemology and interpretation emerges. It can be exemplified by the following
novel synopsis: a female narrator sets o u t to tell the story of an abortive love
affair w ith a man and instead discovers,
. . . something remarkable has happened; w hat was supposed to be the
background, the introduction has become the essential thing. W hat
remains, the part about Hans Jorgen, has lost its significance . . . I've been
imagining that I loved Hans Jorgen. How stupid and dishonest. It was Gro
[a woman friend] I loved, Gro w ho meant som ething to me. (116
Haslund)
This passage is excerpted from a Norwegian novel aptly entitled Nothing
Happens, banned for lesbian content, reprinted and translated by a U.S. American
283
feminist press (Seal). A striking parallel can be found in a theme of Toni

Morrison's Sula.8 In a passage from Sula, the protagonist Nel, betrayed by the
liaison of best friend Sula and husband Jude, is transfigured by grief at Sula's
gravestone:
'Sula? she whispered, gazing at the tops of trees. 'Sula? . . .' 'All that time,
all that time, I thought I was missing Jude' and the loss pressed down on
her chest and came up into her throat. 'We was girls together' she said as
though explaining something. 'O lord, Sula,' she cried, 'girl, girl, girl girl
girl.' It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no
top, just circles and circles of sorrow. (149)
What w as supposed to be the background, female friendship, shifts
forward and becomes the essential thing, dwarfing for Nel the significance of her
marriage. The above passages suggest a re-definition of "lesbian" in terms of a
shift of insight whereby women-identification is an inchoate formation ready to
erupt into significance and alter given frames of interpretation and knowledge.
To discover eventfulness is the task of a critic who grasps history in a moment of
danger/struggle. (Benjamin). An exemplary case is Barbara Smith's reading of Sula
as a "lesbian" novel: the notion of "lesbian" frames the novel in terms of its
"significant breaks" (Williams) with heterosexual hegemony. This is a reading
w hich invokes a utopian topography of criticism, its narrative structure
represented in terms of an invisible background (women-identification) shifting
forward into visibility. The "place" of invisibility marks the utopian in one of its
features as "no-place," thus one variant of the etymology of utopia suggests.9 n
8 Sula was interpreted as "lesbian" in a path-breaking 1977 essay by Barbara Smith, "Toward a
Black Feminist Criticism."
9The visual and spatial metaphor of a Background/foreground relation is central to the
epistem ology of philosopher Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. For
Daly, lesbian/fem inist insight means disclosing a Background of meaning that has been hitherto
obscured by a patriarchal foreground of meaning. The metaphor also informs Frye's essay "To
284
this narrative, lesbian existence emerges as if out of nowhere like "an engulfed
continent that rises fragmentedly to view from time to time only to become
submerged again " (Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality" 191). Rich's image of
the continuum echoes a lost-Atlantis mytho-poetic theme of those lesbian
utopian writings w hich conjure a lost history: "There was a time w hen you were
not a slave, remember that," as Monique Wittig wrote in her classic utopian
poem /novel Les Guerilleres
You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist.
But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or failing that, invent. (89)
For as Nicole Brossard p ut it some decade and a half after the publication
of Les Guerrierres: "A Lesbian who does not reinvent the word is a lesbian in the
process of disappearing" (Aerial Letter). Remember or invent; invent or disappear.
Inventiveness is urgent if it is the case that, as philosopher Sarah Hoagland
proposed, "In the conceptual schemes of phallocracies there is no category of
woman-identified woman, woman-loving-woman or woman-centered-woman.
There is, in short, no such thing as a lesbian" (qtd. by Frye, "M etaphysical
Misogyny" 57). Hoagland argued that a lesbian's position of exclusion from
dom inant signifying practices could be, ironically, one of epistem ological
advantage:
.. .this position is a singular vantage point with respect to the reality that
does not include [the lesbianjher. It affords her a certain freedom from
constraints of the conceptual system; it gives her access to knowledge
which is inaccessible to those whose existence is countenanced by the
system. Lesbians can therefore undertake kinds of criticism and
285
description and kinds of intellectual invention hitherto unimagined, (qtd.

by Frye, "To Be and Be Seen" 57)10
W ith this (at one time startling) reversal of thought, the very outsider
status w hich stigm atizes and deprives now grants a lesbian subject new
privileges and powers. The argum ent—by explicating w hat was inchoate in
earlier lesbian thought—returns me to the criticism of epistemic privilege theory
with which I began: Is this valorization of lesbian marginality simply a case of
converting necessity into virtue, the utopian face of ressentiment in its escape
from power? This w ould seem to be Annamarie Jagose's suspicion:
According to [Hoagland's] logic, figuring "lesbian" as unspeakable and
unthinkable posits the lesbian in some liberatory space beyond the reaches
of cultural legislation. (2)
To some extent I agree w ith Jagose's criticism o f lesbian utopics; I reject
any utopianism that serves to mystify the real social position of lesbians (and
other imagined political subjects). At the same time, however, I argue that
utopian lesbian thought can not be reduced to escapism. Theories which position
"lesbian" as the term for a reality (of resistance, community, passion) that had
hitherto been unimaginable represent a lesbian subject in process. As such, these
theories provide evidence of a historically specific moral imagination: I want to
make this moral imagination more explicit. I want, in other w ords, to elaborate
the ethical/political vantage point forfeited by the retreat from utopianism that I
criticize above (for example in queer theory; see chapter 4). Toward this end I
turn to radical lesbian theory of the lesbian subject particularly as elaborated in
the work of Marilyn Frye and Monique Wittig.
Be and Be Seen: M etaphysical M isogyny and the Politics of Reality" as w ill be discussed in detail
shortly.
l^The claim that exclusion from the dominant conceptual system can be a liberatory space, is
echoed by theorists such as bell hooks writing in a different, related political framework.
286
Radical Lesbian Theory of the Subject

Marilyn Frye's Lesbian Standpoint
In "To See and Be Seen: M etaphysical Misogyny and the Politics of
Reality," Frye elaborates on Hoagland's position that the liberatory meaning of
lesbianism (as women-identification) is linked to its exclusion from the social
order. It is not the mere fact of exclusion that liberates lesbians but the fact that
"[T]he exclusion of lesbians from phallocentric reality is different" (58) from how
other groups are erased, a difference, Frye states, that "is related to unusual
knowing" (58). Elaborating on this difference, Frye writes, "It turns out that the
explanations of how and why we are outside the [phallocentric conceptual]
scheme reveals w hat it is we can see and know from our odd position, and that
in turn reveals w hat a lesbian is" (58). For Frye, lesbian im plies an
epistemological uniqueness that a definition of lesbian as sexual orientation does
not capture. Thus, from this perspective, the assim ilationist dem and for
recognition of lesbians as part of a plurality of sexual orientations in society is a
dem and that begs the deeper question of why a lesbian is excluded from the
dom inant order in first place . The category of lesbian has its special significance
as a threat to (in Wittig's words) the social order as heterosexual and it is this
social order that is the reason for the im possibility/invisibility of a lesbian
subject-position defined by woman-identification.
One pivot of Frye's argument is her distinction between the erasure of
w omen and the erasure of lesbians. While women are exploited and trivialized
and often physically a n d /o r psychically destroyed—and in that way erased—
women are also required as a group for m en's needs and desires. In contrast,
287
Lesbians are not invited to join—the family, the party, the project, the
procession, the w ar effort. There is a place for women in every game: wife,
secretary, servant, prostitute, daughter, janitor, assistant, baby-sitter,
mistress, seamstress, proofreader, cook, nurse, confidante, masseuse,
typist, mother. Any of these is a place for a woman, and women are much
encouraged to fill them. None of these is a place for a lesbian. (66)
That is to say, w hen lesbians are invited to fill any of the positions
mentioned by Frye they are invited to fill them as women. Lesbians qua lesbians
are not so invited.11 In this way, the "lesbian" at stake for Frye implies a new
subject-position "not because [lesbians] are genetically a new (future or fantastic)
species," as de Lauretis comments on a similar theme in Wittig,
but rather because their self-definition or identity is given (in the here and
now) in terms of a conception and a form of subjectivity that are socially
and epistemologically new. The concept of lesbian, as proposed by Wittig ..
. is outside the gender system that defines woman in relation to man.
(Heterosexual Presumption 274)
For both Frye and Wittig, "lesbian" designates a subject-position of
critique which "undercuts the mechanisms by which the production and
constant reproduction of heterosexuality for w om en was to be rendered
automatic" (Frye, "To Be and Be Seen" 69) and to expose (hetero)sexual difference
as, Wittig writes,
11This situation has shifted in the 80s and 90s to som e extent. At the present date there is a way
in which lesbians have been "invited" to fill positions in the boys club—to create lesbian/gay
pornography and be hired by the likes of Bob Guccione to do so; to fill "lesbian a-go-go" stripper
clubs and be given a lot of press for it. (Laura Blumenfeld, "Lesbians-A-Go-Go: Where Women
Treat Women as Sex Objects." Sunday Punch [San Francisco Chronicle] 11 Aug. 1991:2). Lesbian
chic and the commodification o f lesbianism where the demands of market and tendencies of
lesbian/queer subcultures overlap in the conversion of political identity into lifestyle (discussed
in chapter 5) show that lesbians have been invited to join, on the terms of the boys club and on
the terms of capitalist consumerism. However, Frye's argument still holds in that zvoman-
identified women are by no means invited to join, or rather that the boys club cannot include a
politicized lesbian identity that contests heterosexual hegemony.
288
a specific social relation to a man, a relation. . . called servitude, a relation

which implies a personal and physical obligation as well as economic
obligation.. .(The Straight Mind 20)
Frye makes her argum ent through a "Brechtian parable" (de Lauretis,
"Sexual Indifference" 172): Patriarchal Reality is a theater in which only the men
count as actors (as Real). This is a foreground reality maintained by the attention
of an invisible background—the "stage hands," i.e. women.12 Reality is shaken,
Frye points out, by a swerve of attention from foreground to background. From
this lesbian perspective, the background becomes the essential thing. Or, as Frye puts
it, "lesbians are women seers." With this there is a "flowering of possibilities"
(69): "The woman, feeling herself seen [by the lesbian], may learn that she can be
seen; she may also be able to know that a woman can see; that is, can author
perception" (69).
Re-Casting the Master-Slave Narrative as Lesbian Theater?

