I also agree that double consciousness is not a total devastating critique, and I also agree that it exists. I just think it’s tricky. I think MacKinnon gets into trouble more with tone than substance. She just SPEAKS so grandly, using a lot of “we” statements, that even if she doesn’t mean her descriptions of women’s lives to be universalist, it has that effect.

As to the Cole case, as I said in that post, I think the situation is far, far more complicated there too than a white woman wielding enormous power against black men. I am not sure how much power one can be said to have when one has it only at the express permission of someone else. And as Twisty said later, thus, when a woman complies with the patriarchy, obliges it by giving it an opportunity to attack black men, is what she’s doing an act of volition? I have my doubts.

Second, I’m not sure that a white woman claiming that her oppression has some commonality with ancient Mesopotamian misogynist practices should make anyone uncomfortable. Now, if she said they were identical we would have an argument. But both women are targeted in some instances because they are women, and that deserves recognition. It’s from that commonality that we could even begin to build solidarity among women as a class, IMHO. Furthermore

Third, I don’t understand the prevalence of this myth of her “building an alliance with the Meese Commission.” I don’t have time right now to look up my references, but IIRC, I believe she would strongly object to she and Dworkin’s being characterized as having actively colluded. I think that your point re: “who uses their arguments” is closer to the mark, and is thus well-taken. But in the case of post-modernists, which, again, I would say are different than WOC feminists/womanists, I’m not sure who their arguments can or could be for other than grad students.

Fourth, as for your claim about post-modern and queer feminists, again, I think that those activists, insofar as they exist, are not postmodernists in the strictest sense. Why not? Because they believe, fundamentally, that oppression is not in your head or in some kind of undefined “ether,” that it is exercised by one person on another, and that political agitation is not only possible but necessary. These are all ideas generally eschewed in postmodern theory because they rely on “totalizing narratives.” Whatever transfeminism is doing, in other words, is based on a rejection of some pretty essential tenets of postmodernism.

I think you’re right about the double-consciousness question, though. The most I can remember seeing MacKinnon saying on this point, and I think this is a fair defense but not a total one, is that in general, in her work, she has not relied on these abstract women. Her Bosnian clients, and Linda Lovelace, and Dworkin for that matter, socially exist. These other women for whom she does not speak, well, they socially exist, but like I said in my last comment, it often seems to me their offense at her “speaking for them” is misplaced.

I guess my personal solution to this issue is that in general, in my own life, I find it pretty easy to distinguish between unreflective and reflective people. You can tell who has thought carefully about a situation and who has not. And generally, I just leave unreflective people the fuck alone unless they are hurting someone else, or denying someone else’s truth, to get melodramatic about it.

P.S. Janet Halley finally came in the mail. I shall weigh in eventually, she has a couple of femibooks ahead of her.

Post modern and queer feminists are engaging in activism all over! Transfeminisms, “third wave” activists for labor rights for sex workers worldwide for example, and they are also within older movements taking different views and new tactics. I tried to mention a couple of examples where postmodern feminist activists and other kind of feminist activists disagree to point out the fact that “postmoderns” or “thirdwavers” or multiculturalist feminists or whoever else criticizes MacKinnon really do exist in the world and not just in the academy.

I also understand that it is true that many women and other people are victimized without knowing/fully realizing it, however I do not think that MacKinnon seriously unpacks or addresses the difficulty we have in “speaking for” other women, or anybody else. Surely in some situations paternalism is necessary, I’m not doing an outright libertarian rejection of double consciousness, and I honestly didn’t mean it belligerently — but I think it is a real question feminists have to face when we make claims about double consciousness and the reality of harms that are not acknowledged by their victims, or times when victims claim that the feminist remedy will not improve their situation. Especially if we just spent pages grounding our epistemology in listening to women’s voices.

I also just want to make clear that I’m not saying I don’t “like” MacKinnon or this article or that I don’t think she is right about a lot of things. I can totally understand why it is one of your favorite pieces. I’m just exploring the places in it that make me feel uncomfortable.

When you’re already oppressed, it is, in fact, impossible to volunteer for oppression. A woman is a member of the sex class whether she “chooses” it or not. This pre-existing condition forms the backdrop to any fun feminist’s conclusion that her compliance with the patriarchal sexbot mandate is voluntary. She may believe otherwise, but her belief does not alter the fact that patriarchy — a social order predicated on an oppression to which she is already subject — is real and in effect and entirely beyond any unrestricted control she may wish to exert and only too glad to welcome her as a team player and sign her up for the rewards program.

1. It’s strange to me that you would claim that postmodern “activism” even exists outside the academy. I don’t know who these “postmodern feminist activists” in favour of decriminalization of prostitution are, or where it is that they are agitating. (I see some so-called “sex-positive” feminists agitating for it – many of the rest of them seem awful busy blogging about their sex lives as opposed to actually doing anything for prostitutes. In any event, I doubt many of them would explicitly term themselves “postmodern.”) Judith Butler, last I checked, hasn’t been agitating for anything. (In fact, she thinks the only way we can agitate at all is in small parodic performances. In the old days, this was known as quietism. See Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Butler, for example.) I don’t really hear a lot of postmodernism outside the academy generally, other than in the soft form of “multicultural” critiques and the like, which I think most postmodern feminists would also dismiss as reductive (because they don’t think there’s any such thing as an easily-defined “culture”).

2. … her theory of feminism is grounded in a theory of subordination, it often fails to take into account those occasions and ways in which women and feminists are not subordinated.

I am confused by this, generally, though it’s a critique I hear often. I would like someone to explain to me where it is that women are not subordinated. (As she says, let’s move there.) If what you are referring to is that in the context of an overarching culture in which women are second-class citizens, women do have the ability to make small choices like empowering themselves by education and, well, high heels and sex work and the like, well, great, but I’m not sure that a theory of liberation can ever think that’s enough. (How ’bout a world in which the amount of sex you have is wholly irrelevant?) Which is all, in all the MacKinnon I have ever read, I hear her saying.

3. … if they think differently about their situation than you do, Ms. MacKinnon, whose description of that reality is true?

This is kind of belligerently phrased, no? Anyway, I think her point is more that there are not an inconsiderable number of those without power who do recognize the gravity of their situation, and to deny that they are without power because a similarly situated someone else does not “feel” oppressed is kind of odd. If Jenna Jameson feels empowered by porn, truly and seriously, bully for her. But should and does that supercede the claim that there are women who are trafficked, who appear in porn when they would prefer doing something else, whose reality is rape, who don’t find liberation in sexuality but find pain instead? I mean, let’s not kid ourselves. Those women who are harmed exist. And in which case, why wouldn’t it be a feminist priority to help them out of their situation, rather than ignoring them in favour of people whose claim is that they are already comfortable?

I think it’s important to acknowledge, though, that there are cultural differences and they are not all parallel. Not to justify oppression, but, because opression is treated differently in different places and it is still oppression.