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Article Excerpt
I. INTRODUCTION
What's in a name? Halley's article takes as its starting point masculine identification in the signature "Ian Halley." But the designation of Ian as a "masculine" name perhaps causes one to fall into a trap that Halley has set for readers. Pointing out the "gender" of a name, particularly in a language that does not inscribe gender in nouns, adjectives, or past participles, commits a feminist error of always inscribing gender or attributing discrimination along gendered lines to every aspect of living. Gender thus carries the attributes of value. It is from Ian's performative and phantasmatic iteration that Halley engages two writers, Leo Bersani and Duncan Kennedy, who adopt a "queer" theoretical position that must, in Halley's view, depart from feminism. Decrying a form of moralism apparently endemic to contemporary feminism, Halley gives a reading of cultural feminism's roots in some of the more radical provocations from MacKinnon and Dworkin, only to underscore how contemporary feminism, for better and for worse, has rejected all that was radical in those already highly problematic positions. (1)
MacKinnon and Dworkin would call upon the law to reject its "male" position, condemning sex, and the violence that for them necessarily is involved in heterosexual intercourse. (2) They failed to acknowledge the pleasures of violence or debasement, and they continued to have absolute faith in the power of the law to effectuate change in women's cultural, economic, and political realms. (3) Cultural feminism, drawing on a similar view of masculine forms of violence, condemns the undervaluing of values and sexual practices deemed "feminine." (4) It insists upon the value of that which has been subordinated, that is, the feminine. According to Halley, imbuing the subordinated with intrinsically positive value also occurs in some queer theory in which power of the subordinated becomes linked to the attribution of value, and the forms of signification that follow. (5) When Halley appreciates the argument that ensues, however, she reads queer studies as offering a parody of the feminist move because of its far more radical sense of sexuality. (6) In an earlier draft of Halley's article, authorship was signified, and therefore a certain authority given over to, a signature which has here been substituted: Janet Halley became Ian Halley. I note that copyright is still held by Janet in Ian's article, and I ask myself why that may be. If Janet Halley owns the words of Ian Halley, what is suggested about the constitution of the sell responsibility, and agency designated in the signature and in the name of the copyright holder? Perhaps the "true" copyright ought to belong to a "Halley who is divided, multiplied, conjugated, shared," and perhaps even to Bersani and Kennedy, MacKinnon and Dworkin. (7) Janet seems particularly keen to maintain ownership of Ian, and in some ways continues to insist her presence even though she presents herself as absent. I note also that this was once a talk, but I will confine myself to the dynamics of written communication, and the meanings that emerge in signatures, because I was not present for the oral performance. (8) My response will consider the question of value, what was remaindered in the substitution of Janet for Ian, and the constitution of the self sometimes proposed in the proffering of a signature.
II. TAKING A BREAK, DISAVOWAL, AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE EGO
Halley's article proposes that it would be good both for feminism, and for "left/liberal/progressives" to "Take a Break from Feminism." (9) In a classic expression of disavowal, the logic of which Octave Mannoni succinctly described in the phrase "I know very well, but even so ...," (10) Halley writes:
There are many good reasons to think [taking a break from feminism] is a bad idea.... In this essay I hope it will be permissible to circumscribe my goal: I want to provide an elaboration, in a somewhat high degree of detail, of some conceptual moves that may be possible only if one pursues a divergence between feminism and queer theory as I imagine it. (11)
Feminism is circumscribed, queer theory is full of imaginative possibility. Feminism is known to insist upon its importance, nagging that it is a bad idea to leave it behind. But even so, Halley's version of the necessity for queer theory's divergence from feminism involves a conscious choice to ignore the nagging, as well as the ambiguities to which it gives rise. In this gesture "feminism," in spite of the lip service given to "sex positive" feminism, as well as those feminisms whose agenda is not that of MacKinnon or cultural feminists, apparently needs to be rejected. What remains of feminism's important questions, and its nagging, is therefore left behind. I would furthermore suggest that Halley's relationship to it is unresolved. This allows Halley to give queer theory a utopian quality, and simultaneously see feminism only in terms of its manifested limitations.
Not only does feminism provide the model for valuation of the subordinated, in Halley's nominalist version, feminism is plagued by a need to distinguish between m and f (whether male/female; masculine/feminine; or men and women). As queer theory does not have to rest its case on this binary of gender according to Halley, it would serve it well to take a break from feminism. Two important questions arise from this: (1) does feminism, any more or less than queer theory, really have to be primarily about gender and the logic of m/f? (That is, didn't "difference" feminism already tackle this problem?); and (2) what is compromised when the "supplement of gender" (12) is not only critiqued, remaindered, and exchanged, but actually left behind and abandoned?
