taking a break from feminism
[Our Bitchy friend has been kvelling about this book, and I think I
may see if I can get the author on the radio. Any thoughts from the
masses?]
The ideas interview: Janet Halley
She argues that feminism is stuck in old certainties and should ‘take
a break’. John Sutherland asks why
Tuesday August 8, 2006 The Guardian
Looking back over the past 20 years, Janet Halley, a professor of law
at Harvard University, perceives a “fierce turn in American feminism
towards the state” and a powerful tendency towards “criminalising and
illegalising as many of the bad things that men did to women as
feminism could articulate”. In the process, she believes that
feminism “has lost a certain power of critical thinking”, the clarity
of vision that would allow it to focus on “what law really does in a
complex society”. Feminism, she argues, should “take a break” - and a
good, long, thoughtful look at things as they are.
I want to know exactly what she means. Take a time-out, as in
basketball, before returning to the fray? Or “break away from old
forms of feminism altogether”? She doesn’t answer directly. The
phrase, she says, “tells you a lot about your personal anxieties
about feminism. And I hope I can use that ambiguity to reveal how
people individually feel about the centrality of feminism. The
purpose of my book is to push against the idea that feminism - or any
theory that the left has about power and sexuality - is somehow
‘right’. I want to move the issues from that certainty to a place of
hypothesis.”
But feminism is a “movement”, I argue. Surely, like the shark, if it
stops moving forward, it sinks? “I don’t think so, no. I think
feminism is pretty resilient and thoroughly embedded in the world
that we inhabit now. Feminism should be credited with more strength
than people often give it credit for. The paranoid attitude that if
we’re not religiously loyal to feminism, in a devotional sense, then
it will die is not a healthy attitude. It was fairly common in the
1990s in America and helped create a sense of paralysis - I attribute
that disabling paralysis to the mandate that one must be feminist all
the time, without a break. That’s not responsive to the complexity of
the world.”
In her book Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from
Feminism, Halley distinguishes between power feminism, sex-positive
feminism, cultural feminism, liberal feminism, socialist feminism and
governance feminism. “It’s a sign of the vitality of feminism that it
hosts so many alternatives. Which is why, by the way, I think it’s
important to ‘take a break’.
Let’s say you walk into a grocery store. You find yourself among a
swirling crowd of shoppers. Let’s assume you see a mom who’s
separated from her kid. Huge crowd, lost kid. The kid’s crying for
its mom. At last they’re reunited. But instead of being happy and
relieved, the mom screams violently at the kid, maybe even slaps it.
Now, how are you going to understand that interaction? I’m going to
assume that this mom felt so guilty, she felt so scared and ashamed
that her child was lost, that she had to behave like that - not that
the mom is a child-abuser. You need hypothesis to get to that
conclusion.
Now think about feminism. Historically it’s developed around
opposition between male and female. But maybe it’s not about that.
Maybe it’s about old and young, maybe it’s about anxiety or fear,
maybe it’s about something else. You need to get outside, to stand
apart, to understand in an effective way what these interactions
between people and positions are about.”
Halley doesn’t seem to buy into what one might call the wave-theory
of feminism. “It’s not the thing I’m most interested in, no. But I
do, historically, note that there have been waves. And there are
certain texts - Catharine MacKinnon’s articles in the 1980s, for
example, that are historically embedded in that moment, and should be
regarded as classics. But we can also use them to perceive social
formations which are still with us, even though that wave has passed.”
So is her position essentially post-feminist? Have the battles fought
since the 1960s been won, so that we can now enjoy the luxury of
internal debate, dispute and disagreement? It turns out that she is
talking specifically about a particular kind of American feminism.
“There are still places where male domination has a very familiar,
structural and immobile character and I think we need feminism to
help us with that.”
Which leads me to a fairly obvious question. She is an eminent female
professor at Harvard. That university was at the centre of a storm
last year, with its (recently resigned) president’s reported
pronouncements about women’s genetic handicaps where science was
concerned. Is that partly what she is thinking about?
“Larry Summers lost his job. They brought down one of the most
powerful men in the American academy. I think that the people who
wield that feminist power should admit to it, and come to terms with
the fact that they have it.”
So where does feminism go, post-Halley’s break? “I’m in the break
myself at the moment. I’m writing about things that have nothing to
do with feminism. I think this is very common. What I’m trying to do
is draw attention to the political possibilities of multiplicity, the
fact that one has a bunch of different gears one can slip into. I’m a
leftist, for example. And I care just as much about that as feminism.
I would also note, in passing, that feminism is not necessarily
friendly to leftism - they don’t necessarily work well together. You
need to have a contingent attitude about both affiliations, without
being religiously aligned with one or the other, keeping them both in
play. Feminism, I believe, can have that optional character without
becoming dead or paralysed.”
Does she still feel a current of strong optimism in feminism, that
optimism about possibilities which energised the movement’s earlier
phases? “I think at a time like now when three wars are going on in
the Middle East it feels like a very serious time for us all
politically and it’s hard to talk about optimism.”
· Janet Halley’s Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from
Feminism, Princeton University Press