Frye's allegory and argument recalls an informing narrative of the marxist
subject of history, namely the dialectical reversal at the heart of the master-slave
narrative in G.W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. At stake in the
"L ordship/B ondage" chapter (sections 178-196) of the Phenomenology is a
moment of recognition, viz. the discovery of subjecthood for one who, hitherto,
has lived un-self-consciously as an object—as a mere tool of the oppressor.
According to Hegel, the "master" comes to recognize his own state of dependence
on the slave's subjecthood through the very social process that denies the slave his
12 Her allegory elaborates a classic articulation of the narrative trope discussed above, and
introduced by philosopher Mary Daly, nam ely, the Background/foreground relation in which
wom en's reality is a hidden background disclosed through demystifying practices of fem inist
knowledge. See Gyn/Ecologu: A Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism.
289
subjecthood. In order to be master, the master needs, yet deprives the slave of,
the slave's "gaze." O ut of this contradiction comes a dialectical reversal: the
slave comes to recognize the master's dependence on him —on the slave and the
slave's labor—and, concurrently, that he, the slave him self is a subject. The
Hegelian moment of recognition is recast by Georg Lukacs' marxist epistemology
as collective, class consciousness whereby consciousness of a (shared) status of
objectification is also the shared condition of u n ity /so lid a rity . This
consciousness is key to w hat Marx described as a shift from class in-itself to a class
for-itself, namely a shift from a mass unified by economic interests to a mass
unified by consciousness of this unity and subsequent defense of its ow n
interests.13
As the M arxist/Hegelian "philosophy of the subject" (Benhabib) travels14
to M arilyn Frye's theory of lesbian insight, it loses the moment of dialectical
reversal—in which relations between oppressor and oppressed are reversed—
and the moment of recognition between master and slave is re-figured as female
solidarity. Subjecthood is discovered via a standpoint of knowledge which gives
aw ay the Show, as it were, exposing Reality in its metaphysical and social
scaffolding. Women, like workers, are the "stagehands" crafting Reality itself, a
social position which gives them behind-the-scenes knowledge, special access, in
13"[T]his m ass is already a class in relation to capital, but not yet a class for itself. In the struggle,
of w hich w e have only indicated a few phases, this mass unites and forms itself into a class for
itself. The interests which it defends become class interests" (Poverty of Philosophy [ch.2, sect. 5]
quoted in Bottomore, 1983: 76).
In other words, the "proletariat" is theorized as a new social identity that emerges through
struggle.
14I'm thinking here of Edward Said's concept of "traveling theory" [need citation/ in World, Text
and Critic ?]
290
other words, to the social world that it is women's work to maintain.15 The twist
of course is that the "lesbian" is cast as the woman-seer—and as the symbol of
women's "class" consciousness. A similar (but not identical) argument in Wittig
even more directly re-casts the marxist narrative for the theory of the lesbian
subject.
Wittig's (and Lukacs's) Subject of Revolution

In W ittig's political essays, lesbian is to patriarchy-as-heterosexual as
"proletariat" is to bourgeois culture-as-capitalist—the term of de-reification in
which social orders are dis-enchanted of their naturalizing effects. As Louise
Turcotte summ arizes Wittig's theory, the point is not to create a new category,
"lesbian," w hich w ould then be added on to the old categories of gender
(m an/w om an), b ut to destroy the old categories:
15 As Benhabib points out, Marx and Lukacs inherit from H egel the category of labor as a
metacategory—as the ontological m odel of human activity—a theme which "travels" to the
lesbian narrative. It is through "making" the social world that the "slave"/worker—and "stage
hand"—has privileged access to knowledge of this world—in contrast to the parasitic relation of
the master /bourgeois—and makes possible the shift to class "for itself," i.e. class consciousness.
Benhabib and others, including Martin Jay, point out that this m odel creates a legacy of
epistem ological confusions and m oral/political problems for the western marxist tradition that
took it up—Gramsci, the Frankfurt Institute and Habermas. These problems include what
Hannah Arendt criticized in Tne Human Condition as a collapse of the praxis (doing) and poesis
(making) distinction, a m odel of activity that, as Benhabib and Jay separately point out,
presupposes a Transcendental Subject of History as Artisan, a m odel of "making history" which
precludes the indeterminate, plural nature of praxis (Critique 62, passim; Jay, "Vico" ). Jay cites
the influence of Vico's verum-factum, principle—that the "true" and "the made" are
interchangeable— on this model of praxis as it developed in Marx and (especially) Lukacs (Jay,
Totality 108, passim and "Vico" 68-9,71). A better m odel for praxis is what Habermas calls an
intersubjective (rather than—in Benhabib's term—"transsubjective") model. As Benhabib
discusses it, an intersubjective m odel of human activity is based on making history as making
meaning (e.g. through language) rather than objects (62). Another problem with the labor- model
is that it blurs the difference between intentional and unintentional making of history; as Adorno
argued, this m odel elides those power differences which have allowed some men (and surely he
means som e men) to make history intentionally, in contrast to the way in which all human beings
"make" history unintentionally (Jay, "Vico" 76).
291
It is not a question of replacing 'w om an' with 'lesbian' but rather of making
use of our strategic position to destroy the heterosexual system .
("Foreward," Straight Mind x)
The argument invests 'lesbian' w ith a [symbolic] value strikingly sim ilar
to that attributed by Marx to the proletariat:
When the proletariat proclaims dissolution of the previous world order it
does no more than reveal the secret of its ow n existence, for it represents
the effective dissolution of that world-order. (qtd. in Lukacs 149)
The utopian meaning of the proletariat—and its "secret"—is that it exists
as a potential rupture in the very (capitalist) world-order which depends on its
(exploited) labor. The category of lesbian in W ittig's work has a parallel
meaning. In Wittigian terms the above passage from Marx might read:
When lesbians have proclaimed the dissolution of the (heteropatriarchal) system
we have announced the hidden meaning of lesbian existence, for lesbian represents
the effective dissolution of that world order by revealing the system's instability.
The category of "lesbian" is a new epistemological position that has its
critical force vis-a-vis (hetero)sexual difference as reification. (Hetero)sexual
difference functions for Wittig's argument analogously to how bourgeois thought
functions in marxist theory, namely as a reification which, as Roland Barthes
writes, transforms "the reality of the w orld into an image of the world" (141)..
"And this image," Barthes suggests, "has a remarkable feature: it is upside
down" (141): While presupposing massive social transformation of nature through
technological progress, "bourgeois ideology yields in return an unchangeable
nature" (141), the myth of its own inevitability. Making a similar argum ent in
the context of her critique of heterosexuality, Wittig rhetorically asks:
What is this thought which refuses to reverse itself, which never puts into
question what prim arily constitutes it? This thought is the dom inant
thought. It is a thought which affirms an "already there" of the sexes,
292
something which is supposed to have come before all thought, before all
society. (Straight Mind 4)
The central concept here—on similar to Rich's notion of "com pulsory
heterosexuality"16—is heterosexuality as a social process which yields in return
the idea of its inevitability and unchangeable nature. Sex difference masks
political difference, i.e. domination: "M asculine/feminine, male/female are the
categories which serve to conceal the fact that social differences always belong to
an economic, political ideological order" (2). The category of difference,
however, constitutes itself as immutable and inevitable, indeed, Wittig writes
The prim acy of difference so constitutes our thought that it prevents
turning inw ard on itself to question itself, no matter how necessary that
may be to apprehend the basis of that which precisely constitutes it. (2)
This analysis of difference resonates with Lukacs' argument that bourgeois
thought is that thought which cannot turn inw ard to examine its ow n social
conditions of possibility. Like the Kantian mind which can grasp anything but its
own existence as an empirical phenomenon, bourgeois thought can grasp all "but
the incomprehensible and contingent fact of its existence in the first place"
(Jameson, Marxism and Form 185). Bourgeois thought can not grasp its social
condition in capitalism and thus reifies capitalism as inevitable/N ature. "[A]
conjuring trick has taken place; [bourgeois thought] has turned reality inside out,
it has em ptied it of history and has filled it w ith nature. . ." (Barthes 142-3).
Bourgeois thought is that paradox of totalizing thought which, seeking to
16 W ittig's and Rich's essays were, in fact, published at the same time (1980). In her foreword to
The Straight Mind, Turcotte argues that Wittig's position differs from Rich's notion of com pulsory
heterosexuality as follows: "Rich analyses the concept of heterosexuality within the framework of
contemporary fem inist theory from the 'women's point of view ,' whereas radical lesbianism does
without that point of view . It sees lesbianism as necessarily political and considers it outside the
whole heterosexual political regime. For to speak of compulsory heterosexuality is redundant"
(x).
293
penetrate and control all of nature, to systematize, simultaneously submits to a

second nature in the social as inexorable, iron-clad law. For Lukacs, this paradox
can be further explained as built into the "antinomies" of western epistemology.
The Problem of Totality and its "Symptoms"

Lukacs argues that a reification of th o u g h t is b u ilt into w estern
epistemology insofar as the latter founders on w hat he calls its central problem—
the problem of totality. Correspondingly, the "standpoint of the proletariat"
implies special access to knowledge of totality precluded by the categories of
bourgeois thought. I will summ arize the argum ent in "Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat" for the purpose of more richly discussing its
echoes in radical lesbian/fem inist epistemology. According to Lukacs, bourgeois
thought reaches its pinnacle in Kant's notion of reason as legislator, indeed as
legislator of nature. Thus Gilles Deleuze summarizes the "fundamental idea" at
stake in Kant's "Copemican Revolution," namely, "substituting the principle of a
necessary submission of object to subject for the idea of a harm ony betw een
subject and object" ("Kant" 14):
The essential discovery is that the faculty of knowledge is legislative, or
more precisely, that there is something that legislates in the faculty of
knowledge. . .The rational being thus discovers that he has new powers.
The first thing that the Copemican Revolution teaches us is that it is we
who are giving the orders. (Deleuze, "Kant" 14)
And yet, the attem pt at totality fails by virtue of its success: its
failure/success is marked by the arrival of the Kantian "thing-in-itself," a concept
w hich m arks the lim its of "pure reason" an d its "new " pow ers and,
correspondingly, a principle antinomy (or unsolvable dilemma) of pure reason in
the split between things in themselves (noumena) and things as they appear
294
(phenomena). The problem of totality for bourgeois thought is most manifest here
where it confronts its supposedly eternal limits in the antinomies at the very
moment that it claims god-like powers. According to Lukacs, the split between
noum ena and phenom ena dooms totality by presupposing for system an
intractable content that resists system atization.17 In this way, totality as the
manifest impulse of rationality presupposes irrationality, viz. that which cannot be
contained by a system. But this dilemma was central to the epistem ology of
capitalism, thus due to reification, not reason: The unsolvability of w hat Kant
took to be essential antinomies of universal reason was, according to Lukacs, the
consequence of a limited social vantage point, namely, bourgeois thought in its
inability to pierce its ow n reifications.18 As Jameson puts it in his study of
Lukacs, "[C]apitalism is itself the first thing in itself" (Marxism and Form 185).
17Lukacs writes, "It is evident that the principle of systematization is not reconcilable w ith the
recognition of any 'factidty', of a 'content' which in principle cannot be deduced from the
principle of form and which, therefore, has sim ply to be accepted as actuality. The greatness, the
paradox and the tragedy of Classical German philosophy lie in the fact that—unlike Spinoza—it
no longer dism isses every donne as non-existent, causing it to vanish behind the m onum ental
architecture of the rational forms produced by the understanding. Instead, while grasping and
holding on to the irrational character of the actual contents of the concepts it strives to go beyond
this, to overcome it and to erect a system. B u t.. .it cannot be left to its own being and existence,
for in that case it would remain ineluctably 'contingent.' Instead it must be wholly absorbed into
the rational system of the concepts of the understanding" (History and Class Consciousness 117-
118).
18The epistem ological dilemma turns on a rigid split between subject and object. The object, but
not subject, is seen as constituted/created. In Lukacs' view , Hegel came closest to solvin g the
problem by attempting to close the gap between Subject and Object with the medium of history.
By granting historicity to the Subject/Object relation, the Subject can be understood as itself
created and philosophically arrive at an identical subject/Object. However, Hegel, as a bourgeois
thinker, construes the Subject-Object as an immanent force in history. In Lukacs, "geist" is
transposed into the terms of a Marxist epistem ology—the proletariat as authentic subject/object,
capable of exploding a prior order of bourgeois thought, of revealing its historicity and
contingency. See Jay, Totality , chapter 2.
295
Lesbian as Symptom of Hetero-totality

