The mirror and the veil: Reading the imaginary domain

Feminist Legal Studies

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 33-58

  Sandland, Ralph ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0010146108     PISSN: 09663622     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02684870     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. T. Murphy, "Feminism on Flesh", Law and Critique VIII(1) (1997), 37-59, at 43.
2. L. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1985), 122.
3. Supra n. l, at 57.
4. J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (NewYork and London: Routledge, 1990),
5. and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).
6. D. Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography and Sexual Harassment (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), hereafter referred to as ID.
7. ibid, at 4.
8. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) cited in Cornell,
9. Supra n.5, at 17.
10. Cornell, Supra n.5, at 232.
11. D. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (New York and London: Routledge, 1991);
12. The Philosophy of the Limit (New York and London: Routledge, 1992);
13. Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).
14. Rawls, Supra., n.7, at 119
15. For Cornell the alliance with Rawls is "most timely in the light of the particular feminist aspects of our constitutional crisis", Supra, n.5, at x, the "our" here meaning American. ID is therefore concerned with American legal structures, institutions and doctrines. This does not mean that Cornell's arguments cannot "translate", but it does mean that this translation must be considered by those working in other, different jurisdictions.
16. On this see S. Gibson, "Continental Drift: The Question of Context in Feminist Jurisprudence", Law and Critique 1/2 (1990), 173-200.
17. Supra n.5, at 16.
18. Supra n.5, at 16. For discussion of Cornell's understanding of the concept of the limit see n.33 below and accompanying text.
19. Supra n.5, at 17, emphasis added.
20. Supra n.5, at 16-17.
21. Cornell has in mind here the move away from the "reasonable man" to the "reasonable woman" standard seen for example in some American jurisdictions, and the fact that this type of splitting is capable of being taken further, with each division blunting law's ability to adjudicate behaviour other than by the standards set by that behaviour. For example, under this type of splitting it is only possible to challenge male behaviour by reference to the "reasonable male", which effectively makes it impossible to challenge the category of the "reasonable male" from, as it were, the outside.
22. D. Cornell, "What is ethical feminism?", in S. Benhabib, J. Butler, D. Cornell and N. Fraser with introduction by L. Nicholson, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 75-106, at 82.
23. Supra n.16, at 81.
24. That is, between women who are veiled and those who are not. I shall discuss "splitting" in more detail below, in the context of its place in Lacanian theory.
25. Supra n. 16, at 82.
26. Supra n.5, at 17.
27. Supra n.5, at 4.
28. Supra n.5, at 5.
29. Supra n.5, at 7.
30. Supra n.5, at 8.
31. Supra n.5, at 40.
32. Supra n.5, at 39.
33. Supra n.5, at 40.
34. Supra n.5, at 127-8.
35. In Lacanian theory the child moves through three stages of development; the Real, the Imaginary and, finally, the Symbolic, with their corresponding characteristics of need, demand and desire respectively.
36. E. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 62.
37. ibid., at 64-65.
38. See M. Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Volume Three (London: Penguin, 1986), especially at 187-232, for an interesting discussion of this process of negotiation in the Greco-Roman world.
39. Supra n.5, at 20.
40. See Grosz, Supra n.30;
41. B. Benevenuto and R. Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction (London: Free Association Books, 1986);
42. J. Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1985).
43. Of Lacan's own writings Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977) and the
44. papers contained in J. Mitchell and J. Rose, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (London: Macmillan, 1982) are perhaps most commonly seen as a starting point.
45. Supra n.16, at 86.
46. ibid.
47. ibid., at 87.
48. Supra n.5, at 26.
49. Supra n.l6, at 94.
50. See also Butler's "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imagination" in Bodies That Matter,
51. Supra n. 4, at ch.2.
52. Supra n. 5, at 33.
53. Cornell gives plenty of examples of judicial and academic writings which rely on these distinctions.
54. Supra n. 5, at 80.
55. Supra n.5, at 200-201, emphasis added.
56. ibid., at 205.
57. Ibod., at 201.
