Journals as a Feminist Playground

When I told the organizers of this symposium I wished to take as my topic the problems of disagreement among feminists, they put me on a panel they had titled "Why Do We Eat Our Young?: Journals As a Feminist Battleground." Like Katherine Franke, whose paper also proceeds from the premise that "we disagree badly as feminists," (1) I, too, will resist the title given our panel by changing one word in it and explaining why the given title will not do. In speaking of journals as a feminist playground rather than battleground, I shall say something about the relationship I perceive between playgrounds and battlegrounds, play and battle. I will also take issue with the first half of our panel's assigned title by arguing that the question to pose is not why (or even whether) we eat our young but how we honor our mothers. My thoughts are prompted by comments given to me early in my career when I circulated an article of mine on feminist jurisprudence to a senior feminist theorist at a prestigious law school. (2) Although generally encouraging, she was quite troubled by one passage. In that passage, after noting that "I myself think it is important to remember that feminism is not simply about women" (3) and urging a "focus on how men as well as women fit into the world," (4) I had dropped a footnote saying, "Not all feminist legal theorists would agree with me." (5) As an example, I had cited Christine Littleton's "making a claim" Littleton herself had described as one she had "only recently begun to understand as controversial: feminism is about women..... The claim is merely that, even though many feminists do sincerely care about men, caring about men is not what feminism is about." (6) According to my reader, my mere admission of a clear disagreement among feminist theorists risked undermining the discipline as a whole. You cannot say that, she told me. You cannot say, "Some feminists think x and I think the opposite." That is just what unsympathetic male critics are waiting for, she warned. They will reward you for saying such things, but they will use what you say to hurt other women. I fear that one of the reasons we may disagree badly as feminists is that we have too thoroughly internalized the notion that we "cannot say that," the warning that acknowledgement of disagreement is somehow dangerous. Notice something about the particular example I cite: the question of whether feminism should concern itself with the plight of men is one on which reasonable minds clearly can differ. That is to say, it cannot reasonably be thought to be either erroneous or evil to take either side of that debate; there are simply multiple perspectives on the question. Even if it were wrong in some sense to take one or another position on a question, that would not be a reason for silence, but for even more critical speech on the subject. If we cannot criticize ourselves and set standards for ourselves within the discipline, then unsympathetic outsiders will be more readily able to dismiss anything we say, even (indeed especially) the most laudatory things we say about each other's work. In her presentation for this symposium's panel on "Confronting Obstacles: Tenure Politics, Rankings, and New Solutions," Elvia Arriola confirmed the dangers of our presenting too united and uncritical a front to the world. She noted that when her tenure committee received "glowing review letters" of her scholarship, the response of colleagues was to dismiss them as coming from "just a bunch of biased feminists, and all they want is for Arriola to get tenure here, so, no, [the glowing reviews] will not change [our] opinion." (7) Thus, even if the goal is to avoid undermining other scholars in the field, holding off from honest disagreement may not be the best way to accomplish this goal. But our unwillingness as feminists to exhibit disagreement goes far beyond an unwillingness to be publicly critical of the scholarly quality of other feminists' work and extends to a reluctance to engage one another on those issues where reasonable disagreement is only to be expected. …