"The postmodern emphasis on subject formation rather than brute domination as the really trenchant application of power to persons called into question the subordination paradigm."
It's part of a paragraph I'll reproduce for fleshing out her ideas. I really wish I could scan the whole chapter because it's such great stuff as a response to criticisms of pomo here lately. Alas, too time consuming. Here's the larger paragraph from which I took above sentence:
"To be almost unbearably reductive ... postmodernism arrived on the U.S. intellectual scene, bringing with it a whole array of new (to the left/liberal U.S. intelligentsia) brainwaves. The antifoundational, libertine, irrationalist, ecstatic, antimoralistic tendencies in postmodernism led many power [1] and cultural feminists [2] to wonder what had come over them. The postmodern critique of the Englightenment subject brought the already-uneasy fit between identity politics [3] and liberal individualism into question. The postmodern emphasis on subject formation rather than brute domination as the really trenchant application of power to persons called into question the subordination paradigm [4]." p 29-30, _Split Decisions_
[1] and [4] power feminists and the subordination paradigm. she means Catherine MacKinnon's work. Referring to her 1982 and 1983 articles in 'Signs', Halley says:
"Like other radical American social theories of the time, MacKinnon's theory is a 'consciousness' theory. Power produces consciousness; it recruits all its subject to the production of domination across the whole expanse of human life. Sex hierarchy (produces)... both its own reality and our every mode of apprehending that reality, it almost completely occupies the horizon of possibility.
Radical theories like this one pose a deep challenge to anyone seeking emancipation: the very consciousness with which women perceive their being, the very wellspring of their desire, is male domination. Only a transformation of consciousness -- of women, by women, and for women working utterly without any leverage from any emancipatory 'outside' -- can possibly give any hope of release from (male domination)."
[2] people have often equated cultural feminism with MacKinnon, sometimes because Alice Echols influential work branded a certain strain of radical feminism as cultural feminism, one that betrayed the radical left analyses of earlier radical feminists.
For Halley, cultural feminism "is roughly half of the time devoted to the cultural revaluation of women's distinctive relationship care, the rest of the time it is concerned about women's distinctive engagement in sexuality. That part of cultural feminism agrees with power feminism in characterizing male sexuality as a vast social problem. But while MacKinnon focuses on the unjust male domination of women through power, cultural feminism emphasizes the unjust male derogation of women's traits or points of view through male-ascendant normative value judgments. And the early MacKinnon regarded male *and* female sex, gender, and sexuality to be fully constituted by the eroticization of male domination...." p. 28, _Split Decisions_
[3] identity politics. Halley is thinking of the black civil rights movement as paradigmatic of an identity politics movement, arguing that feminism, gay liberation, and other movements borrowed "a lot of ideas about how to have an identity movement from the black civil rights movement."
but i think she also presses at something interesting when she writes, "the gay movement borrowed ideas from feminism about how to have a *subordinated sexuality movement.* Roughly speaking, gay identity politics in the United States can be construed to take forms resembling the common elemtns of sexual-subordination feminism: homosexuals are a real social group subordinated in sexuality to heterosexuals; justice requires ending that form of social ranking. Moreover, gay-identity movements tend to take either a MacKinnon-lie form, looking with a wary eye for traces everywhere of heterosexual dominance and seeking its overthrow; or a cultural-feminist-like form, emphasizing the moral virtues of homosexuals and seeking their normative inclusion in the center." p 28, _Split Decisions_
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