Wittig w ould undoubtedly argue that heterosexuality is the first thing-in-
itself.
. . . although it has been assumed in recent years that there is no such
thing as nature, that everything is culture, there remains within culture
a core of nature which resists examination, a relationship excluded
from the social in the analysis—a relationship whose characteristic is
ineluctability in culture, as well as in nature, and which is the
heterosexual relationship. I will call it the obligatory social relationship
between "man and woman." (Straight Mind 27)
Twisting the analogy a bit, if heterosexuality is the thought that refuses to
reverse itself and investigate its own condition as socially contingent, its attem pt
to constitute itself as nature paradoxically presupposes an unnatural, deviant
element that m ust be at once contained and excluded. The paradoxical character
of lesbian as that which is excluded as logically impossible, and yet included as
deviant, functions as something like the thing-in-itself vis-a-vis heteropatriarchy,
in the latter's attem pt to constitute itself as a total system. Or, as Lynda H art
argues, lesbian functions as something like a "sym ptom " in phallocentric
signifying systems. Like a "sym ptom," lesbian is that "secret" w hich is
sim ultaneously contained (hidden) and deployed by patriarchal signifying
systems:
The sym ptom is constitutively paradoxical, for it is an element at once
necessary to any system's ability to constitute itself as a totality and the
site that marks that system's instability. (Hart 8)
Resonating in an interesting way with de Lauretis's subject of feminism,
Hart's lesbian-as-symptom is at once inside and outside of the dominant system:
"[I]t is w hat allows a signifying system to appear consistent, and yet it is also in
excess of that system, for it cannot be fully circumscribed w ithin it" (8)..
296
Acknowledging her debt to Frye's theory of the lesbian subject, H art writes,
"The negativity of a symptom is not unlike the lesbian as Marilyn Frye sees her
being (un)seen by the phallocratic spectator. . ." (8). In fact, for both theorists
lesbian is the hidden logic haunting the surface Reality, the symptom of dis-order
despite an apparent seamlessness of Order.
For Frye, and for Wittig, the lesbian "secret" has a decidedly utopian value
that parallels the "secret" of the proletariat: Lesbian is imagined as a standpoint
of knowledge into a social totality otherwise obscured by dom inant thought.
From this special vantage point, "[T]hings should be shown to be aspects of processes"
(Lukacs 179), viewed, that is, " .. .as aspects of the development of society, i.e. of
the dialectical totality become fluid: they become parts of a process" (175).
Epistemology "scandalously" passes over into politics w ith the assumption that
this position of knowledge is also a strategic position for overthrow ing the
dominant system.19
The Subject of Consciousness20

For Lukacs, the proletariat's epistemological advantage is grounded in
ontological categories now contested by new generations of m arxist/critical
theorists, namely, a concept of labor as the model of hum an activity and a
teleological concept of history as progressing inexorably to a single point. In
other words, the proletariat had its (ad) vantage as knower and as shaper of history
via its special position as laborer and maker of the social whole. The
lesbian/fem inist discourse borrows from this narrative with its concept of a
19Jameson refers to this scandal in "History and Class Consciousness, An Unfinished Project."
^®The following section is indebted to de Lauretis's account of the category of "consciousness" in
feminist discourse and her reading of MacKinnon and Wittig accordingly, in "Eccentric Subjects."
297
special fem inist/lesbian stand point—for example, Bunch's proposal that the
material conditions of lesbian life make political disinterest in patriarchy more
likely. I w ill have to return, shortly, to Bunch's claim because it seems an
inescapable assum ption of any utopian theory of lesbian—or feminist—as a
special "standpoint." In my opinion, however, Frye and W ittig are attem pting to
propose something different w ith their concept of lesbian. In fact, Lukacs's
account helps elaborate a concept of consciousness at stake for these theorists.
Lukacs describes a "self understanding" that " is .. .simultaneously the objective
understanding of the nature of society" (149) for a group who is assum ed to be,
through its labor, central to the working of the social totality. Strip the theory of
its metaphysical assumptions, however, and a concept of consciousness remains
that is still relevant to political praxis. As de Lauretis p u ts it, this concept of
consciousness implies a "a fundamental redefinition of oppression", a category
arrived at from the special vantage point of the oppressed, in their struggle. .
.("Eccentric," 36). Unlike dom inant thought, this is thought that must reverse
itself in order to pose the question of its ow n conditions of existence; this is
consciousness as displacement—"a painful 'decentering' of the consciousness" in
its im m ediacy for subject confronted w ith a "determ ination. . .that m ust
necessarily be felt as extrinsic or external to conscious [immediate] experience"
(Jameson, Political Unconscious 283-4).
The category of reification is central to this formulation of consciousness.
Turning inward, feminist consciousness poses the question, Are there women?
and in the process discovers that, "that which is most one's o w n .. .is m ost taken
away."21 And what other aspect of human relations seems m ost "one's own" as
21This is MacKinnon's analogy between the feminist concept of sexuality and the marxist concept
of work ("An Agenda for Theory" 1).
298
sexuality? W hat seems more immediate, personal, intimate? On the other hand
(Euroamerican) feminist thought has had to confront its ow n determinants in
race and class hierarchies as well as in gender (de Lauretis, "Eccentric"). What
seems m ost one's own, in this case a homogenous female or feminist subject,
implicitly relies on the "invisible labor of others" (Jameson "Unfinished Project")
insofar as this subject glosses over race and class privilege. Consciousness means
that what seems given and immediate—what seems most like "home"—"turns
out to be the consequence of a multiplicity of mediations" (Lukacs 169). Thus,
the apparent "personal" nature of sexuality turns o ut to be the consequence of
social relations of gender, and the apparently homogenous nature of "feminism"
turns out to be mediated by race and class.
The consciousness that grasps its own determinants is consciousness as a
paradox— to return to a central theme of m y project.22 Lukacs cites the
paradoxical knowledge of a reified social order by a subject who comes to
understand th at she herself is reified/objectified/com m odified. Thus the
worker's " .. .consciousness is the self-consciousness of the commodity'" which is the
same as "the self-knowledge, the self-revelation of capitalist society founded
upon the production and exchange of commodities" (Lukacs 169, emphasis in
original): Its insight into its own position reveals the logic of the system in which
it is positioned. Analogously, the subject of feminism implies the self-
consciousness of woman-as-(eroticized)object, the self-revelation of patriarchal
society "founded" upon the appropriation of women. Here we arrive again at
the paradox which w ould seem to make critique of oppression impossible in
contrast to merely contradictory: feminism means coming to subjecthood through
^ S ee chapter 3 above for a discussion of the paradox of fem inist consciousness.
299
consciousness of objecthood. But perhaps the contradiction (and impossibility) is

only such for consciousness as logic or science, contemplative, in contrast to (what
Lukacs em phasized to be) practical knowledge: "The innerm ost kernel of
[consciousness] is praxis, its point of departure is of necessity that of action. .
.(Lukacs 175). For, to turn back to Wittig,
. . . before the conflict (rebellion, struggle) there are no categories of
opposition, but only of difference. And it is not until the struggle breaks
out that the violent reality of the oppositions and the political nature of the
differences become manifest. For as long as oppositions (differences)
appear as given, already there, before all thought, "natural"—as long as
there is no conflict and no struggle—there is no dialectic, there is no
change, no movement. (Straight Mind 3)
As a category of consciousness, lesbian implies practical rather than
contemplative knowledge, knowledge that changes its object: "Once it becomes
evident how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of the commodity
system begin to dissolve" (Lukacs 169). Correspondingly, feminist consciousness
m akes evident that, for exam ple, sexuality presupposes a com pulsory
dim ension—the institution of heterosexuality—and this is the "secret" of
"lesbian" as feminism's magical sign. With this revelation, the fetishistic forms
of the gender system begin to dissolve. The show is given away, the system
exposed for w hat it is.
Then again. The Persistence of Patriarchy

Annamarie Jagose's criticism of Wittig and "lesbian utopics" can be re
invoked at this point:
Clearly, the ten-year gap between Wittig's announcement that the lesbian
is not-m an and not-w om an and today's continuing existence of the
300
categories of sex suggest that th e .. .category "lesbian" does not overthrow

systems of gender and compulsory heterosexuality. (6-7)
The "revolution" does not seem to be forthcoming, as Jagose puts it, and the
fetishistic forms of compulsory heterosexuality seem intact. Is the theory of the
lesbian subject therefore one more conjuring trick that substitutes an alchemical
transform ation for an account of how groups are mobilized into struggle?23
W hat is the relation in the end between the theory of the lesbian subject and
actual social consciousness? (Are all lesbians feminists?) Between consciousness
and action? (Are all feminist lesbians revolutionaries?)
On one obvious level the category of lesbian for both Frye and Wittig
seems to open the way for a problematic lesbian vanguardism that held sway at
one historical moment in feminist campaigns (the other side was an equal or
greater history of lesbian purges in feminist organizations).24 Less obviously the
notion points to contradictions at the heart of utopian lesbian theory regarding
^ I'm thinking here about Pierre Bourdieu's critique of the marxist notions such as "class" which
"confuse things of logic with logic of things" (198). He wants to talk about a real space of social
relationships vs. theoretical objects. He critiques the Marxist distinction between dass-in-itself
and class-for-itself as oscillating between determinism (logical, mechanical, or organic) and
voluntarism—the "effect of an 'awakening in consciousness." In both cases a "mysterious
alchemy" remains unexplained, i.e. how a "group in struggle" arises (199). "The Social Space and
the Genesis of Groups."
24Vanguardism proposes that one given group ought lead the "masses" in any political
m ovem ent/struggle. While the abuses of this notion are notorious, there is an im plicit notion of
leadership at stake which remains debatable. The contentious assum ption that lesbians be
drafted into this role of political leadership rests on a confusion between lesbian as a symbolic,
normative identity—one that suggests a dream of a collective subject o f feminism—on the one
hand, and empirically existing lesbians on the other hand. The story o f this section of my
dissertation is that while this confusion has led to the problems of lesbian community discussed
in chapter 5 (viz. the anxiety of authenticity and expressivist politics internal to lesbian
community) as w ell as to vanguardism (the vexed relation between lesbian community and
fem inist struggle), there has also existed the potential in the concept o f lesbian (as "woman
identification") for an imagining of feminist hegemony, a counter force to heterosexual
hegem ony. Hegemony is a term drawn from Gramsd w ho stressed its etymological link to
"leadership." This etym ology is a good reminder of the political (as opposed to merely cultural)
m eaning of hegemony. Lesbian-feminism has constituted itself primarily as a counter-culture,
rather than a counter-hegemony but even so, raises the contentious or enticing (depending on
one's perspective) idea of a political, hegemonic force.
301
the relation between feminism and lesbian feminism, contradictions m ost

