Identity politics and the law in the United States

Feminist Studies

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 345-361

  Valverde, Mariana ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039164053     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3178683     Document Type: Review

References (16)

1. In Nietzsche's work, ressentiment is the passion and the politics of weak, life-denying, feminized forces and movements (most notably, Christianity), a theorization that relies on a masculinist conception of "life" as struggle and power. Wendy Brown, presumably, does not want to import Nietzsche's masculinist vitalism into her own work, but it is not clear to me how she modifies Nietzsche's analysis of ressentiment.
2. Lydia A, Nayo, "In Search of Common Ground," Women's Review of Books (February 1998): 9-10.
3. Judith Butler indirectly relies on Jacques Derrida's analysis of the necessary injustice of all state law, an analysis that has been influential in some U.S. and British legal theory but is virtually unknown in feminist circles.
4. This passage relies on Foucault's well-known analysis of the declining power of "sovereignty" in modern societies, in Discipline and Punish.
5. Crenshaw makes extensive use of empirical research on race and gender issues but she tends to be dismissive of all social and political theory. The opposite of this is found in such writers as Marianne Constable and Peter Goodrich, who tend to promote continental philosophy as against empirical work. Institutionally, this is reflected in the difference between the prestigious Law and Society Review, which does publish theoretical work occasionally but tends toward empiricism, and the more obscure philosophical journal, Law and Social Inquiry.
6. Given the very high profile of issues of racialization within U.S. culture, any feminist text that is "race blind" is not innocent. I use the term "race blind" not to cast aspersions on anyone but to call attention to an abdication of political responsibility which is independent of authorial intentions.
7. The first, "theoretical" volume of Frances Olsen's anthology has a mere two articles on postcolonial and antiracist feminist perspectives, and these are put at the very end of the book, an organizational choice which strikes even this non-U.S. reader as unfortunately reminiscent of the back of the bus. Among the trend-setting theory articles in the first half of the Olsen volume, only one includes Black feminism in a nontokenistic way. See the review article by Christina Brooks Whitman published in Feminist Studies 17 (fall 1991): 493-507, entitled "Feminist Jurisprudence." Even in that article, antiracist feminism is discussed only at the very end of the essay, as if race were not an integral dimension of all feminist theory.
8. See especially Williams's deservedly famous article, "On Being an Object of Property," originally published in Signs 14 (spring 1988): 5-24, and reprinted in the Olsen anthology Feminist Legal Theory, vol. 2. She also has two less substantial essays in Critical Race Feminism.
9. See especially Williams's deservedly famous article, "On Being an Object of Property," originally published in Signs 14 (spring 1988): 5-24, and reprinted in the Olsen anthology Feminist Legal Theory, vol. 2. She also has two less substantial essays in Critical Race Feminism.
10. Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1992).
11. Martha Fineman, "The Deviant Mother," chap. 5 of The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth-Century Tragedies (New York: Routledge, 1995). This work is cited in several contributions to Critical Race Feminism.
12. The 1993 anthology edited by D.K. Weisberg, Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), reprints several influential articles by antiracist feminist scholars, but it confines them to a second-class section called "The Debate on Essentialism: Gender and Race," while race blind feminist theorists such as Catherine MacKinnon and Robin West are given pride of place in the high status "Theory" sections. Fran Olsen's 1995 anthology reviewed here avoids this type of tokenizing, but very few of the articles in it integrate race and gender analyses-and, not coincidentally, almost all the contributions are written in such a way as to suggest that their authors are white.
13. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1988).
14. Goodrich's title is misleading, however, in that only some of this book actually does the history of "minor" feminine jurisprudences. A more sustained analysis of "the unconscious of law" from a feminist Lacanian perspective is carried out in Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
15. Drucilla Cornell, the most influential postmodern legal feminist in the United States, has recently critiqued identity politics from the standpoint of John Rawls's liberalism in her book, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harassment (New York: Routledge, 1995).
16. Richard Rorty is today the most influential exponent of pragmatist philosophy not only in the United States but throughout the English-speaking world. Many progressives incorrectly assume that pragmatism is necessarily tied to Rorty's rather conservative politics, even though, within legal theory, Stanley Fish has used a pragmatist approach to support affirmative action and other progressive projects. Fish, however, seems to have kept his distance from both critical race theory and feminist legal scholarship. See Stanley Fish, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).