Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique

6. Politicized Identity, Women's Experience, and the Law

In previous chapters, I drew on the work of Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Babbitt, Elizabeth Anderson, and Iris Marion Young to argue that certain forms of feminist theory and practice offer an alternative to both the abstraction and the individualism of liberalism. I suggested that without entirely dismissing the concepts of rights, equality, and justice, feminists can recognize that such concepts reinforce male power but that they must be redefined from a feminist perspective. Through projects of redefining these concepts and working to implement them through feminist theory and activism, women can bring about changes in social institutions and practices. In Chapters 6 and 7, I examine the recent work of two feminist theorists who are rooted in the postmodern tradition, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler.1 Echoing the concerns of other postmodern feminists, Brown and Butler offer a number of arguments against the analysis I have defended, and they raise important questions about the nature of political, linguistic, and legal structures in the context of oppression. Employing a Foucaultian conception of power, in which power circulates and cannot be seen as originating in one specific locale, postmodern feminists resist efforts to devise structural or systemic analyses of the experience of oppression. Although one reason for such resistance is the worry that a structural account of women’s oppression could reify women’s status as “victim,” postmodern feminists also call attention to the very real danger that radical feminist attempts to formulate laws based on a feminist understanding of women’s equality might in fact lead to legislation that will be co-opted and used to reinforce 6 Politicized Identity, Women’s Experience, and the Law the status quo. Focusing on different aspects of how the law works, both Brown and Butler suggest that one cannot make the law embody feminist understandings of oppression without taking part in highly restrictive and problematic forms of regulation. In fact, both suggest that if the law were to acknowledge certain forms of male dominance as oppressive, this might preclude the possibility that such practices could be given a different meaning at some point in the future. I examine these arguments because I think it is important to distinguish my project from feminist postmodern critiques of liberalism. Like Brown, Butler, and other postmodernists, I am critical of liberalism’s abstraction from actual power relations and of its narrow focus on individuals. Nonetheless , I suggest that the concepts typically employed in liberal discourse— such as rights and equality—can be radically reformulated to embody feminist perspectives. In previous chapters, I have argued that dominant conceptions of rights and equality are not in fact abstract, as liberal political and legal theorists purport, but actually embody hierarchical and oppressive understandings of power. By introducing an analysis of male dominance that takes women’s lived experience as central, feminists can use these allegedly universal concepts to promote the interests of people who are marginalized and oppressed. While Brown and Butler share some of my objections to liberalism, they oppose efforts to devise structural or systemic analyses of the experience of oppression. Whereas Brown focuses on the issue of identity, Butler highlights the linguistic aspect of experience, noting that because speech acts must be repeated in order to be part of a structure or system of oppression , there is always the chance that such repetition could fail. The risk of failure, and the possibility that speech could be “restaged” or “resignified,” undermines attempts to describe the situation of women, people of color, or gays and lesbians in any systemic manner. Both Brown and Butler contend that structural analyses of group-based oppression become particularly dangerous when articulated in the universalistic language of the law. They warn that feminist and antiracist attempts to regulate pornography or restrict racist hate speech could solidify the oppression and the victim-based identities of those who seek liberation. In addition, Brown and Butler treat MacKinnon’s arguments against pornography, each objecting to the way that her analysis focuses on sexual subordination and not on other aspects of women’s experience. Rather than specifying what these other experiences are, however, and rather than attempting to correct MacKinnon’s analysis so that it more adequately takes 114 Feminist Postmodernism the interests of women into account, they ultimately decide that a structural analysis of women’s oppression is simply not possible and that any attempt to devise such an analysis runs the risk of being politically...