//14.12.16  I have been reading Janet Halley’s book, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism, from the Feminist library on Calibri, shared through the local network at GTI. This post-in-progress will be my reflections on some of the ideas in this book. I will add to this post, little by little, as I read through the book. //
Before I put together a full review of the book, here is some information-gathering, and key bullet-points as I read:

1. The map is not the territory. Treating ideological frameworks as theories, mere models of the world, without insisting that they be the normative prescriptions by which the world ought to operate. Focusing on the problem, rather than on the orthodoxy of theory. Allowing for multiple points of ideology to coexist in describing a single problem.

“Instead of working to defend, protect, and maximize theory as an account of the world and program for the world, I am trying to see it as theory fragments lying about that we can use quite instrumentally, pragmatically, and disloyally to deal with problems we perceive and want to do something about….My desire is a posture, an attitude, a practice, of being in the problem, not being in the theory.

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2. A History of Prodigal Feminisms – Convergence and Divergence: Janet Halley provides a very well-written genealogy of splits from mainstream feminism, what she calls “the prodigals.” In later chapters, she writes about each of these prodigals, where and why they differ from mainstream feminism, and the attitude of outraged betrayal they inspired in Mother Feminism – what she calls “convergence feminism,” an attitude among governance feminists that feels it must reincorporate the prodigals back under its umbrella somehow, in order to remain whole as a theoretical framework. This is in contrast with what Janet Halley calls “divergence feminism” – owning up to the fact that mainstream feminism doesn’t describe all people’s experiences, and isn’t the only form of justice that can be. Allowing for differing strands of theory to coexist without insisting that a single one has to be right.

“It is widely (but by no means universally) thought that left/progressive, theoretical, political, and erotic work in sexuality today, in the United States, will always, at root or ultimately, be feminist. I argue here, to the contrary, that feminism is not a universal advocacy project for all sexual interests that left/progressive/liberal intellectuals and advocates have constructed, inhabited, defended, and advanced: … gay-identity thought and politics, sex-positive feminism, anti-racist, postcolonial, and socialist feminisms that are willing to diverge from feminist priorities, postmodernizing feminisms, queer theory with and without feminism – have been competing with various feminisms…for intellectual authority and political fealty.”

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“A person framing a conceptual, descriptive, normative and/or political project that involves a discontinuity between two theories of power, two descriptions of the world, two normative aims, two invoked constituencies, and so on…can choose between converging and diverging them….What I’ll call convergentist feminism insists that feminism mediate whatever comes into conflict, harmonizing it into a feminism frame. In its divertentist forms, feminism is prepared to see political splits and split decisions, within its feminism….Decides that feminism need not be the normative or political measure of goodness of the results”

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3. Feminism’s Bad Faith: as an ideology, governance feminism refuses to admit to its will to power, insisting that it is always the victim, and refuses to see how it also victimizes people in conflicting crossroads.

Critique of feminist NGO imperialism:

“Global governance and local governance are often done through informal, opaque, ideologically committed ‘nongovernmental organizations’ that strategize hard – sometimes successfully – to become indispensible when major new fluidities in formal power emerge.”

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BEST QUOTE:

“Let me say, loud and clear, that governance feminism has been, in manifold ways, a good thing….But surely even a beneficiary of governance feminism can question the good faith of feminists who persistently represent feminism as unequivocally a political underdog, as lacking governance ambitions and effects, and as pushed into the grave by every up-start prodigal theory. Perhaps we can instead acknowledge that feminism has a will to power, and thrill to the ferocity with which it sometimes wields the power it has won.

Of course acknowledging feminism to be a governance project has a dark side, and it is important to face it. That dark side includes its vanquished, its prisoners of war, the interests that pay the taxes it has levied and owe the rents it has imposed. Feminism with blood on its hands.

Any force as powerful as feminism must find itself occasionally looking down at its own bloody hands. And any force as powerful as feminism will occasionally impose itself on its own constitute elements….But when governance feminism / feminist theory pretends it is always the underdog, and when feminists insist that prodigals must be converged back into feminism or feminism will die, it wages power without owning it. Feminism…avoids acknowledging the full range of its effects….It is a very dangerous moment.

…This refusal to see, sustained while feminism imposes costs on interests and projects outside its purview, gives us a textbook case of bad faith….As long as it closes its eyes to the effects of its power on neighboring but different theoretical/political projects and constituencies, on its prodigal sons and daughters, they will – and I think they should – prolong their sojourn away.”

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BRIEF BIO OF THE AUTHOR: *for personal reference*

Janet Halley is among the canon of critical legal theory scholars, who teaches at Harvard Law School. I first encountered her work in the context of her critiques of human trafficking, as the co-director of Trafficking Roundtable. My first taste of Halley’s thinking was through this anthology, Left Legalism/Left Critique, which she co-edited with Wendy Brown (the critical legal theorist, partner of Judith Butler, who included in this anthology a thought-provoking paper about suffering the paradoxes of rights in identity-based politics, which I will write about in another post). My first encounter with Janet Halley was at her talk at NYU Gallatin, organized by my advisor, Vaskuki Nesiah.

• Here is an interview Halley did with the Guardian, where she talked about many of her core ideas.
• Here is a select list of Halley’s publications, which represent her body of thought, which spans queer sexuality to family law.
• Here is a video of Halley speaking at Duke Law School on: “A Map of Feminist and Queer Theories of Sexuality and Sexual Regulation”

• Here is Halley’s [curtailed] professional bio, as listed on the Harvard Law School website:

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“Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has taught at Tel Aviv Buckmann School of Law and in the Law Department of the American University in Cairo….She is co-director of the Trafficking Roundtable and of the Up Against Family Law Exceptionalism Conference, an international collaboration dedicated to studying the role of the family and family law in colonization, decolonization and contemporary globalization….She teaches Family Law, Gender and the Family in Transnational Legal Orders, Gender in Postcolonial Legal Orders, Trafficking and Labor Migration, and courses on the intersections of legal theory with social theory.”

Areas of Interest

• Family Law
• Family Law: Comparative Family Law
• Gender and the Law: Gender in Transnational Law
• Gender and the Law: Queer Theory in Legal Studies
• Legal Theory: Critical Legal Studies
• Sexuality and the Law
  

  Anthologies Edited 

• With Wendy Brown, Halley coedited Left Legalism/Left Critique (Duke 2002)
• With Andrew Parker, Halley coedited After Sex? New Writing Since Queer Theory (Duke 2011).
• Halley is the editor of a collection of essays entitled Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law
• Her current book projects are The Family/Market Distinction: A Genealogy and Critique and Rape in Armed Conflict: Assessing the Feminist Vision and its Law.