here's the links:
Shame Affirmative http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/09/11/shame-affirmative/
(Sex positive feminism, btw, *affirms* that sex is about shame, domination, subordination, subjugation and more of us like than we'll admit)
Copulas http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/09/11/copulas/
Bad Air http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/09/11/bad-air/ (explain her transvalutation of values reading of Cultural and Radical feminism)
MacKinnon, feminism, and Queer Theory http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/09/11/janet-halley-mackinnon-feminism-and-queer-theory/
As Dwayne and WDK can attest, a lot of this stuff would make 98.7539% of feminists in bloglandia apoplectic!
So, what's wrong with feminism? Well, long story that. But here's the example she uses to draw a distinction between convergentist feminismS and divergentistS feminismS (what she advocates).
A black male is accused of raping a white woman, but there is some possibility that this might be a false accusation. A convergentist feminism such as radical and cultural feminism (often seen as the same, but slightly different) has a grand narrative that authorizes only one response: the woman is supported in all cases. the only truth of rape is the truth of the woman so raped. this kind of feminism is always male v female (m and f where M > f). **
Another form of convergentist feminism (e.g., socialist, marxist, antiracist) would seek to explain the possibility that a white woman might accuse a black male of rape, retaining a commitment to its feminism *without contradiction* (her words in asterisks). it's theory has to resolve the contradiction with an explanation as to why one oppressed group would harm another oppressed group. and it has to do this (as God Carrol understands :) because it insists on a narrative of innocence or purity to the victim. But if victims are purse, then how can a white woman have falsely accused a black man. No matter how hard these convergentist feminisms try, the residue of standpoint theory -- the search for the revolutionary subject of history -- haunts them.
A divergentist approach would simply say: time to "jump out" of feminism. there's no need to make this fit or work. there's no need to explain how this could happen. no need for a grand theory. if the situation with the case is such that it appears that a black man was falsely accused, it's time to take a break from feminism (break as in rupture or gestalt move perhaps) and simply look at it from an anti-racist perspective (critical race theory, for instance).
What else is wrong with feminism? Well, in attacking a particular kind of feminism, she offers us this narrative of the self from a Nietszchean perspective. But, my guess, from reading her, is that she's talking about radical MacKinnon type feminism which rest on the absolute vicimization and subordination of women. There is no room for agency in a horizonless, total-structure, patriarchy-commands-all structure. None.
But this is wrong, Halley says, or at least very troubling. Because in all cases, woman is always victim, agency is eradicated. But this is an illusion, what is really going on is ressentiment, a transvaluation of values, where the slave sadistically punished the master and then viciously attacks herself from the guilt of acting with agency. (People who've read Butler's book on power, forgot title, should make the connections her to her discussions.)
There is always some agency, always some choice. Why, she asks, don't feminist recognize that when a woman evades the threat of death at knifepoint to have sex they really really don't want, then a woman had agency in so far as she made a choice, death was worse than rape. she chose rape. because no one wants to go there, because if you *say* that, you fuck up all kinds of claims about consent, coercion, freedom. there must be a brightline. And this leads, she thinks to a fascinating decisions in a Texas divorce case where the one judge actually says that, when the woman engaged in sex with her husband because during counseling he said that he might not be able to live in a marriage where he couldn't explore is domination fantasies, she had the sex she didn't like to preserve the marriage.
This threat of divorce was the same in a Mackinnon framework as the threat of a knife at the throat.
And there you have, if you're a Foucaultian, reason to say, "So, where is power really operating?" Don't look at the obvious, look at the non-obvious.
What's that? Marriage. It isn't a "social construction" that marriage is so important to a woman that the threat of divorce is like the threat of knife at the throat. It is what it is: only natural. No questions asked. And, in this very subtle way, the hegemony of heterosexual marriage and the naturalness of women subordination in marriage is upheld -- all in the name of a ruling that MacKinnonite (and many other) feminists would applaud.
** what I have said at the blog because I'm still formulating is this: if the truth of rape where everything that is belongs to the copulary (my word) of MacKinnon's theory where everything is *like* rape (please see blog and her lecture for why she says this), the with a little Foucault we can see consciousness raising as the 'talking cure' that will never let it go. it must always be there, circling around the truth of rape, around the truth of violation, around the truth of female subordination, around the truth of all injury done to the victimized cure is so much of this craziness is about -- much like Foucault says about the constant search for the truth of sex. and when you look at the texts produced by bloggers who're influenced by MacKinnon you have some insight why this repetition may not just be about how they heal from trauma, but is, itself, productive of trauma.
like i said, still working it out.