pronounced, in m y opinion, for lesbian separatist practices insofar as separatism
claims a revolutionary feminist status for lesbianism while constructing itself
through a retreat from feminist politics (and from politics generally)—although
not from feminist principles. Having said as much, I am not yet ready to entirely
reject the idea that "we can build on the fact that it is not in the interests of
lesbians to maintain and defend the system as it is" (Bunch "N ot For Lesbians
Only" 55). I w ant to argue that p a rt of the reason that lesbianism has been
ensnared by a de-politicizing utopics, is that it represents a radical social otherness
th a t a fem inist im aginary has n o t yet p o liticized (th at it d o o m s to
"impracticability."25 One question, then, is whether it is possible to re-politicize
the utopian?—in other words, how , if at all, to conceive of the relation between
the pow erful epistemological critique at stake for Frye and Wittig, on the one
hand, and political opposition and praxis, on the other hand.
After the Fall of the Subject of Revolution

Re-Thinking Feminist Standpoint Theory
The answer to this question depends in p art on the durability and
desirability of a theory of fem in ist/lesb ian standpoint in light of recent
predicaments of feminist theory. Can the notion of an epistemologically unique
standpoint withstand a postm odern tu rn hastening the fall of the subject and
s e v e rin g an y in e v ita b le lin k b e tw e e n su b ject p o s itio n and
consciousness/struggle? What w ould it m ean to re-think feminist standpoint
theory in light of both poststructuralist and materialist feminist contributions to
^"Impracticable" is Butler's term for a fem inist "utopian" view of sexuality. See chapter 4 above.
302
theory? And, conversely, how m ight radical lesbian thought re-configure—

perhaps as an intervention within?—the "field" defined thus far by this recent
theory? To answer these questions I begin by turning to Rosemary Hennessy's
attem pt to rethink feminist standpoint theory through poststructuralist and
materialist frames. She argues that a feminist standpoint can be retained insofar
as it refers to the specificity of feminism as critique. I will argue that, to the
extent that feminism has this specificity as critique o f institutionalized
heterosexuality, the "lesbian subject position" theorized by Frye an d Wittig
remains a crucial utopian m om ent of feminist thought.
In her theory of "The Fem inist Standpoint" H ennessy attem pts to
incorporate first, a materialist feminism that insists on a systemic analysis and
second, a (revised) discourse m odel of the subject. Hennessy wants to retain a
notion of standpoint insofar as it refers to "a 'position' in society which is shaped
by and in turn helps shape ways of knowing, structures of power, and resource
distribution" (Feminist Materialism 67). She affirms the view—held by Harding,
Hartsock and others—of standpoint as a position "that is socially produced" and
"reached through philosophical and political struggle. . ." (67), rather than
"immediately available to all w om en" (67). However, H ennessy notes a
persisting "knotty problem" w here feminist standpoint theory founders on the
question of the relation betw een feminist standpoint as a critical discourse and
the empirical referent, "w om en's lives." Standpoint theory is at an impasse
w here it opts for a poststructuralist, discursive account of the subject yet
continues to assume a fixed base in women's experience a n d /o r identity (74).
The problem is with any "transparent appeal to women's experience," a move
which
303
tends to homogenize "w om an" as a universal and obvious category. . .

and lock[s] into the structures of feminist epistem ology a binary
opposition between male and female which naturalizes gender an d erases
the other social categories across which 'woman' is defined. (68)
The task, in Hennessy's view, is to avoid essentialism by dis-engaging a
feminist standpoint from any empirical referent and to affirm a discourse model
of the subject/identity- However, she argues, discourse needs to be re-thought in
its materiality as ideology or, more precisely, via a "post-Althusserian theory of
ideology" (75).26 In this w ay, Hennessy aims to avoid not only an empiricist
essentialism but an idealism which positions the subject of feminist critique
elsewhere to the social.
The materiality of ideology means that ideology is a site of hegemonic
struggle, always contested and reconfigured (see discussion of hegemony above).
Correspondingly, resistance implies a process of sifting through and reconfiguring
the dominant ideological form ation rather than escaping to an elseiohere {76).27
One moral of this story is familiar: an oppositional standpoint is never altogether
elsewhere to the social, is not, then, utopian. In this vein Hennessy objects to de
Lauretis's notion of lesbian as "outsider to heterosexuality"—describing the latter
as an attem pt to position "new ways of knowing" beyond the social. This
concept of "eccentric subject," she argues
26 Hennessy's summary of this theory of ideology can be briefly paraphrased as follow s.

Ideology produces (rather than reflects) what counts as socially real and is overdetermined in the
sense that it is both shaped by and helps shape political and economic forces. This notion of the
materiality of discourse and knowledge assum es a distinction between the actual w orld ("Real
object") and object of knowledge. The actual world is available only through discourses of
knowledge but as a material force is "that which intervenes in production of the social real by
being made intelligible" (75).
27Gramsci's work is important here: "Critical understanding of self takes place therefore through
a struggle of political 'hegemonies' and of opposing directions, first in the ethical field and then
in that of politics proper, in order to arrive at the working at a higher level of one's ow n
conception of reality" (Prison Notebooks 333).
304
occludes the ways in which the critique of heterosexuality, and lesbian

subjectivity as a position circumscribed by that critique, emerges from
contradictions w ithin that institution and its discourses, just as the critique
of patriarchy em erged from contradictions w ithin its discourses. (85-6,
emphasis in original)28
Hennessy's argument, however, occludes the specific concept of "eccentric
subject" as, precisely, that which makes home impossible and, as such, emerging
from the contradictions of patriarchal ideology. Moreover, Hennessy's concept
of "reconfiguration" fails to solve the problem with a utopianism that obscures
its complidtous relationship to the system it would escape. Instead she echoes
Butler's (ultimately meaningless) distinction between "resignification" of power
and a utopian beyond to existing power relations. As I argue above (chapter 4),
the concept of "resignification" is an (implicitly) normative account of resistance
that resists, as it were, norm ative questions: this concept begs the question of
how to distinguish between forms of "reconfiguration" (or "resignification") that
are politically a n d /o r ethically critical of, from those that are comp licit w ith
dominant ideology. Moreover, if feminism is not in some way beyond the terms it
is also constrained by, w hy struggle at all for feminist goals? Hennessy's attempt
to make altereity material (86) is not addressed by her critique of the eccentric or
outsider position because oppositional subjects and discourses are, as de Lauretis
insists, both outside and w ithin ideology.
One of the problems w ith Hennessy's argument is that she seems to cling
to a typical marxist distinction between materiality (defined as economic) and
^H ennessy thus invokes objections to a utopian beyond by now fam iliar to my reader, viz. those
offered by various post structuralist accounts discussed above. To be fair, Hennessy adds one
refreshing question which is to ask of the relation between such utopian subjects and political
opposition.
305
sexuality, implicitly banishing the latter to the "cultural" and "superstructural."29

Thus she objects to de Lauretis's reliance on Wittig and MacKinnon insofar as
these writers, she claims, have a theory of power that separate the subjective
from other social forces (85). This objection, however, elides the specificity of
feminist critique as derived from its unique challenge to the split between the
"subjective" and other social forces. WTiat Hennessy calls "subjective," e.g.
sexuality, radical feminists analyze as "sexage" or appropriation (Guillaumin), a
material relation of power. This is not to say that radical feminist/lesbian theory
of the subject ought not be extended in order to account for how sexuality/gender
articulates w ith other arrangem ents of power. The question is how to do so
w ithout sacrificing the specificity of a position such as described by Frye's
"woman-seer"— a position which undercuts the mechanisms of heterosexuality insofar
as these mechanisms normalize male domination.
Interestingly, Hennessy's attem pt to extend feminist standpoint while also
incorporating a radical critique of heterosexuality (drawing on de Lauretis and
Wittig) hovers close to an analysis that synthesizes (marxist) materialist and
radical feminist theory. But her argum ent ultimately mutes if not drops the
aspect of the critique which addresses male power. Moreover, in the end she
embraces (I hope to show) a problematic discourse model of the subject. I will
look at her use of materialism first.
Hennessy helpfully extends the notion of standpoint w hen she suggests
we think of a feminist standpoint as the collective subject of a systemic critique.
Feminist standpoint, Hennessy suggests, is distinguished by its focus of inquiry
rather than by any assumed foundation of knowledge in female experience. This
29 I am reminded o f Fraser's distinction betw een "actual" and "cultural" pow er in her critique of
Pateman and discussion of Prostitution, (see chapter 2, the power o f feminist Theory).
306
is critique which "begins with inquiry into and opposition to the devaluation of
'w om an' under patriarchy in all of the relations of production it spans" (97,
em phasis in original). The term "devaluation" again signals H ennessy's
difference from a materialist radical feminism. Materialist radical feminism does
not begin w ith the question of value, or the devaluation of "wom an," but with
the social relations through which men have politically legitimized access to
w om en's bodies (see chapter 1). The question is, how to extend a materialist
radical feminism so that it accounts for how male pow er is implicated within a
network of social relations, including those of multinational capitalism. Toward
this end, H ennessy's em phasis on material as system ic critique—despite its
residues of economism—is helpful, for she calls attention to the heterosexual
regime in its articulation w ith other institutions. Thus Hennessy's materialist
notion of standpoint counters an "em phasis on know ledge as local and
indeterminate" endorsed by other standpoint theories (73).30 By implication, in
my view, the theory allows for an extended notion of "lesbian," or, rather, an
extended notion of the utopian imaginary at stake in a feminist definition of
lesbian. For, I suggest, if the specificity of feminist critique derives from its
critique of heterosexuality as heterosexuality intersects with other institutions,
the subject-position of this critique resembles (and material-izes) the imagined
collective subject at stake for Wittig and Frye. However, im portant questions
remain, not least the question of whether and how to disarticulate any such
subject-position from empirical subjects—to avoid, in other w ords, a theory of
"epistemic privilege" that attributes special powers of know ing to actually
existing women and lesbians by virtue of the fact that they are (biological,
^ H er emphasis on the systemic is also a deviation from the postmarxist project such as advanced
by Laclau and M ouffe, to be discussed below, and its Foucaultian influence.
307
empirical) women a n d /o r lesbians. Thus I tu rn to Hennessy's specific use of

disco urse-analysis as an anti-essentialist strategy.
Hennessy's attem pt to dislodge the subject-position of critique from any
empirical referent (in actually existing subjects) presupposes a poststructuralist
critique of the unified subject. By the latter I m ean the de-centering of a subject
once assumed to correspond (reflect an d /o r express) homogenous (id)entity—
"women," "female experience." "Once subjectivity is theorized as an ensemble
of discursive positions, no monolithic identity can serve as the subject of
representation or liberation" (95). Her argument counters the assumption central
to the marxist philosophy o f the subject (Benhabib's phrase) that a given historical
group can be said to be specially positioned to understand and shape history.
For this assumption can lead feminist theorists to conflate feminist work with any
work done by (biological) women and to assume that women as a group (or
lesbians) are inherently carriers of feminist/revolutionary wisdom. It can lead us
back to a central problem inherited from the marxist notion of the subject of
history.
The Legacy of Lukacs and the Is-Qught Fallacy