Halley refers to a "divergentist" theory, which recognizes and underscores the different political agendas among feminists and queer theorists and activists, as a way in which one may deal with distinctions among political and theoretical positions between feminist and queer studies. (13) In this attempt to divert the two fields and theoretical bodies, however, she exaggerates differences and does not attend to the problems of diversion that may arise. She claims that "convergentist" logic, which tries to make necessary the coexistence or intersectionality of a variety of liberal/leftist positions around gender, sexuality, and indeed class and race, conflate different agendas in ways that do not allow attention to the differences and divergences. (14) It would seem to me, however, that the logic involved in both divergentist and convergentist agendas is the same, and it leads to the exclusion of alterity at the moment of conceiving political possibility. (15)
Halley's appreciative departure from Bersani and Kennedy, who explicitly attempt to re-think questions of sexuality in the post-AIDS moment in the United States, involves pitting their theories with and against feminist taxonomies in the United States today. (16) Both writers acknowledge great debt to forms of feminism that have disabused us of too-rosy concepts of sexuality, and the normative and bourgeois ideas of good and bad sexual practices and fantasies that accompany this. (17) They both offer critiques of some feminist thinkers; they also are greatly
indebted, and feel no need to leave feminism itself entirely behind. Duncan Kennedy thinks of himself as not a "feminist any more than he thinks of himself as a black nationalist," (18) but writes this in light of the influence on him of Jane Gallop, Judith Butler, and Mary Joe Frug (in memory of whom Kennedy's essay is dedicated). The implicit point is that he does not see feminism as an identity position, but he finds some feminist work rather useful in its structuralist and post-structuralist veins. The whole essay is, in some ways, a protracted relation to the feminist thinker to whom it is dedicated. Hardly laying feminism to rest, it is a thinking through of the limitations of some feminisms in light of others. It is true that the desire to not count oneself as a feminist is a dismissal of a certain position, but the criticism of some feminisms (particularly governance feminism) is hardly news in the feminist academy. A feminist, more often than not, is someone who does some form of feminist work, just as a post-structuralist is someone who does some post-structuralist work. A feminist is not necessarily, and in fact is not usually, simply someone who identifies with the most banal form of outdated or misguided feminism. Indeed, some define feminism as critique precisely because of its self-critical attitude. (19) Bersani, who discusses the "value of sexuality itself ... (as the demeaning of) the seriousness of efforts to redeem it" (20) after having discussed feminist attempts to redeem it, nonetheless sees their feminist analysis of sexuality as demeaning as the groundwork for his own discussion. It is Bersani's essay that will become the focus of my response to Halley.
Bersani begins provocatively with the statement, "[t]here is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it." (21) This does not, of course, mean that most people do not have it. Following Catharine MacKinnon's insights around forms of debasement women experience in heterosexual sex, Bersani writes of how this is a position that needs acknowledgment as attractive as well as potentially abusive. (22) In MacKinnon's rendition, by contrast, there is no room for men to experience or enjoy feelings of debasement. (23) They are always positioned as aggressors; and debasement is always considered negatively. Halley concurs with Bersani on this point. (24) She ambiguously departs from him, however, in a problem that she sees as deriving from cultural feminism: the value ascribed to the subordinate. (25) Whereas MacKinnon was unequivocal in her condemnation, Bersani insists on the value of the subordinate position. (26) It is from this position that he can criticize the murderously puritanical mainstream representation of AIDS, and the equally lethal evaluation of good sex and bad sex, particularly in state sponsored campaigns, in principle aiming to reduce the spread of HIV, but in practice geared toward the lowest risk groups. (27) Embracing abjection as a moment of the undoing of sell in which uncontrollable regressive identifications cannot come to fruition, he writes, "[t]he self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence." (28) He adds in a footnote, "[t]his sentence could be rephrased, and elaborated, in Freudian terms, as the difference between the ego's function of 'reality-testing' and the superego's moral violence (against the ego)." (29) The super-ego, in Freudian theory, constitutes a regulatory mechanism through which "conscience" violently imposes itself on the ego. As I will explain, the ego's relation to reality-testing, when hindered by melancholia, can challenge the notion of sovereignty and selfhood that relies on moral violence. (30)
I have no interest at all in responding to Halley in a defense of all kinds of feminism. In many of its renditions, I also find feminism regressive and misguided. I do not dispute the idea that a whole range of mistakes have been made by feminists and in the name of feminism, ranging from misguided well-meaning gestures to deliberately regressive and reactionary moves that are complicit with and fail to critique a dominant politics, whether of the puritanical and murderous, neo-liberal late capitalist, or the conservative imperial ilk. Rather than defending a movement that has undeniably at times been guilty, I will propose why leaving feminism behind, and believing that it can be left behind, is itself a politically and conceptually misguided ploy that is complicit with a neo-liberal heterosexist paradigm. Rather than disavowal, I will propose melancholia.
Disavowal functions in terms of the "superego's moral violence," and the wrong-minded attempt to erase entirely the history of a radical movement with a complicated history. Melancholia is an "undoing of self," and the melancholic is unable to let anything simply go. Melancholia is inhospitable to forms of identity or community formation that rest on a structure of mourning and identification with dominant or subordinate groups. Even though feminism has indeed been involved in supporting major miscarriages of justice, I will argue that feminism as...
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