58. See, for example, Supra n.5, at 42: "we can begin to think of a legal system as a symbolic Other; a system that does not merely recognise, but constitutes and confirms who is to be valued, who is to matter" (Cornell's emphasis).
59. Cornell's argument may actually be stronger than she realises on this point. In the UK at least, the "erect prick" is only ever present as its absence, is only ever evoked in metaphor or analogy, as required by censorship laws which forbid its appearance. What is fantasised by the "consumer" of pornography, therefore, is already fantasy, already metaphor.
60. Supra n.5, at 129.
61. Cornell limits her discussion to "mainstream heterosexual pornography", Supra n.5, at 106.
62. Supra n.5, at 98.
63. C. Smart, "Collusion, collaboration and confession: on moving beyond the heterosexuality debate", in D. Richardson, ed., Theorising Heterosexuality(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), 161-177, discusses how her students have to be taught to respect the power of the phallus in the face of their immediate reaction to the idea of its "powerfulness", which is humour. Smart argues that the phallus may have been subject of an "emperor's new clothes" syndrome with academics guilty of seeing what, in a sense, is not really "there".
64. Supra n.5, at 104.
65. ibid.
66. Which might include his own body, in the form of pornographic tattoos for example.
67. Supra n.5, at 180.
68. See further M. Matsuda, "Liberal Jurisprudence and Abstracted Visions of Human Nature: A Feminist Critique of Rawls' Theory of Justice", in D. Kelly Weinberg, ed., Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 476-484.
69. P. Legendre, "Introduction to the Theory of the Image: Narcissus and the Other in the Mirror", trld. P. Goodrich and A. Pottage, Law and Critique VIII(1) (1997), 3-35, at 27.
70. ibid., at 25.
71. The most trenchant criticism of Cornell's use of Lacan is to be found in N. Fraser, "Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn", in Benhabib et al., Supra n.16, at 157-168.
72. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti Oedipus, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1984).
73. J. Richardson, "Jamming the Machines? "Woman" in the work of Irigaray and Deleuze", Law and Critique IX/1 (1998), forthcoming.
74. W. Hollway, "Recognition and heterosexual desire", in Richardson, Supra n. 52, 91-108, at 97.
75. The following passage is typical: "... the two sexes are differentially and asymmetrically situated... precisely because of the unconscious identification of the masculine sex with subjectivity, and the corresponding identification of the feminine sex with our reduction to an object" (Supra n.5, at 188, my emphasis). The resort to asymmetry does not challenge binarism as such, and that this asymmetry is "situated" spills the symbolic over into the empirical. Cornell tries to counter the conservatism or essentialism which inheres in this characterisation of binary gender difference by stating that "Men need this truth, at least those men who have invested and continue to invest their identities hrough this system" (at 220), but she does not attempt to explain how or why it is that not all men do so invest, nor how that non- or dis-investment impacts on the reworked Lacanian position that she argues for.
76. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (London: Alien Lane, 1979), 78.
77. D. Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 10.
78. Supra n.5, at 34.
79. P. Cotton, "The cultural significance of Lacanian psychoanalysis" in K. Murray, ed., The Judgment of Paris (Sydney: Alien and Unwin, 1992), 77-95.
80. Butler, Supra n.4, at 189.
81. In Beyond Accommodation Cornell does argue that feminism which seeks to rework myth through intervention into the psychoanalytical canon can be combined with empirical and genealogical work, and the "mistake is to think that we cannot engage in all three aspects of the project, and worse, that one excludes the other" (Cornell, Supra n.9, at 171). I agree with this as far as it goes, but I think that it is a mistake to posit these three aspects of feminist work as discrete. It is not so much that one excludes the other, more that the insights of one might interrupt the orthodoxies of the other, and therefore each aspect of the project can only operate in the light of the others. It is not enough, here, simply to respect the integrity of the other.
82. I have not in this review challenged Cornell's fairly uncritical endorsement of "rights politics". My own view is that the notion of rights, although obviously problematic, can be rescued in the way contemplated by Sara Ahmed. See S. Ahmed, "Deconstruction and Law's Other: Towards a Feminist Theory of Embodied Rights", Social and Legal Studies 4 (1995), 55-73.
83. D. Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 81.