Hennessy's attem pt to straddle standpoint and discourse theories of the
subject without lapsing into essentialism is an argument that implicitly responds
to a problem passed on from Lukacs to feminist/lesbian theory of the subject.
The problem is seen m ost clearly perhaps in relation to Bunch's claim for lesbian
consciousness as potentially revolutionary—how to theorize the relation between
a normative subject (e.g. "class for itself;" politicized/feminist lesbian identity) on
the one hand and actual concrete individuals and groups on the other hand (e.g.
308
actual lesbians including lesbians who define themselves as sim ply having a
different sexual preference a n d /o r who do not see themselves as "political").
The concept of "class consciousness" (and its variants) begs the question of the
relation between "subject" in a normative sense and subject in an empirical
sense, leaving a gap too easily filled by projections that m ay be more the wishful
thinking of theorists and ideologues than anything else—projections that are "no
less real" however, in some of their effects.31 Acknowledging the gap between
class for-itself and class in-itself, Lukacs proposed the infamous distinction
betw een "im puted class consciousness" and em pirically existing class
consciousness. Jay glosses this problematic legacy of Lukacs as follows: while
members of the proletariat have the "objective possibility" of rising to Makers of
History, they are not yet ready. W hat follows is the proposal that a Party
V anguard "which merely expressed the im puted class consciousness of the
proletariat" could and m ust fill the gap allowing for the "Stalinist nightmare"
which followed ("Vico" 79-80). The watered dow n version of this nightmare is,
31 Pierre Bourdieu discusses, in this vein, the "working class" as a social fiction—a magical entity
invoked and made to speak by those who believe it to exist:
It is a sort of existence in thought, an existence in the thinking of a large proportion of those
whom the taxonomies designate as workers, but also in the thinking of the occupants of
the positions remotest from the workers in the social space. This alm ost universally
recognized existence is itself based on the existence of a working class in representation, i.e.
of political and trade-union apparatuses and professional spokesm en, vitally interested
in believing that it exists and in having this believed both by those who identify with it
and those who exclude themselves from it, and capable of making the "working class"
speak, and with one voice, of invoking it, as one invokes gods or patron saints, even of
sym bolically manifesting it through demonstration, a sort of theatrical deploym ent of the
class-in-representation, with on the one hand the corps of professional representatives
and all the sym bolism constitutive of its existence, and on the other the m ost convinced
fraction of the believers who, through their presence, enable the representatives to
manifest their representativeness. This working class "as w ill and representation" (in the
words of Schopenhauer's famous title) is not the self-enacting class, a real group really
m obilized, which is evoked in the Marxist tradition. But it is no less real, w ith the
magical reality which (as Durkheim and Mauss maintained) defines institutions as social
fictions. (217)
309
in my opinion, a particular politics of group identity in a U.S. leftist/fem inist

context.
Standpoint Theory and the Ethos of Authenticity

W ith this last point I turn back to the problem w ith a politics of identity
that trades on its epistemic privilege for its "authenticity," a politics thus
generating an anxiety of authenticity (see ch. 4 above). To this end I take a
detour from my discussion of Hennessy, and re-enlist Bar O n's critique of
epistemic-privilege theory in feminism and other progressive movements. Bar
On pin p o in ts a key problem w ith epistem ological-privilege theory—the
assum ption that identity and a putative "group experience" can provide the
authoritative ground from which to speak and to authorize/authenticate its
speech as truth. This theory does have—Bar On points out—a strategic value,
namely, to "em pow er" groups to speak on their ow n behalf, to provide
know ledge that w ould otherwise be unavailable—self know ledge—and to
thereby contest the dominant rule of silence for marginal groups. I agree with
Bar On th at the issue is not whether marginal groups should claim the power to
speak b u t whether the grounds of such pow er are in epistemological privilege,
rather th an "the dem ands of justice" (97). The failure to understand that
disobedience of the rule of silence is a matter of justice, not authorization, leaves
marginal groups w ith a strategy of "empowerment" that has no basis in actual
social power (Bar O n 97). Lacking this power, a group's "claims for epistemic
privilege" she writes, "are therefore, merely normative, compelling only for those
who are theoretically persuaded by them, usually members of the socially
marginalized group who find them empowering" (Bar On 96).
310
These "merely normative claims" imply a form of power-over as well as

em powerm ent, however, suggesting internal regulatory mechanisms through
which group-members are measured as "authentic" or "inauthentic." These
mechanisms may include the very concept of lesbian identity I defended above
as liberatory, namely, a normative definition of marginal identity as a form of
resistance to domination. Bar On argues, for example, that groups who assume
an epistemological privilege as derived from their marginal status often attribute
resistance to the margins, excavating and valorizing all hidden histories and
knowledges as histories and knowledges of resistance. This theory does not
merely recover agency in a marginalized group but valorizes agency as resistance
(Bar On 92).32 A particular politics of identity follows—a politics based on an
idealized identity (based on resistance, or nurturance) abstracted from experience
and invoked as a basis for establishing norms of behavior for group members.
Thus Bar O n's argument poses a central challenge for any theory presupposing a
normative, utopian lesbian identity. In other words, it is a challenge to radical
lesbian theory from Adrienne Rich's notion of a continuum of resistance to
Hoagland and Frye's concept of the lesbian subject-position as deriving power
from its very exclusion and Wittig's "lesbian" as an escapee from the class of
women. Is the utopianism of these theories implicated within, an d /o r reflecting,
inevitably prescriptive and repressive mechanisms of lesbian-feminist politics of
identity? Is the notion of "standpoint" unsalvagable, given this criticism?
32In a different feminist framework this theory valorizes agency as nurturance. Bar On points out
that resistance and nurturance are the two main paradigms for such recovered agency in feminist
thought (92-3). I would add that agency is valorized as resistance in different ways by lesbian
feminism, on the one hand, which stresses ethics and on the other hand by queer culture/theory
which stresses sexuality as the site of agency. With the first paradigm you have the w illful
amazon as the extreme image of agency as resistance and in the second you have something like
Madonna as the extreme.
311
In response to the above challenge, I suggest that the problem can be

understood in terms of an is-ought fallacy, i.e. the fallacy of extrapolating from a
normative goal to a claim about what-is, or, w hen a theoretically constructed
utopian ought becomes the yardstick for measuring the authenticity of w hat is.33
This fallacy is implicit in an expressivist ideology which collapses politics into
personal expression in a way that confuses "being" a lesbian (or black, Chicana,
etc.) w ith political resistance. I suggest an alternative to an expressivist model of
identity. Why not consider that political identity implies a tension between actual
subjects and normative (e.g. utopian) identities? As a proposal about what is to be
done, political identity ought to be continually re-vised in light of historical
limitations and conditions in which actual groups and individuals mobilize for
social change.
The fiction of Women and the Im-materiality of the Subject of Feminism

A sheerly discursive model of the subject, however,—to tu rn back to
Hennessy—abandons the task of theorizing the relation between normative and
em pirical consciousness, not least because it tends to disregard, if n ot reject,
normative (ethical, political) dimensions of the feminist subject a n d /o r to expel
from the subject any material referent in women's lives. An "anti-essentialist
33 Bourdieu addresses "the whole ambiguity of the Marxist conception of class, which is
inextricably an 'is' and an 'ought'" (209). This is an ambiguity, he argues, which the sociologist
ought avoid if the latter is not to pursue politics by other means. The sociologist ought not,
according to Bourdieu "take as his object the intention of assigning others to classes and of telling
them thereby what they are and what they have to be (this is the whole ambiguity of
forecasting)" (209). Instead, "he must analyze, in order to repudiate, the ambition o f the creative
world view , a kind of intuitus originarius that would make things exist in accordance w ith its
vision" (209). This "is-ought" ambiguity or fallacy can be found in what Jay argues is Lukacs's
appropriation of Vico's "verum-factum" principle ( "Vico" 108). As Jay discusses it, "the gap
between 'is' and 'ought'" as a central antinomy in bourgeois thought was particular source of
"distress" for Lukacs ('Totality 110).
312
deconstructive feminist position" (Fraser, Justice) ultimately pulls rank in

H ennessy's argum ent as she cites "w om an" as a homogenizing category that
"generates its ow n refusals"34 i.e. is based on (invisible) race, class an d other
exclusions. In other words (so the argum ent goes), if feminism is generated from
contradictions internal to patriarchy, there is no woman standing apart from these
contradictions, or, no w om an ap art from its "juridical representation" in
patriarchal discourse (Hennessy 95).
If the problem w ith a utopian fem inist/lesbian theory of standpoint is that
it tries to deduce an empirical reality from normative claims, the problem w ith
discourse theory is that it tries to deduce normative claims from discourse and
thus, as Fraser argues, tries "the theoretical equivalent of pulling a rabbit o ut of a
hat" (Justice 183). The deconstructive critique might be valuable as a m ethod of
exposing identity as socially constructed through discourse.35 It fails, however,
to distinguish between different historical and political contexts of construction.
Feminist anti-essentialists fail to ask "how a given identity or difference is related
to social structures of domination and to social relations of inequality" (Justice
183)36 and "appraise[. . .] identity claims on ontological grounds alone" (183
^ H ennessy is invoking Butler's critique of the concept of wom en in Gender Trouble here.
35Brown's critique of identity politics as a re-naturalization o f capitalism is a good exam ple of an
effective deconstructive critique. See chapter 4 above. Other examples are Alcoff and Grey's and
Armstrong's critiques of confessionalism—the identity of "survivor" is constructed through rites
of revelation in which a supposedly un-mediated, raw experience is the foundation of a truth
about sexual trauma. This category of experience, however is highly mediated by sensationalism
on the one hand, and therapy industry on the other, with their associated experts (talk show
hosts, therapists, etc.). See chapter 3 above.
36De Lauretis m ade a related argument in "Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously," w hen she
proposes that the explicit polemic against the "essentialism" o f those writers labeled "cultural
feminists" is in fact an implicit attack on a specific historical project of reconceptualizing fem ale
(and lesbian) identity. As de Lauretis discusses it, what has been termed "essence" by the anti-
essentialists w ould be read far more accurately as
313
Justice). The discourse model assumed by deconstructionists such as Butler, in its

critique of essentialized identity, promotes a new essentialism in the trappings of
discourse. In its failure to provide criteria for distinguishing m aterial and
norm ative differences between identities, the model itself, as m uch as the
discourse it contests, essentializes identity! Adherents of this position,
risk succumbing, as a result, to a night in which all cows are gray: all
identities threaten to become equally fictional, equally repressive, equally
exclusionary. (Justice 183)
In the end, Hennessy's argum ent leads us directly into this proverbial
night as, in our haste to ward off essentialism, we lose the referent of feminist
discourse in wom en's lives, and can no longer distinguish between the woman
redefined by fem inist discourse and the woman that is an effect of "juridical
representations," both now considered equally fictional and repressive. Thus
H ennessy is caught at the impasse in feminist thought she h ad aim ed at
surpassing—at a stand-off betw een an attachment to an em pirical referent,
"women," on one side and a discursive analysis of "woman" on the other.
Surpassing the Impasse where Discourse Analysis takes us

