Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (review)

In Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, Janet Halley, Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, periodically announces "cardson the-table moments" to reveal her own intellectual and/or personal relationships to the theoretical ideas she covers: feminist and queer theory between the 1980s and 2000. Following suit, I begin this review with my own such disclosure. Raised a feminist by both a mother and father committed to 1960s and 1970s white second-wave feminism and as someone who still primarily identifies as a feminist scholar, I was immediately suspect of Split Decisions because the subtitle seemed to suggest some kind of post-feminist—i.e., there is no longer a need for feminism—argument. However, in spite of its misleading title, Split Decisions provides an excellent rereading of the theoretical, political, and legal implications of recent feminist and queer theorizing while revealing the problems and possibilities of both.

To begin, I feel compelled to caution readers that Split Decisions is theoretically dense and complex. Wading through the book is worth it, however, because readers will discover an expansive and impressive rethinking of key intellectual ideas about power and sexuality. Moreover, in part 1, "Taking a Break from Feminism," Halley helps readers by laying out her key terms, overarching argument, and basic understanding of feminism. Halley argues that the last 25 years have "produced a rich range of theories of sexuality," resulting in a "wide array of incommensurate theories of sexuality and of power" (3). Halley then proposes "an alternative to the normative demand to harmonize them, reconcile them, and smooth out their clashes. I argue here for a politics of theoretic incommensurability" (3). In short, Halley argues that both our theories and politics are better when we focus on conflicts and contradictions, on split decisions.

The subtitle of the book, then, reflects Halley's belief that U.S. feminism is a chief impediment to embracing split decisions within left-of-center theorizing. Using abbreviations for male (m) and female (f), Halley argues that this is the case because feminism makes "a distinction between something m and something f; a commitment to be a theory about, and a practice about, the sub-ordination of f to m; and a commitment to work against that subordination on behalf of f" (5). In short, Halley argues that feminist theory is convergentist rather than divergentist, and it is now time to take a break from convergentist feminism and move toward divergentist thinking and practices. Clearly, then, Halley does not argue that we take a complete break; as she puts it, "My desire is a posture, an attitude, a practice, of being in the problem not being in the theory" (7).

Halley unpacks these arguments in part 2, "The Political/Theoretical Struggle over Taking a Break." Her rereadings, although theoretically dense, are nevertheless a tour de force through (in this order) power feminism, cultural feminism, liberal feminism, what she calls convergentist and divergentist hybrid feminism, gay identity/feminism/queer theory, the relationship between feminism and queer theory, and trans theory. Halley's goal is to show that power and cultural feminism are both sexual subordination theories that cannot get beyond the binary relationship of male greater than female. She then argues that because "the gay movement borrowed ideas from feminism about how to have a subordinated sexuality movement," it also needs new ways of thinking (28).

In part 3, "How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism," Halley explores the costs and benefits of her proposal. In the end, Halley argues that taking a break is worth the real costs because it allows feminism to suspend its "bad faith" commitment to male-greater-than-female, enabling "feminism to participate in a much more expansive political engagement with its own effects, its own imagined constituency, and other political projects it professes to care about" (344). Halley concludes the...