SPLIT DECISIONS

Vol. 17 No. 2 (February, 2007) pp.92-95

SPLIT DECISIONS: HOW AND WHY TO TAKE A BREAK FROM FEMINISM, by Janet Halley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 418pp. Cloth. $29.95 / £18.95. ISBN: 0691127379.

Reviewed by Claire Rasmussen, Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware. Email: cerasmus [at] UDel.Edu.

The Duke rape case has become a lightning rod for feminist and anti-feminist supporters. What originally seemed like the perfect storm of racial, class, gender, and educational privilege leading to an act of oppression now appears to be something far more complex and ambiguous. The incident revealed how difficult it can be to analyze and understand the power relationships that undoubtedly lie beneath whatever happened at that night at a house in Durham. In such an environment, where a feminist analysis seems both more necessary and more dangerous, Janet Halley’s new book SPLIT DECISIONS: HOW AND WHY TO TAKE A BREAK FROM FEMINISM treads brave ground in appealing to feminist scholars that not only has her own break from feminism been intellectually stimulating, but might be a valuable vacation for more of us.

Halley’s text is both highly theoretical and deeply personal, engaging on both levels with feminist and non-feminist literature in the last twenty years. Her ultimate argument is that feminist literature in the United States has taken a form that can often be as limiting in terms of analysis as it can be illuminating. Her formula for defining American feminism is brief: m/f, m>f, and carrying a brief for f. In other words, feminism begins with a basic assumption of a gender binary in which masculinity has been the dominant form and the goal of the feminist theorist is to provide analysis which combats the oppression of women. Her concern with feminist scholarship is that this formula has become a limitation on scholarship, preventing feminists from exploring beyond the gender-centric analysis of feminist. She also regrets a growing “statism” in feminism that looks to public policy and the state to remedy our gender woes.

Halley lays out the intellectual landscape of feminism and its alternatives through exploration of debates within feminism and, most prominently, splits on questions of sex and sexuality. She foregrounds debates between feminism and queer scholars for personal reasons—Halley’s own turn to questions of sexuality in law—and [*93] for intellectual reasons. If debates over race and ethnicity within feminism redefined feminist scholarship in the 1980s and early ’90s, debates over sexuality have reshaped feminist scholarship in the last fifteen years in profound ways.

To explore the contours of this debate, the first two sections trace, respectively, feminist arguments that reflect the general formula of American feminism followed in the next section with the emergence of queer theory that begins to express ambivalence about feminism both for its understanding of gender and for its exclusion of certain concerns. The section on feminism primarily examines two feminist perspectives, the power feminism of Catherine MacKinnon and the cultural feminism of Robin West. She secondarily turns to examine the Cohambee River Collective manifesto and “Can the Subaltern Speak” by Gayatri Spivak. She provides in-depth and careful readings of the differing authors, using them to illustrate what she sees as problems plaguing feminist theorizing. Halley provides helpful sections demonstrating what she sees as divergentist trends—that is those impulses we see in the texts that urge “taking a break” from feminism—that break from the formula of feminism in order to explore other possible interpretations of the relationship between gender, sex, and sexuality. She also examines one of the chief errors in which feminist theorizing which is a convergentist impulse, an attempt to bring stragglers back into the fold of feminist theorizing by implying that feminism can, indeed, provide the normative framework for all relevant concerns.

The middle section on queer theory explores a range of divergences from feminism that has generally resulted from the study of sexuality. She begins with a discussion of Foucault’s THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, a text that deliberately does not view sexuality as primarily derived from the gender binary and power relationship deployed by feminists. She examines the text itself and its profound impact on scholarship on sexuality with a particular nod to the work of Gayle Rubin. She goes on to address a range of texts including Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner, Duncan Kennedy and Jay Prosser before turning to a set of feminist anthologies produced during the various debates over feminism including its relationship to postmodernism and queer theory.

The final section of the book is dedicated to exploring the advantages of taking a break from feminism as a primary theoretical lens. While the first two sections may be of interest primarily for those ensconced in the debates of feminist and queer scholarship, the final section offers a more general perspective on theorizing as an academic activity. The section is built around interpretations of two different court cases buttressed by a set of sections that consider the probable theoretical and political arguments against taking a break. The goal is not to replace feminist interpretations but rather to open ourselves up to multiple possible interpretations, some that may dovetail with feminism and many which may not. In her readings of the various cases she examines the costs and benefits of particular feminist readings and how they reveal to us something about the power relationships at work, but also how reading them in such a way comes with costs in terms of the other possibilities they may be suppressing. She then provides alternative explorations of the dynamics of particular sexual relationships, such as the same-sex sexual harassment of Joseph Oncale that became the Supreme Court case, ONCALE v. SUNDOWNER OFFSHORE SERVICES, and the object of feminist analysis. [*94]