The impasse that Hennessy describes parallels a particular bifurcation in
philosophical thought that Hegel addresses in his critique of n atu ral right
theories, namely, a split between dogm atic empiricism and transcendental,
Kantian, theory.37 In the first place Hegel cites a theory which obscures its
a totality of qualities, properties and attributes that feminists define, envisage, or enact
for them selves (and som e in fact attempt to live out in 'separatist' com m unities) and
possibly also w ish for other wom en. This is m ore a project, then, than a description of
existent reality. (5)
As de Lauretis suggests, this "project" of re-valuing female identity is linked to the project of
lesbian-fentitiism.
37I'm relying on Benhabib's discussion of H egel here (chapter 1 Critique,)
314
normative presuppositions (e.g. empirical theories which begin from a "state of

nature"). The flip side of dogm atic empiricism is the em pty formalism of
theories which cannot generate any concrete content (Kant's notion of acting in
accordance to the moral law).38 In my opinion, feminist theory shows signs of a
similar bifurcation in thought. O n the one hand, we have the experience-based
epistemology implied by identity politics—a form of dogmatism presupposing
an authentic group-experience as the ground for political and knowledge claims.
On the other hand, we have the anti-essentialist deconstructive position which
seems to break through dogmatism by compelling deconstruction of any reified
identity or experience, emphasizing a "narrative construction of experience" and
"social constructedness of 'speaking from'" (Hennessy Feminist Materialism 70).39
However, to the extent that it forgoes the referent altogether this discourse model
is incapable of generating praxis.40
If, as Hegel argues, the polarity where em piricism faces off w ith
formalism is itself a symptom of a bifurcation in social life and crisis in thought, I
suggest a parallel crisis for feminism. The impasse defined by a split between
empiricism and formalism is a symptom of a crisis in a social imaginary of
feminist politics. My discussion here partly departs from Laura Kipnis's
argument, "Feminism: The Political Conscience of Postmodernism?" Invoking
the work of both Perry Anderson and Laclau and Mouffe, Kipnis cites "formal
38 The impasse is reflected in one current bifurcation of feminist counter-public life, namely
between the dogmatism of experience-based thought and activism which fails to scrutinize its
theoretical, normative and cultural presuppositions and the empty formalism o f academic
feminism which converts everything into textual issues.
39We saw an example of this bifurcation in the dialectic of expressivist kitsch lesbian feminism
and aesthetidzed camp queer: the latter escaping the dogmatic authenticity of kitsch into the
aesthetic play of camp.
40The parallel argument in philosophy is that Immanuel Kant's categorical im perative cannot
account for the effect of the "moral law" on conduct.
315
shifts" (Anderson) in a marxist theory—specifically the turn to deconstructive

and psychoanalytic theories of the subject—as a symptom of political failure, of
theory filling a gap where mass movement (socialist or feminist revolution) never
happened.41 A discourse model (that Kipnis associates, in a feminist context,
with French feminist ecriture) frees the subject of feminism from "w om en's lives"
and fills a gap where a political subject never coalesced, i.e. the subject of a mass
women's movement. Kipnis inexplicably proposes that feminist theorists reclaim
and somehow revise ecriture as a site of feminist praxis. But this is a leap of faith
rather than argument; my contrasting proposal is that a discourse m odel only
leaves feminism stranded between an essentialist coherence of "w om an" and its
dispersion into linguistic elements. In the process of discarding a monolithic
subject of feminism, a discourse model makes a unified subject unimaginable.
What remains unimaginable, in other words, is feminism as a revolutionary force for
social change, and this lack of im agination is a political/ethical crisis. A
disenchanted lesbian is a symptom of this crisis as is the discourse model of
identity which comes to take its place.
The "Inflation of Discourse": Laclau and Mouffe's Post-Marxist subject of

Revolution
Rather than generate praxis, a discourse model promises the em pty
formalism of "a theory no longer able to constitute its political object" (Kipnis
155). It is interesting, then, to assess the contortions of a theoretical model that
tries the magic trick of wresting a theory of strategy from a discourse m odel of the
41Laclau and M ouffe argue that "hegemony" is a "symptom" of a crisis in marxist thought
(although not a sym ptom of failure, as Anderson claims). See below for further discussion of
their argument.
316
social and of politics. I am referring here to the efforts of self-identified

"postm arxists" Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to theorize (radical
democratic/socialist) strategy in a poststructuralist frame. To be sure, Laclau
and Mouffe do offer valuable insights. First of all, by taking up the issue of
strategy, their argum ent pushes a key question to the foreground of political
thought, namely, W hat is to be done? This seems an especially worthwhile
question for U.S. feminists (theorists and activists alike)—we are too silent on the
issue of strategy.42 The question of strategy takes on a new urgency in light of
irreversible shifts in leftist thought which have perm anently shaken up old
models of the unified subject as monolithic. In this vein, the m ost significant
question raised from Laclau and Mouffe's postmarxist perspective is how to
conceptualize political unity after the fall of the unified subject of M arxist
struggle. Founding political theory on the fact and goal of diversity, Laclau and
Mouffe provide a means for theorizing the specificity of the feminist subject as it
articulates w ith other emancipatory struggles. However, their argum ent also
dem onstrates the poverty of a discourse model for theorizing politics. I will
address three analytic dimensions of Laclau and Mouffe's argument: First, I
address their discussion of shifts in a marxist imaginary after the fall of a
"revolutionary subject"; second, their discussion of the conditions of capitalist
(post)modemity in which these shifts have occurred; and finally, the theoretical
underpinnings of their argument in a particular discourse model of the social. In
conclusion I suggest parallels between a marxist, social imaginary-in-crisis and a
feminist imaginary in which "de-centering lesbian feminism" has been a key site
for de-centering the Subject of feminism.
distinguish strategy here in the sense of formulating a big-picture of social transformation,

from specific tactics such as particular legislative policy, grass roots campaigns, etc.
317
Shifts in the Political Imaginary of the Left

In their critique of a marxist imaginary Ladau and Mouffe call upon leftist
thinkers to relinquish the category of subject as unified and unifying essence
(Hegemony 181). The political subject now proliferates—hence "new social
movements" confront marxism with "the plurality and indeterm inacy of the
social" as "fundam ental bases from which a new political im aginary can be
constructed" (152). While there is no return home to the Jacobean Imaginary in
which Revolution is thought to erupt from a single, central point in dass unity,
the question of political unity does re-emerge: social plurality compels the
question of how an y /each sodal struggle in its sp ed fid ty m ight articulate with
other struggles. "A rticulate" is a key w ord in their lexicon—derived from
G ram sd, it distinguishes hegemony as a concept of political unity from the (in
their view) idealist notion of class unity. Articulation emphasizes that political
identities are constructed through struggle—hegemonically fused—rather than
teleologically w ired into spedal structural positions in a unified sodety. This
shift from a metaphysical to a political logic can be traced through marxism's
own history and its inadvertent recognition of its ow n moments of crisis—the
gap(s) where a unified dass-for-itself did not coalesce. For L adau and Mouffe,
the concept of "hegemony" fills the gap and marks the crisis w ith its emphasis on
the contingency in contrast to necessity of all struggle, in other words its political
constructedness. The notion of hegemony, however, not only fills a void in a
prior imaginary b u t marks the emergence of a new democratic imaginary, one
continuous with the struggles begun in the 19th century, based on the expansion
of norms of equality and liberty.
318
The existence of democratic movements opens the w ay for theorizing

politics based on the "fundamental ambiguity of the social, the impossibility of
establishing in a definitive manner the meaning of any struggle, w hether
considered in isolation or through its fixing in a relational system" (170). Every
new social struggle on the terrain of democracy constitutes itself through a "logic
of equivalence," i.e. through its equivalence to other struggles that have defined
themselves vis-a-vis an expansion of democratic norms—hence the development
in politics defined by a proliferation of new forms of rights. It is in this domain
that, say, welfare rights and disability rights have emerged in the wake of the
anti-racist civil rights movement and feminist movement. But this is also the
"discursive compass" in which the "rights" of "angry white men" and anti
abortionists have emerged. This point leads me to the second analytic dimension
of their argument, namely their analysis of the social conditions in which new
social movements emerge and to a fatal ambiguity in the argument with respect
to the difference between new identities as forms of resistance or new identities as
primarily forms of adaptation to the postmodern face of capitalist power.
The Dual Structure of Capitalist (Post)Modemity as a Condition of New Social

