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Is it time to take a break from feminism? In this pathbreaking book, Janet Halley reassesses the place of feminism in the law and politics of sexuality. She argues that sexuality involves deeply contested and clashing realities and interests, and that feminism helps us understand only some of them. To see crucial dimensions of sexuality that feminism does not reveal--the interests of gays and lesbians to be sure, but also those of men, and of constituencies and values beyond the realm of sex and gender--we might need to take a break from feminism. Halley also invites feminism to abandon its uncritical relationship to its own power. Feminists are, in many areas of social and political life, partners in governance. To govern responsibly, even on behalf of women, Halley urges, feminists should try taking a break from their own presuppositions. Halley offers a genealogy of various feminisms and of gay, queer, and trans theories as they split from each other in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. All these incommensurate theories, she argues, enrich thinking on the left not despite their break from each other but because of it. She concludes by examining legal cases to show how taking a break from feminism can change your very perceptions of what's at stake in a decision and liberate you to decide it anew.

In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner, Nunokawa studies the diverse ways that the Victorian novel imagines women as property removed from the uncertainties of the marketplace. Along the way, he notices how the categories of economics, gender, sexuality, race, and fiction define one another in the Victorian novel. If the novel figures women as safe property, Nunokawa argues, the novel figures safe property as a woman. And if the novel identifies the angel of the house, the desexualized subject of Victorian fantasies of ideal womanhood, as safe property, it identifies various types of fiction, illicit sexualities, and foreign races with the enemy of such property: the commodity form. Nunokawa shows how these convergences of fiction, sexuality, and race with the commodity form are part of a scapegoat scenario, in which the otherwise ubiquitous instabilities of the marketplace can be contained and expunged, clearing the way for secure possession. The Afterlife of Property addresses literary and cultural theory, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies.

The regulation of intimate relationships has been a key battleground in the culture wars of the past three decades. In this bold and innovative book, Jean Cohen presents a new approach to regulating intimacy that promises to defuse the tensions that have long sparked conflict among legislators, jurists, activists, and scholars. Disputes have typically arisen over questions that apparently set the demands of personal autonomy, justice, and responsibility against each other. Can law stay out of the bedroom without shielding oppression and abuse? Can we protect the pursuit of personal happiness while requiring people to behave responsibly toward others? Can regulation acknowledge a variety of intimate relationships without privileging any? Must regulating intimacy involve a clash between privacy and equality? Cohen argues that these questions have been impossible to resolve because most legislators, activists, and scholars have drawn on an anachronistic conception of privacy, one founded on the idea that privacy involves secrecy and entails a sphere free from legal regulation. In response, Cohen draws on Habermas and other European thinkers to present a robust \"constructivist\" defense of privacy, one based on the idea that norms and rights are legally constructed. Cohen roots her arguments in debates over three particularly contentious issues: reproductive rights, sexual orientation, and sexual harassment. She shows how a new legal framework, \"reflexive law,\" allows us to build on constructivist insights to approach these debates free from the liberal and welfarist paradigms that usually structure our legal thought. This new legal paradigm finally allows us to dissolve the tensions among autonomy, equality, and community that have beset us. A synthesis of feminist theory, political theory, constitutional jurisprudence, and cutting-edge research in the sociology of law, this powerful work will reshape not only legal and political debates, but how we think about the intimate relationships at the core of our own lives. .

Sentimentalism, sex, the construction of the modern body, and the origins of American liberalism all come under scrutiny in this rich discussion of political life in the early republic. Here Bruce Burgett enters into debates over the \"public sphere,\" a concept introduced by Jurgen Habermas that has led theorists to grapple with such polarities as public and private, polity and personality, citizenship and subjection. With the literary public sphere as his primary focus, Burgett sets out to challenge the Enlightenment opposition of reason and sentiment as the fundamental grid for understanding American political culture. Drawing on texts ranging from George Washington's \"Farewell Address\" and Charles Brockden Brown's Clara Howard to Hannah Foster'sThe Coquetteand Harriet Jacobs'sIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Burgett shows that the sentimental literary culture of the period relied on readers' affective, passionate, and embodied responses to fictive characters and situations in order to produce political effects. As such, sentimentalism located readers' bodies both as prepolitical sources of personal authenticity and as public sites of political contestation. Going beyond an account of the public sphere as a realm to which only some have full access, Burgett reveals that the formation of the body and sexual subjectivity is crucial to the very construction of that sphere. By exploring and destabilizing the longstanding distinction between public and private life, this book raises questions central to any democratic political culture.

