Sexuality, queer theory, and "feminism after": reading and rereading the sexual subject.

AuthorCossman, Brenda

Although some scholars no longer see a place for feminist theory in analyses of sexuality, this article shows that there are lessons to be learned by examining queer theory through the lens of feminism. The author undertakes several feminist and then queer theory readings of the film Secretary and the divorce case, Twyman v. Twyman. This article shows that feminism, despite being sometimes perceived as "anti-sex", can be helpful in understanding sexuality. The author argues that feminism may sometimes need to suspend its focus on gender. She also shows how bringing gender back into the analysis can shed greater light on how law and society deal with sadomasochism and other forms of sexual expression. While her discussion is structured mainly along disciplinary lines, she suggests that it may be time to worry less about intellectual territory and more about intellectual trespass.

Si certains specialistes jugent que la theorie feministe n'a plus sa place dans les analyses de la sexualite, cet article tente de demontrer qu'il y a des lecons a tirer d'un examen de la "queer theory sous l'angle feministe. L'auteure entreprend plusieurs lectures, parfois feministes et parfois inspirees de la queer theory, du film > et d'une affaire de divorce, Twyman v. Twyman. L'article se propose de demontrer que meme s'il est parfois percu comme oppose au sexe, le feminisme peut aider a comprendre la sexualite. L'auteure soutient que le feminisme doit parfois devoir mettre en veilleuse son insistance sur les identites sexuelles. Elle veut egalement montrer de quelle maniere l'inclusion des identites sexuelles dans les analyses de discours peut permettre une meilleure comprehension de la maniere dont le droit et la societe traitent du sadomasochisme et d'autres formes d'expression sexuelle. Si son analyse se conforme dans l'ensemble aux lignes disciplinaires usuelles, l'auteure suggere neanmoins que le temps est peut-etre venu de s'inquieter moins de territorialite intellectuelle et davantage d'intrusion intellectuelle.

Introduction: Pre/Post/Anti Feminism The S/M Subject Through a "Feminism After" A. Reading and Rereading Twyman B. Reading and Rereading Secretary Conclusion: Disrupting and Reinvigorating Feminism Introduction: Pre/Post/Anti Feminism

In the film Secretary, Lee Holloway is a young woman who comes to embrace her masochism through her relationship with her lawyer boss E. Edward Grey. (1) Grey likes to discipline his secretary for even the most minor of spelling errors, and Lee, it turns out, likes to be disciplined. Lee learns to redirect her psychic trauma: once a self-mutilator, she becomes a proud submissive who makes mistakes in order to attract the ire of her employer, and if she is lucky, a humiliating spanking. While Grey has difficulties accepting his own dominating proclivities--he is plagued by self-loathing and shame--Lee obsessively embraces her new, highly erotically charged submissive self. When he tells her that they cannot continue, that they cannot perform their bondage/domination ("B/D") relationship "24/7", she persuades him otherwise, and in a demonstration of her submissive commitment, sits for days in a chair at Grey's desk without moving her hands or feet (in a wedding dress, no less). She gets her man, and they live happily ever after. It is an ironic, romantic comedy for the B/D set.

For some, the film Secretary might be seen as an anti-feminist track, an attack on the political correctness of feminism's anti-sex, a queer celebration of shame and desire, and/or a celebration of the submission of at least one woman. Indeed, the film traffics in the idea that the "official feminist" would be outraged with its premise. For example, during Lee's vigil at the desk, a parade of characters and commentary includes several appearances by her friend Alison, who condemns Lee's choices in no uncertain terms. During one visit, she judgmentally asks "Why in the world would you--who can be anything you want to be--choose to debase yourself like this? Why would you give up all your power? Why would you spit upon everything that women have worked for all these decades?" (2) In a second visit, Alison deposits a large stack of feminist books on the desk, saying "If you want to ruin everything women have worked for, why don't you read about the struggle first? Why don't you find empowering ways to live your life?" (3)

More than one film reviewer has commented, in passing, on the received wisdom that feminists will disapprove of, if not hate, this film. (4) The most common story told by the reviewers rejects the feminist frame and sees Secretary as an unwavering celebration of sex and desire. The film is seen to challenge conventional sexual roles, center the erotic, and return shame to its rightful place in desire. It throws off the shackles of political correctness and explores the complexities of sexual attraction. Lee, as the masochistic bottom, is the protagonist; she makes the story happen--for herself, her boss, and the film. She may be a slave, but she is no pushover. She knows what she wants. She knows how to get it. And she is not ashamed to admit it to friends and family. She is a post-feminist heroine.