The decision to focus on a few specific texts as illustrative of movements in feminism and queer theory has its advantages and disadvantages. Halley’s readings are almost unfailingly sympathetic and detailed, enabling her to point to specific moments in texts where she finds the author making at times useful and at times dangerous moves in their theoretical commitments. For example, a reader familiar with Halley’s own postmodern and queer commitments (which she makes clear in the introduction), might be surprised with her incredibly sympathetic reading of MacKinnon and her structuralist approach. Of course, selecting a few texts as representative of a whole or of a trend is problematic given the controversial argument of Halley’s text, that feminism may have nothing to offer progressive scholars, or even feminists, in some cases. As an historical survey it is necessarily partial in terms of evaluating the robust debates that occurred within feminism during the time period Halley evaluates, focusing chiefly on sexuality without much analysis of, for example, ongoing discussions of race, gender and sexuality. As an exploration of feminism, it is most deeply ensconced in some of the most academic debates and less concerned with feminism as a public movement. And, as a partial survey, the literature does for Halley precisely what she argues theory should do, present us with new analytical conundrums that require us to think more deeply about the political ramifications of our theoretical commitments.

As an admittedly partial genealogy of feminism, the text is a valuable engagement with some of the most important—and most difficult—debates in academia over questions of gender and sexuality. Halley’s readings are thorough but challenging, making the book a valuable refresher course for those already familiar with the debate, or providing a solid introduction to contemporary literature on gender and sexuality for graduate students. Above and beyond the textual knowledge she presents, Halley’s writing is unquestionably enjoyable, containing personal asides, creative rhetorical strategies and even laugh-out-loud moments that give lie to the claim that feminists are no fun.

Beyond a literature review, the book is most interesting as an exploration of how and why to theorize. The book is, at its heart, an examination of Halley’s own intellectual journey and, perhaps, an answer to a very personal question about why not feminism anymore. Yet Halley repeatedly takes her personal response and opens it up to the reader, occasionally via direct address using questions posed to the reader about their level of comfort about certain claims relative to feminism. Halley quite unapologetically takes up for those she views as excluded from or silenced by the canon of feminism, whether transgendered subjects, men who desire men as men, or even the most Other figure to feminist theory—the heterosexual male. Indeed, as I read Halley’s multiple interpretations of the various court cases I came to a greater appreciation of her overall approach to the texts discussed in previous sections that was—to borrow a verb from the Butler-era of feminist theory—performative. [*95] Halley’s readings of texts are an example of a form of theorizing that can take a break from feminism without dismissing feminist theory from the discussion. As a polemic, the book pleads for openness as theorists, an engagement with ideas, events, and politics without knowing in advance our purpose or end point. In this way, Halley can find a certain intellectual spark in MacKinnon while also reading Duncan Kennedy’s ode to his own heterosexuality as queer theory. The work is evocative of some of the most innovative explorations of sexuality that have engaged both with and against feminism including that of Anna Marie Smith, Lauren Berlant, and Lisa Bower.

These readings demonstrate a theoretical style that is most associated with poststructuralist theory but that rarely is achieved with such clarity. She states her purpose up front: “I hope to elicit your desire to think that no one theory, no one political engagement, is nearly as valuable as the invitation to critique that is issued by the simultaneous incommensurate presence of many theories . . . . I am promoting a left-of-center political consciousness that makes such commitment perpetually contingent on redecision at the level of theory. I am urging us to indulge—precisely because we love justice but don’t know what it is—in the hedonics of critique” (p.9). Those with postmodernist tendencies may nod along with Halley in these sentiments, appreciating her desire to multiply our theoretical perspectives without the urge to make them converge on or around a single set of commitments. Those who read the book from other left-of-center perspectives, including feminists, will likely find such a call frustrating and politically divisive. But as the unfolding of events at Duke suggests, ambivalence may be the only responsible response, even for a good feminist.

REFERENCES:

Berlant, Lauren. 1997. THE QUEEN OF AMERICA GOES TO WASHINGTON CITY: ESSAY ON SEX AND CITIZENSHIP. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bowers Lisa. 1994. “Queer Acts and The Politics Of Direct Address.” 27 LAW AND SOCIETY REVIEW 1009-1934.

Foucault, Michel. 1990. THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY: AN INTRODUCTION. New York: Vintage.

Smith, Anna Marie. 2001. “Missing Post-structuralism, Missing Foucault: Butler and Fraser on Capitalism and the Regulation of Sexuality.” 67 SOCIAL TEXT 103-25.

Smith, Anna Marie. 2002. “The Sexual Regulation Dimension of Contemporary Welfare Reform: A Fifty State Overview.” 8 MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF GENDER AND LAW 121-218.

CASE REFERENCE:

ONCALE v. SUNDOWNER OFFSHORE SERVICES, INC., 523 U.S. 75 (1998).

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