In this powerful work, Susan Friedman moves feminist theory out of paralyzing debates about us and them, white and other, first and third world, and victimizers and victims. Throughout, Friedman adapts current cultural theory from global and transnational studies, anthropology, and geography to challenge modes of thought that exaggerate the boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and national origin. The author promotes a transnational and heterogeneous feminism, which, she maintains, can replace the proliferation of feminisms based on difference. She argues for a feminist geopolitical literacy that goes beyond fundamentalist identity politics and absolutist poststructuralist theory, and she continually focuses the reader's attention on those locations where differences are negotiated and transformed. Pervading the book is a concern with narrative: the way stories and cultural narratives serve as a primary mode of thinking about the politically explosive question of identity. Drawing freely on modernist novels, contemporary film, popular fiction, poetry, and mass media, the work features narratives of such writers and filmmakers as Gish Jen, Julie Dash, June Jordon, James Joyce, Gloria Anzald%a, Neil Jordon, Virginia Woolf, Mira Nair, Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, and Irena Klepfisz. Defending the pioneering role of academic feminists in the knowledge revolution, this work draws on a wide variety of twentieth-century cultural expressions to address theoretical issues in postmodern feminism.

The core discussion in this paper focuses on the apprehension of the imaginary corresponding to the social reality of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Our main concern lies on its descriptive effects according to an analysis of the homoerotic images that can be grasped in Ode Martima by lvaro de Campos, Pessoas most undisciplined and impetuous heteronym. Ode Martima was first published in 1925 in Orpheu, a magazine that gave rise to Portuguese Modernism. We believe that the issues we highlight herein, based on the confrontation between the anguish felt by the lyric I and the closet (Sedgwick, 2007), permit a glimpse of the Pessoan imaginary coercively marked by heteronormativity.

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading

The steps of the argument have been scoured in detail to find cracks that will yield under pressure. Some of these efforts have been intriguing, and illuminating, and some even provide dialectical victories that shift the burden of proof back to the skeptic. Here, Roush argues that the thing people seem obviously to know implies the thing they seem on inspection obviously not to know. He will argue that this part of the argument cannot be repaired in a way that preserves the skeptical threat. Thus, if the skeptic wants to convince people to worry about one's ordinary knowledge, one will have to come up with a completely different argument. Closure of knowledge under known implication (hereafter \"closure\"), is necessary for the skeptical argument presented above but obviously not sufficient. Epistemologists are aware that the implication claim first stated by the skeptic does not hold, due to the possibility just described, so the implication claim typically gets propped up in the obvious way, by saying that having hands implies one is not a handless brain in a vat. Sometimes one puts a tone on the emphasized word to convey the judgment that this detail is tiresome. One then moves along in development of the skeptical line to get to the more interesting issues, confident that the patch has done no harm to the argument because implication has been achieved. However, it is not enough that there be an implication.

[...] while prudes might now be marginally less paranoid about what it is we're up to, this state of affairs is not necessarily fortunate. First Sylvester splits from R. Kelly, then the narrator from Sylvester, then the narrator from himself.

Again she offers a macronarrative of literary history, in which sentiment, a term of value for both genders in the eighteenth century, becomes a denigrated, feminocentric term in the nineteenth century and, Eve argues, a term associated with male bodies in the twentieth. [...] her antihomophobic argument begins by insisting on the irreducible entanglements of gender and sexuality - but also on their necessary separation.