Movements
While the emergence of new social movements implies an extension of a
democratic imaginary, it is also, Laclau and Mouffe argue, a consequence of a
two-fold development in capitalism, namely, bureaucratization/rationalization
319
on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the extended commodification of all
society, both developments pointing to the "homogenization of social life."43
Laclau and Mouffe cite a "decisive change" in social relations, namely, the
"commodification of social life" wherein all previous social relations are replaced
with commodity relations and society becomes a vast m arket in which "new
'needs' [are] ceaselessly created, and in which more and more of the products of
hum an labour [have been] turned into commodities" (160-61). However, rather
than decry a "one dimensional society" (Marcuse) as the consequence of this new
consumer culture, Laclau and Mouffe affirm the multiplicity of social relations
from w hich democratic antagonisms and struggles m ay originate: "habit,
consumption, various services can all constitute terrains for the struggle against
inequalities and the claiming of new rights" (161). From this astonishingly
optimistic vantage point, a new consumer culture is declared to play an
important role in such struggles as civil rights, creating a society in which groups
"are interpellated as equals in their capacity as consumers" and thus "impelled to
reject real inequalities which continue to exist" (164).44
Laclau and Mouffe are almost as sanguine when it comes to assessing the
bureaucratization of social life. In this case, the role of the state is central to the
analysis, which scrutinizes a shifting line of demarcation between public and
private sectors. For example, the contemporary state in industrial capitalist
society intervenes in and regulates areas of social life once considered "private."
Laclau and Mouffe interpret this to be an ambiguous development—as both the
43These are developm ents that Carl Boggs discusses as the dual condition o f capitalist modernity
defined by rationalized state power on the one hand and com petitive atomistic capitalism on the
other.
^ In chapter 4, "Uses and Abuses of Disenchantment," my critique of queer visibility suggests
that queer counter-discourse exem plifies this kind of optimism, an optim ism that signals the
convergence of queer sensibility with strains of poststructuralist thought.
320
em ancip ato ry consequence of n ew social m ovem ents co n testin g the

p riv a te /p u b lic relation, and as a developm ent enabling new form s of
subordination, insofar as the new public sector is established in a non-democratic
w ay (162-3). In the end, however, Laclau and Mouffe are more optimistic than
not, lauding "positive liberties" as a "new" type of right to emerge in the context
of a rationalized state which has transformed the dominant common sense.45
In sum, Laclau and Mouffe see the emergence of new political subjects
(and struggles) as the consequence of b o th p o stm o d ern cap italism
(commodification and bureaucratization) and of liberal-democratic ideology, as
the latter has been continuously reconfigured in the last two centuries to
encompass new struggles for equality. Note that these are the same duo-fold
conditions that Wendy Brown cites as conditions of contemporary ressentiment
(discussed in chapter 4). Brown is troubled, by a social im aginary w hich
proliferates ever new rights and social classifications. She thus transforms Laclau
and Mouffe's somewhat equivocating discussion into a cautionary tale about the
emergence of new social movements. To some extent Laclau and M ouffe's
argum ent counter-balances Brown's tendency to reduce democratic struggles to
ressentiment, viz. as a reaction to atomistic competition, and rationalized state
power. However, in my opinion, the am biguity which Laclau and Mouffe
45Ladau and Mouffe cite the "welfare rights movement" as an example of an extension of
demands directed at the state. Contrasting analyses of this sam e developm ent are made by
Barbara Smith ("Gay Liberation") and Jacqui Alexander. Smith, for exam ple, is critical of w hat
she calls the "501 (c)(3)-ing of the movement" (204) that is to say, its bureaucratization as
nonprofits replace grass roots organizations. Alexander argues that global rationalizing trends
characterized by the convergence of multinational corporations, state policy, and nationalism (in
neo-colonial regimes such as in the West Indies), have devastating effects on women. In the case
Alexander describes, private/public relations are re-configured by the gutting of social spending
for crucial care-taking services for the elderly, the poor and children (yet bloating of bureaucracy
in the state's convergence with such imperial agencies as the International Monetary Fund).
These trends drastically re-burden women w ith their traditional, privatized/ invisiblized labor as
caretakers. I discuss Alexander's argument above in chapter 1.
321
discern in the social terrain reflects an am biguity in their own analysis. O ne

m ight say that the argument convincingly presents the conditions of capitalism
and then— and then, a miracle happens. It is n ot clear why and how, according to
their framework, new social movements constitute resistance more than they do
accom m odation to social conditions of com m odification/bureaucratization.
They seem to conflate plurality (the basis of democracy) w ith a state of
fragmentation (the consequence of a social world atomized and homogenized by
capitalism). The problem is that Laclau and Mouffe's discourse model can neither
provide criteria for distinguishing resistance from recuperation nor address the
conditions of possibility for their normative ideal of a democratic imaginary as
based upon social, political a n d /o r ethical equivalence between struggles.
The Limits of a Discourse Model for Politics

Laclau and Mouffe refer to Foucault's critique of repressive pow er for
their theory of political identity and political unity as discursively constructed.
In this vein, they contrast two views of political antagonism. First, they reject the
view that an antagonism emerges through opposition to an external (repressive)
power. They affirm, in contrast, that identities are constituted through their
"equivalence" to other social identities within a democratic imaginary (Hegemony
158). In other words, to use one of their own examples, rather than imagine that
the struggle for women's rights emerged primarily in a conflict between women
as a group and men (or patriarchy) as an external, oppressive force, their
emphasis here is on how feminism constituted itself through its equivalence to
"Rights of Man." They argue that "there is no relation of oppression w ithout the
presence of a discursive 'exterior' from which the discourse of subordination can
322
be interrupted" (154). It is certainly true that political identities—in their

historical specificity—emerge in a discursive universe of other movements and
identities. And Laclau and Mouffe are right to conceptualize this discursive
world in terms of a democratic imaginary in which certain norms and values are
central. However, there is a conflict in the theory w here Laclau and Mouffe
attempt to deduce a democratic imaginary from a sheerly discourse model of the
social. I elaborate as follows:
In flight from teleology, Laclau and Mouffe aim to dissolve any
"necessary" link between identity/social position and resistance struggle and
hence to topple the reified subject of history. In their effort to sever the notion of
subject-in-struggle from its ontological bearings in categories of class, labor,
history, Laclau and Mouffe, however, leap over to the other side of a polarity
defined by econom ist rigidity on one pole and a p o stm o d ern /m arxist
"fluidity"/contingency on the other.46 As Nicos Mouzelis points out, Laclau and
Mouffe conflate discursive with contingent and thus elide larger, institutional
constraints of discourse. This slippage in the argum ent between discursive,
contingent, and indeterminate dis-enables a critique of social power in its
enduring modes and structures—what Jacqui Alexander has discussed as an
"intransigence of dominance" (11)—and obscures the contexts in which some
new social movements and identities emerge as opposed to others as forms of
resistance to such constraints. Thus their discourse model leaves Laclau and
Mouffe without means for prioritizing political struggles, say, for distinguishing
anti-democratic from pro-democratic struggles a n d /o r for theorizing the basis of
^John Sanbonmatsu has analyzed what he calls the "antinomies of postmodernism," oppositions
which, stemming from a critique of humanist metaphysical concepts such as the unified subject
ultimately flip over into an absolutist embrace of that concept's opposite, e.g. difference
("Theorist as Stranger").
323
any new political unity—how progressive struggles would articulate w ith each
other. The latter concept of unity, however, is precisely w hat they attem pt in
their discussion of "democratic equivalence."
The challenge for Laclau and Mouffe's concept of a democratic imaginary
is how to affirm unity while taking into account the sometimes irreconcilable
differences between political struggles. (The challenge is relevant to the question
of how to theorize "lesbian" as a point of entry into larger struggles, given that
"lesbian" is that which makes "hom e" impossible). Laclau an d Mouffe
distinguish their notion of equivalence from that of "equality" insofar as the
latter implies an 'alliance' between given interests" and thus obscures the context
of systemic social inequalities in which different political interests have or lack
compatibility.47 In contrast, the principle of equivalence is one that "modifies the
very identity of the forces engaging in that alliance" (183-4). A w orkers' rights
struggle, to use their example, that is achieved without sacrificing w om en's and
immigrants rights, is a struggle that requires that members of the possible
alliance establish "an equivalence between these different struggles" (184). In
contrast to an individualist framework based on m utual self-interest—w here all
others are defined as limits on individual freedom—"democratic equivalence "
implies "the construction of a new "common sense" in which, as Marx p u t it,
"the free development of each should be the condition for the free development
of all" (qtd. in Laclau and Mouffe 183).
This adm irable (and generative) vision of political unity th rough
pluralism nevertheless has theoretical problems that stem from Laclau and
Mouffe's denial of the unification of the social. In their desire for political
47A perfect example is the recently passed (1996) California legislation to roll back affirmative
action billed as equal rights for whites, especially white men.
324
plurality, Ladau and Mouffe deny that the logic of equivalence at stake in radical
democracy is a new "'unifying prindple' which reduces the others to differential
moments internal to itself" (186). A dilemma ensues for the theory. As Terry
Eagleton observes, Laclau and M ouffe's dilem m a is how to safeguard the
autonomy of political identities "m odified" through equivalence while also
arguing that political interests and identities are produced through hegemonic
struggle:
If the various elements of sodal life—those groups, so to speak, aw aiting
the event of being hegemonized into a radical political strategy—do not
retain a certain contingency and identity of their own, then the practice of
hegemony simply means fusing them together into a new kind of closed
totality. (Ideology 215)
How can Ladau and Mouffe preserve the autonomy of political identities
without lapsing back into the older marxist assumption that so d al interests (e.g.
socio-economic conditions) pre-exist sodal struggle and that these interests are in
fact determinants of the political identity at stake in the struggle? L adau and
Mouffe want to stress the indeterminacy of struggle—the point that there is no
predictable outcome, or direction of struggle, that this direction, on the contrary
is always the result of a hegemonic struggle (168).48 For them, a democratic
imaginary "opens the way for [diverse] political logics," for the right w ing as
well as radical democracy. The New Right, for example, mobilizes people's
48 Refusing the marxist metaphysical logic of necessity, Laclau and Mouffe also warn against
subscribing, alternatively, to a logic of "pure difference." However, they leave the reader in no
doubt as to their preference for a view of the social as a "vast area of floating elements"
(Hegemony 136). The reader is then also left with the question, to w hat extent is this theoretical
m odel a symptom rather than diagnosis of the logic of late capitalism? (As Eagleton points out,
what better metaphor of the empty signifier than money?) It seem s that Laclau and Mouffe do
little more than invert the econom ist superstructure polarity, embracing a logic o f pure
contingency. In a postfeminist frame w e saw where this led us w hen it came to cultural/social
analysis of, for example, pornography and prostitution. Under a rubric of contingency, the force
offantasy came to dissolve the force of material relations such as at stake in a theory of ideology.
325
(potentially progressive) disaffection with the capitalist state, linking it to a

vilification of the welfare state in particular and to generally racist, sexist,
homophobic agendas.49 For Laclau and Mouffe, the New Right thus confronts a
marxist imaginary with a rupture where social position and social struggle were
once inexorably linked. Their point is that leftists can no longer assume a
necessary link between class condition and democracy, betw een "w orker" and
socialism.50 However, in response, I'd say that their very example points to a
necessary connection betw een the success of the right w ing and the class
condition it mobilizes.
While there may be no predictable outcome to struggle that can be deduced
from the material conditions of subjects, it does not follow that there is no
necessary connection between the direction of struggles and material conditions
that pre-exist the struggles themselves. Thus, for example, although not all
w om en are feminists, surely, "there is a good case for arguing that there is an
indeed internal relation between being a woman (a social situation) and being a
feminist (a political position)" (Eagleton 211)—and, I w ould add, a relation
between being a woman and being an anti-feminist. The question of how to
distinguish feminism from anti-feminism—or the new Right from Socialism—
49As an example they dte Stuart H all's analysis of the growth of Thatcherist "populism" which
combined "the resonant themes o f organic Toryism—nation, family, duty, authority, standards,
traditionalism—w ith the aggressive themes of a revived neo-liberalism—self-interest, competitive
individualism , anti-statism" (qtd. in Hegemony 170).
50As Fred Dallmayr has pointed out, Laclau and Mouffe reverse the marxist relation between
necessity and contingency (43). W hile Marxism banished contingency to the margins of necessity
(economics)—assum ing a causal base in economics to a contingent superstructure—in Laclau and
Mouffe's formulation of hegem onic articulation, necessity is now seen as partial lim it of field of
contingency (Hegemony 111; Dallmayr, 43). Indeed, Dallmayr suggests, som etim es hegem ony is
seen as an exit from necessity and from all m odes of social determinism (43). The problem here is
with the assumption that "necessary" means causal. As Eagleton points out, one can assum e a
necessary relationship between a worker position and socialism in the sense that this position
(socio-economic interests) is a necessary motivational base for leading a socialist struggle that
would presumably be lacking in the Donald Trumps of the world (Ideology 211).
326
depends—as Laclau and Mouffe would point out—on political interpretation

