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In her 2006 book, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, legal scholar Janet Halley tells a personal, theoretical, and political story about feminism’s wayward “offspring,” those “prodigal sons and daughters who have wandered off to do other things.”1 She herself is one of those children, though whether son or daughter is not quite clear: “And if I could click my heels and become a ‘gay man’ or a ‘straight white male middle-class radical,’ I would do it in an instant—wouldn’t you?” (SD, 13). As it turns out, those children are more rebellious than wayward, not “wandering off” but running away from a “governance feminism” (SD, 32) they regard as unjust. Halley is referring specifically to feminist legal reforms such as sexual harassment legislation when she writes, “any force as powerful as feminism must find itself occasionally looking down at its own bloody hands. . . . Prodigal theory often emerges to represent sexual subjects, sexual possibilities, sexual realities, acts, bodies, relationships onto which feminism has been willing to shift the sometimes very acute costs of feminist victories in governance” (SD, 33). To buttress her argument that “feminism . . . is running things” (SD, 20), Halley divides all of feminism into its two legal versions: power feminism , represented by Catherine MacKinnon, and cultural feminism, epitomized by Robin West. And if she continues to be filled “with awe” (SD, 60) by the dazzling power analyses of early MacKinnon, such is not the case with regard to the “bad faith” (SD, 60) of an “intensely moralistic” (SD, 76) Robin West, who tries to combine an ethics of justice with an ethics of care. Halley complains: “The distinctive cultural-feminist character of West’s project . . . is the pervasive moral character of patriarchy and feminism” (SD, 61, original CHAPTER ELEVEN Foucault and Feminism’s Prodigal Children LYNNE HUFFER 256 | LYNNE HUFFER emphasis). Cultural feminists see a male-dominated world in which “female values have been depressed and male values elevated in a profound moral error that can be corrected only by feminism” (SD, 61, emphasis added). Her own position as a Harvard law professor notwithstanding, Halley asserts that she cannot follow either MacKinnon or West into the corridors of legal and institutional power where their “governance feminism” has taken them. And if she continues to admire MacKinnon and to profess an allegiance to the epistemological focus of her early work, this is not the case with Robin West. The vehemence of Halley’s rejection of cultural feminism and, with it, her former self, takes on the force of a religious conversion: I was a cultural feminist for years, a fact that I confess with considerable shame. Somehow, now, cultural feminism is a deep embarrassment to me. . . . It was a time of intense misery in my life—misery I then attributed to patriarchy but that I now attribute to my cultural feminism. And it was a wrenching and painful—also liberating and joyful— process to move into a different metaphysics, a different epistemology, a different politics, and a different ethics. (SD, 59–60, emphasis added) I begin with this sketch of the opening arguments and confessions of Halley ’s provocative book in order to situate my own project on queer theory, feminism, and the gendered matrix from which queer sexuality was born.2 Although it is tempting to engage Halley in the detail of her arguments, that is not my purpose here. Rather, I use her image of prodigal children in their rebellion against an “intensely moralistic” (SD, 76) feminist mother to situate my work within a queer feminism that continues to interrogate, long after queer theory’s feminist birth, gender’s “translations” into ever-new contexts and fieldsofstudy.Myspecificfocusisthecomplexresultofaseriesofdivergences— figured by Halley as “split decisions”—within a configuration of terms— specifically, sex, sexuality, and gender—that have now been institutionalized and theoretically established as that inchoate project we call queer theory. I am especially interested in the ethical dimensions of those split decisions , and view Halley’s work as but the latest moment in a string of events that might well be described as a queer resistance to an age-old figure: the scolding feminist prude. In her figuration within queer “prodigal theory,” that sex-phobic nag is both overly victimized and overly powerful: always “about to be raped,” as MacKinnon puts it, and, at the same time, as Halley complains, always “running things” (SD, 20) in order to ensure her own protection.3 As a result of the feminist...

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