Feminist, Pro-Gay, and Queer Readings of Same-Sex Sexual Harassment Women's subordination feminism posits that women are subordinated to men. Some women's subordination feminisms claim that this is a structural feature of human life (MacKinnon; cultural feminism in its "patriarchy" mode); others think that subordination is more episodic (historicist Marxist feminism; cultural feminism in its "social meanings" mode). Some object to women's subordination as an unjust effect of power (MacKinnon); others detect in it an error in values (cultural feminism). And .whereas some locate the primary or paradigm site of women's subordination in the market/fam- ily complex (Marxist and socialist feminisms), others locate it in reproduc- tion and women's experience of care (cultural feminism), while still others locate it in sexuality (MacKinnon; cultural feminism focused on sexuality rather than maternity). I call the last of these sexual subordination feminism. One basic thing that went wrong in the left project of remedying wom- en's subordination at work is that sexual subordination feminism Mac- Kinnon's feminism in an alliance with cultural feminism came to subtend the legal and regulatory project and to locate its contours, all at the expense of socialist feminism. I argue that it is time for a return to a socialist feminist understanding of this piece of left legalism. This is in part because socialist feminism provides the more germane insights into women's working lives. Because this project is already well articulated in a pathbreaking article by Vicki Schultz, I will not concentrate on it here.2 Instead I want to concen- trate on another reason for such a shift, one emerging from gay identity and queer interests and thinking. By a gay identity project, I mean one that supposes that there are and should be gay men and lesbians, that they are subordinated unjustly, and that justice projects should focus on their equal- ity. By a queer project, I mean one that emphasizes the fictional status of sex, gender, and sexual orientation identity, and that affirms rather than abhors sexuality, "dark side" and all. From the perspective of these projects, we can notice that sexual subordination feminism makes policy choices that put gay and queer constituencies in the line of regulatory fire, and that it depends on feminist models of gender and sexuality from which pro-gay and queer thought diverge.
Confronting this, moreover, requires us to be able to notice as well that gay and queer thought and aims diverge. Each seeks the welfare of a dif- ferent kind of sexual subject. A gay-identity approach posits that some people are homosexual and that the stigma attached to this kind of person should be removed. By contrast, a queer approach regards the homosex- ual/heterosexual distinction with skepticism and even resentment, arguing that it is historically contingent and is itself oppressive. This divergence, as that between gay identity and queer projects on one hand and sexual- subordination feminism on the other, is of course only crudely indicated by this sketch. I hope some of the nuances will emerge in the following analysis of real interpretive and policy choices they are all are faced with in sex harassment law.
In the following pages I spell out the terms of MacKinnon's theory, the differences between it and cultural feminism, and the differences between them and gay identity and queer thinking, and deploy all of them to pro- duce divergent readings of Oncale. My goal is to make clear the inadequacy of sexual subordination feminism to assess certain effects and defects of its own law reform project, to suggest an overall need to alter the left attitude toward sexual harassment law. Sexual harassment law has become, I argue, sexuality harassment, and it is time to build left resistance to it.
download Word Doc copy of paper here: http://www.tau.ac.il/law/minerva/sexualityharassment1.doc
-- Dennis Perrin, redstateson.blogspot.com
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