through hegemonic struggle. However, the question is, interpretation of what?
Specific social situations pre-exist the particular struggle which interprets them,
situations which thus, to some extent, shape the direction of struggle. H ow we
define and enact feminism is a matter of a struggle for interpretation and power
but a struggle about concrete conditions that are independent of the struggle
itself. W omen's poverty, for example, is not the basis for save-the-whales
campaigns but it should be the basis of feminism. Any feminism that fails to
interpret poverty as a feminist issue is removed from the majority of women's
lives, if I dare invoke this suspect empirical referent. This judgm ent is based on
an interpretation of conditions that pre-exist the interpretation—the objective
reality of women's poverty.
While Laclau and Mouffe can help us understand that the difference
between feminism and anti-feminism and between different em phases in
feminist struggles is a matter of interpretation through struggle they cannot tell
us how to determ ine which interpretation/struggle is better—more accurate,
more just. If objectivity is discursive, how do we know which discourse, as
Eagleton asks, constructs its object validly? Justly? (Or does a discourse model
throw us back on the will to power as the principle of politics?). The problem is
with w hat Perry A nderson has called an "inflation of discourse"—which is
another way of talking about the night of all-gray cows—a theory that cannot
account for the constraints of discourse except for discourse itself, and thus robs
the term discourse of its critical force, not least with respect to its account of the
material basis and normative dimension of politics. Hence, postmarxists leap to
327
the formalist side of the polarity defined by a split between dogmatic empiricism
and em pty formalism.
In sum, Laclau and Mouffe's notion of equivalential logic displaces an
ideal of transcendental unity in the subject a n d /o r the social that w ould ground
political vision; their argument attempts to safeguard a plurality of political
struggles and interests while theorizing a contingent, political unification in
terms of hegemonic struggle. However, in the end, their legitimate critique of
metaphysics and prioritization of politics leads to an inflation of discourse in a
way th at removes the material basis of politics and offers no m eans for a
normative framework prioritizing struggles. N eedless to say, this model
removes the ground, as it were, for the concept of a fem inist/lesbian standpoint.
Conclusion: Implications of the Postmandst Position for the Subject of

Feminism and the ''Lesbian question"
The postm arxist case elaborated by Laclau and Mouffe has special
implications for the subject of feminism and lesbianism—it cuts into the heart of
the contentious claim that "lesbian" has any specific (ad)vantage of
consciousness and political interests. The argument that there is no guaranteed
(causal/necessary) force linking subject position to social struggle is
incontestable, a political lesson that Laclau and Mouffe's argum ent certainly
reflects and theorizes. However, as Eagleton suggests, to assume a connection
between critique and the position of an empirical group making the critique, is
to assume no more than the following—that the oppressed position of the group
within the social system as a whole makes the critique of that whole in the
political interests of the group. "If women are to emancipate themselves, they
328
need to have an interest in understanding something of the general structures of

patriarchy" (Eagleton, Ideology 96).
Re-enter radical lesbian theory of the lesbian subject where the claim is
that the m arginalized position of a lesbian m akes an especially clear
understanding of the patriarchy possible. Re-enter too the chorus intoning the
plain-talking reminder, on the one hand, and the more high toned skepticism,
on the other, that there is no inevitable, nor indeed probable correlation between
living as a lesbian and "revolutionary" political interests or motives. Thus, we
can welcome the argument that lesbian critique does not emanate from an actual
subject as if it were a birth right. On the other hand, m ust we (can we) entirely
banish such a notion as a lesbian social position, that is to say, a material reality
of lesbian life?
Let's return to Bunch's claim for the potential of lesbian consciousness,
quoted and discussed above: I read in her claim the suggestion that the "social
position" of "lesbian life" makes more possible (although not inevitable) an
understan d in g of the relation betw een heterosexuality and the general
structures of patriarchy which non-lesbian women might have less of a stake in
discerning. My assum ption here is that w om en as a group have stakes in a
system (patriarchy) that may be against their political interests. These "stakes"
have to do w ith intricate systems of survival as tied to the social construction of
desire, the organization of emotional, affectional alliances through institutions of
family, sexuality and kinship, some or all of which can be seen as organized by
institutionalized heterosexuality. (Institutionalized heterosexuality, to
recap itu late the arg u m en t m ade th ro u g h o u t, m eans the system atic
implementation of an ideology naturalizing and eroticizing power differences
329
between m en and women, an institution based on "sex right," m en's political

right of appropriation of women's bodies). Insofar as the meaning of "lesbian"
has to do w ith a subject-position both required (as perverse) and negated (as
impossible) by this institution, and insofar as lesbians are construed as defying
this political right, are in some sense, then, expelled from the system, "lesbians"
have less stakes in it.
And still I am compelled to throw quote marks around the term, for the
story of U.S. lesbian cultural politics—defined by the turn from an expressivist
lesbian feminist anti-politics to a queer, aestheticized anti-politics—shows how
this social position can be and has been recuperated by the dom inant system,
converted into w hat Ti-Grace Atkinson once called a "buffer zone"—a safety
valve siphoning off potential resistance and danger to the system. That is to say,
lesbian has been constructed as a dream o f escape, esp ecially from
(acknowledgment of) race and class interests. My criticism of lesbian politics
here presupposes a contested definition of lesbian, namely the norm ative
identity presupposed by Rich, Frye, Wittig etc.— lesbian as resistance. Once again
one can note that the concept opens a gap betw een norm ative and actual
lesbians, m any of whom do not subscribe to feminist agendas. Expressivist
lesbian feminism tried to close the gap between the normative (idealized) and
the empirical w ith its fusion of lesbian w ith feminist. This politicization of
"lesbian" had the unintended effect of im plicating lesbian identity in a de
politicization of (some comers of) feminism: it substituted identity and culture
for political action, thus precluding the question of praxis, how to get from here
(the actual) to there (the ideal), or redefining praxis as sheer ethics. A queer-ied
lesbian, on the other hand, has come to m ean a denial of the norm ative
330
altogether, freeing lesbian as a floating signifier. The benefits of this position is

in its acknowledgment of the complexity of social identity including its fluidity.
The drawback is that it forfeits the ethico-political insight of the lesbian feminist
position, viz. a critique of the heterosexual institution insofar as the latter has
something to do w ith the way that patriarchy is structured and organized.
The question for theory of the fem inist/lesbian subject is how to cut
through an impasse defined by a free playing, signifying queer on the one hand
and the dogm atic em pirical/transcendental lesbian on the other. If the
poststructuralist position pushes us to consider that what is a lesbian? is a
question that m ust remain open, its answer contested and contingent, the
materialist, radical lesbian/fem inist position reminds us that the question of
heterosexuality should not remain so open. And, as long as heterosexuality
exists as a normative ideal and determ ining institution of women's lives, the
symbolic and utopian force of lesbian derives from its ability to keep open the
most crucial question of all, namely, what is to be done to oppose and imagine
alternatives to this institution?
331
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RE-THINKING RADICAL FEMINISM: OPPOSITION, UTOPIANISM AND

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction

The Dissertation of Kathy M iriam is

Professor Barbara Epstein

Professor Susan Gillman

Dean of G raduate Studies

UMI Microform 9825604

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized

Part I: The Oppositional Im agination of Fem inist Theory

Chapter Two: Pornography is the Theory.. . : The Force of Reality

Chapter Three: Resistance or Ressentiment?: Moral Imagination and the

Part II: Fem inism 's Utopian Im agination

Chapter Four: Some Uses and Abuses of Disenchantment: Re-Thinking the

Chapter Five: Escaping the Class of Women: Lesbian-Standpoint

Re-Thinking Radical Feminism: Opposition, Utopianism and the Moral Imagination of

My dissertation argues for a reconstructed radical feminism that critically thinks

This dissertation is dedicated to m y first mentors, Mary Daly and Janice G.

I want a women's revolution like a lover.

speak-ups, marches, street theater,

We know it will not really come

culture and critiquing sexual violence suggests a dialectic of thought that

2Plenary. "Marxism Now: Traditions and Difference." Conference: Rethinking Marxism,

current global (dis)order—a moment when the exploitation and domination of

Re-thinking radical feminism aims at a materialist theory th a t will be

colonization, bureaucratization and com m odification (Mohanty; Alexander;

conceptualizes) tensions between positive and negative impulses and between

particular dialectic of inside an d outside: A t one an d the same tim e her

The central predicam ent exam ined in chapter 3 is expressed in the

criminalization and social-service models of intervention and treatment) and

coherence as an effect of a new politics of identity in the eighties—a politics that

of gender and (hetero)sexuality, it disavows a critical analysis of heterosexuality

proletariat as revolutionary subject gave rise to a "Stalinist nightm are" Ja y )

subject an d without a teleology of struggle—an imaginary defined by a rupture

CHAPTER 1: THE POWER' OF RADICAL FEMINIST THEORY

PART I: Beyond Radical Feminism?

. . . the point of this essay is not to present

In her (1978) study of housework in France, feminist theorist Christine

In a climate of both popular and academic postfeminism, a specter has

theorization of postfeminism as a category of an ethnographic study o f contemporary women's

Delphy's Materialist Feminism

begins to break dow n as a (conventionally economic) category, w hen the

3In "Difference vs. Dominance" MacKinnon's critique of a "difference"-based approach to

that explains w hy their work is excluded from the realm of value. It is

deny it. Indeed, even radical discourse—marxism—presupposes and conceals

economist—as based in an economic analysis that occludes gender as ideological.

4See Juteau and Laurin for this analysis of the debate.

scrutinize m en as key beneficiaries of this economic relationship. I call this

Foucault and Feminism

simple antithesis" in order to more "adequately . . . theorize the pathways of

En-gendering Foucault and Repressing Power: Gender-Trouble Redux

sexuality [as] a construct of discourses of pow er, gender is never one of

Feminism or This is Not Foucault: Naming the Difference

Theorizing Complicity and Complicating Power

exteriority of pow er juxtaposed to how women "internalize", a n d /o r are

Beyond Foucault: Mapping Postmodern Conditions of Women's Oppression

and gender" through "institutions of colonial rule—the military, the judiciary,

prostitution itself as it emerged among Asian-American immigrants.10 Why does

11The state's deploym ent o f heterosexuality, Alexander argues, is pivotal to negotiating a