>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Subject: [lbo-talk] taking a break from feminism
>To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
>Message-ID: <21690A2B-C04B-4C19-BD7A-EF01179020AD at panix.com>
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>[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?]
>
><http://education.guardian.co.uk/academicexperts/story/
>0,,1839632,00.html>
>
>The ideas interview: Janet Halley
thought: ask her if she will let me have her children?
thought: can I lay at her feet and gaze upward at her face, longingly and admiringly?
thought: can someone land me $150K, 10 yrs off my life, and an in at Harvard so I can study under her?
oh, I have boatloads of questions. we are kind of running a series of discussions on this right now, and Bryan *really* ought to love this. there are links to a fantabulous 2 hour long lecture at Duke, as well as her paper which basically outlines the major tenets of the book. someone else hunted down Duncan Kennedy's paper 'Sexy Dressing' which she calls queer theory.
What you'll utterly love about her Doug is that she pulls no punches. She forthrightly gets up there and says, I'm going to call queer theory, among other things, the embrace of irrationalism (by which she means what you tend to love: believing that indecidability, lack of foundations, etc. is *productive*) Well, she could have called it a lot of things that would have elided the negative connotations. She doesn't. She calls it irrationalism. Why pussyfoot around?
And she's not engaged in what she called 'brattiness' -- ornery for the sake of orneriness some folks think is charactertistic of the pomistas. Rather, as a legal scholar, she thinks this stuff has real consequences in real life. It matters to how we think of law, do law, pursue law -- which can mean life and death.
She turns to Male Queer theory, calling up Duncan Kennedy's paper as *queer*. he is a white hetmale legal scholar who wrote 'Sexy Dressing' to unabashedly say, "I want a world in which lots of women are around who dress sexy."
Yep. this is *queer*. And in her hands, this is just matter-of-fact. It's not there to play shock jock. She's serious. And of course, once you read the 85 page paper and read her argument, yes, it is *queer*.
And what she does playing off MacKinnon against Foucault in terms of case law. Fucking genius.
I need to have her children. :)
love,
kveller