Reframing the Law: Derrida, Women's Studies, Intersectionality

The relationship between Derrida and gender cannot be analyzed without careful attention to the multiple ways feminist thinkers and philosophers have responded, supplemented, and transformed his work. In other words, it is an often unpredictable encounter that alters both gender studies and deconstruction. Following this approach, in this essay I juxtapose Derrida's reflections on women's studies' relation to the law with Kimberlé Crenshaw's famous reframing of the law in terms of intersectionality. What is at stake in this juxtaposition is the question of whether the creation of new institutions and methodologies focused on race and gender merely repeats the law or whether it inaugurates a radically different relation to the law.

I. "To Simply Institute a Department of Women's Studies"

I would like to begin the discussion of deconstruction and intersectionality with Derrida's 1984 seminar at Pembroke, "Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida." The seminar attests to a double hospitality: the invitation of feminist theorists addressed to Derrida and Derrida's generous acceptance of this invitation. Rereading this seminar in 2016, we are struck by Derrida's worry that the institutionalization of women's studies risks replicating the university's law: would women's studies "simply" reproduce the law of the university? "Are those involved in women's studies—teachers, students, researchers—the guardians of the Law, or not?" (Derrida 2005, 143). Derrida is of course referring here to Kafka's famous parable "Before the Law" and his interpretation of this text in the article of the same title. Derrida reminds us that as members of the universities we are all to a certain degree "guardians of the Law—people who assure a tradition . . . who are critics and evaluators, and at the same time who are men from the country, naïve before the text" (2005, 143). However, the specific risk of women's studies lies in the fact that this institution focuses too much on the so-called positive research and does not question, or does not question enough, the university law within which it functions:

With women's studies, is it a question of simply filling a lack in a structure already in place, filling a gap? Fascinating things would be done, new things discovered, knowledge advanced, and this is necessary—but one would not alter the model of the university, and in consequence, one would insidiously reproduce in the modern university . . . the old model, which is fundamentally phallocentric. . . . As much as women's studies has not put back into question the very principles of the structure of the former model of the university, it risks being just another cell in the university beehive.

(2005, 142)

In his remarks Derrida does not refer to any particular texts or mission of women's studies, its pedagogy, historical genealogy, curriculum, or the daily institutional struggles, ranging from the racist and sexist assumption behind canon formation, hiring and promotion, sexual harassment, campus rape, transgender violence; to questioning the insidious whiteness of the university, its lack of diversity, or the neoliberal model of scholarly productivity—the list is simply too long. Nonetheless he warns the members of the seminar that the "simple" institution of women's studies focused on "positive" research might form a new field of study, but at the cost of blindly and uncritically reproducing the "phallocentric" model of the modern university (2005, 142).

Before we address women's relation to the law, let us dwell on this rather odd phrase of Derrida's—"[to] simply institute a department of Women's Studies" (2005, 144)—and on the binary opposition between feminist "positive" research and the deconstructive structural questioning of the university. Has not Derrida's work on iteration, performativity, and so forth, deconstructed this opposition? Furthermore, as black feminists have shown us again and again, isn't this opposition between empirical scholarship and theoretical analysis also racialized and gendered, echoing the old racist prejudice that racialized gendered others are incapable of doing philosophy?

By deconstructing the opposition between positive and theoretical research, let us consider the repetition of...