In the popular imagination, the film represents the antithesis of feminism. As a lighthearted frolic through the erotically charged minefield of domination and submission, celebrating the masochism of Lee Holloway, it is everything that feminism is not: sexual, playful, funny. The film is illustrative of the extent to which feminism has come to be associated with sexual negativity, that is, with an anti-sex attitude that seeks to regulate and suppress consensual sexuality. While this popular impression of feminism obscures the diversity and complexity of contemporary feminism, it is at the same time symptomatic of feminism's troubled relationship with sexuality. Sado-masochism ("S/M"), and its cousins, bondage and domination, have been a contested terrain for feminism. (5) While radical feminism condemns its objectification of women and its eroticization of violence, sex radical feminism bas sought to carve out a space for sexual pluralism and the pursuit of alternative sexualities. Yet, the not-so-subtle subtleties of these conflicts are lost in the hegemonic voice of feminism--and its caricature within popular culture--where feminism has come to be associated with the anti-sex tendencies of the former, not the sex positive tendencies of the latter. Nor is this simply a problem of translation from theory to practice, from the intellectual to the popular sphere, although it is partially that. Rather, the problem is also symptomatic of deeper tensions with feminism, and its theorizing of the sexual.

Feminist theory's contribution to the analysis of sexuality has been profound, revealing sexuality as a site for the production of gender and the operation of power. But, feminism's analysis of sexuality has also been fraught. The sex wars of the 1980s divided feminists into those who framed sexuality primarily as a site of danger and oppression for women and those who saw sexuality more ambivalently, as also a site of pleasure and liberation. Some critics, notably Gayle Rubin and Eve Sedgwick, began to suggest that the study of sexuality needed a degree of independence from feminism, and that sexuality and gender be conceptualized as two distinct domains of analysis. (6) Lesbian and gay studies and queer theory took up the defining challenge of theorizing sex and sexuality in an analytic framework independent of gender. This rupture with feminism bas produced a sophisticated literature on sex and sexuality, allowing more focused attention on a troubling hetero-normativity than the framework of feminism, with its focus on male-female relationships, had allowed.

This rupture bas also produced a somewhat stultifying divide. Gender is allocated to feminism while sexuality is allocated to gay and lesbian studies/queer theory. (7) Feminism and queer theory are, in tutu, cast in an antagonistic relationship, their differences incommensurable. For queer theory, feminism is reduced to one side of the sex wars--those who seek to regulate the harms that sexuality presents for women, while queer theory casts itself as a more liberatory politic that seeks to destabilize the disciplinary regulation of sexuality. For feminism, queer theory is reduced to a sexual libertarian and representation politics devoid of ethicality, unconcerned with the material conditions of women's and other oppressed people's lives in general, and the role of sexuality in producing inequality in particular. It is a divide that traffics in stereotypes; in the worst stereotypes of the sins of the "other". It is a divide that breeds the counter-narratives about Secretary: regressive antifeminism versus liberatory queer sexuality. It is a divide that obscures the important contributions that feminism has made to the study of sex and sexuality, as well as the schisms and conflicts within feminism on the question of sex and sexuality. (8) The sex wars that raged through the 1980s, and erupted from time to time through the 1990s, have disappeared. (9) As Judith Butler observes, "feminism has become identified with state-allied regulatory power over sexuality ... [and] those feminist positions which have insisted on strong alliances with sexual minorities and which are skeptical of the consolidation of the regulatory power of the state have become barely legible as 'feminist."' (10) It is a divide that obscures significant currents of both feminist and queer thought, and that fails to interrogate the more productive potential of analyses that lies in the interstices of gender and sexuality, feminism and queer theory. (11)

In a more recent intervention in the feminism/queer theory debates, Janet Halley has provocatively argued that it is time to "take a break from feminism". Halley has demonstrated the conflicts between dominant variants...

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