APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Symposium: Intra-Feminist Criticism and the "Rules of Engagement"

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How Should Feminists Criticize One Another?

Martha C. Nussbaum
University of Chicago

Why is this an important topic? Why don't we feminists just say (as Naomi Zack suggests) that the canons of ethics for feminists criticizing feminists are the same as the canons for all good critics in any field, philosophical or interdisciplinary?

Although in many ways I agree with Zack, I also think that there is something to be said about our topic as a topic with a specifically feminist dimension. Like other subordinated and marginalized groups against whom great injustice has been done, women have good reasons to be concerned with solidarity and loyalty. By falling out among ourselves and turning toward intranecine combat rather than combat with the enemy, feminist academics could all too easily betray those whose interests they are hoping to promote. We might also, it is feared, bring feminism into discredit with powerful people in the academy (or outside) who are all too ready to ridicule and reject it anyway. At worst, the fight might itself become a pornographic spectacle for men who have no real respect for the issues it involves. Look at those cats hissing and spitting at each other, we can imagine men saying: isn't that just what you expect when you put a group of women together? And aren't they sexy and wild (in an intellectually low-grade way)?

So our issues are serious issues-as they are, too, for African-American intellectuals who have large and serious differences among themselves and who, nonetheless, agree on the urgent importance of promoting justice for African-Americans and of winning respect for African-Americans and African-American studies in the academy. How should they proceed, if they are not to feed bad stereotypes of the irrational African-American, or divert energy away from shared goals? (I believe that on the whole Skip Gates and Anthony Appiah have found good solutions to these problems, and I find their writings valuable paradigms to consider.)

One bad solution to the problems, where feminism is concerned, was exemplified by a panel I watched about five years ago at a major university, a feminist panel that was part of a larger conference on issues of social justice. The members of the panel were four feminists, most of them from law. They held, I knew, widely divergent views. One was a postmodernist; one espoused a form of care ethics; one was a Kantian critic of both postmodernism and care ethics. One was a radical feminist inspired by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Surrounded by the powerful and somewhat skeptical males of the law and social-science academy, these women spoke so nicely to one another, with such solidarity and mutual supportiveness, that one could not possibly have discerned what each one really thought and what the disagreements among them were. They gave an appearance of agreement, and they so glossed over their profound disagreements that there was nothing at all to be learned from the exchange. Sitting two seats away from one of the powerful and somewhat skeptical legal males, one who has a habit of talking out loud when other people are talking (if this is a definite description, so be it!), I heard him repeatedly express frustration - for, as it turned out, he had actually read enough of their work to know what we were missing. They're not saying what they think, he said. They are playing at agreement, he said. And finally-This is a political event, not an intellectual event.

Well yes, it was. And a bad political event at that. Behavior like this shows neither respect nor self-respect. Out of a well-intentioned aim to show solidarity and loyalty, these women had failed to give one another the simple courtesy of listening to what each one actually thought and responding to that thought with their own honest thought. The powerful man's reaction shows that behaving this way is not even good politics. For he went away from that conference with less respect for feminism than he had had before, thinking it was all about feeling good and being nice rather than stating and defending a position.

So: I think we must begin with respect and self-respect, saying what we really think and why, and exposing our true positions to the tough criticism of others. As Naomi Scheman mentions, I've long believed that this insistence on reason is a way of making oneself vulnerable and that concealment of one's argument is likely to be linked with a macho determination to prevail and dominate. When you rely on reason, you are, as it were, naked: everyone can look and see what you have. Influence, status, and power don't make a difference: it's all in the quality of the arguments. And you don't know how the argument will come out: it might go your way, but you can't be sure, because you haven't heard all the arguments on the other side. Openness to the argument brings with it a peculiar vulnerability that can look inappropriate for a dominant assertive male. For that reason, the proud political man Callicles, in Plato's Gorgias, tells Socrates that philosophical reasoning is all right for boys, but totally inappropriate for a real manly man. In the Laws, Plato continues this theme: the Athenian Stranger comments that reason is a soft golden cord, pulled flexibly by the lure of truth and understanding - unless, he adds, it is rudely shoved aside by the iron strings of envy, greed, and fear.1 Oddly, then, the behavior of the feminists who rhetorically conceal their disagreements for political effect looks to me like defective macho behavior, little though it was intended that way.

But because, as I said, I do feel that there are serious issues to worry about when we criticize one another, I think that there is more to be done than just to follow the argument. In the rest of this paper I will say very frankly what I think and what I have done-not in order to prescribe, because I think that there are many good responses to the problems I've outlined, and I am certainly not sure that I myself have found the best ones-but just to put my cards on the table in the hope of prompting reactions and further comments from our readers.
First, I think it is important for feminists who criticize other feminists to indicate, at the same time, their concern and respect for the serious issues with which feminism grapples. Even when we are saying that someone has not grappled with those issues very well, it seems to me important to insist on the urgency of the problems, thus indicating as well one's respect for all feminists who have thought it worthwhile to spend their careers engaging with those problems. (I find Christina Hoff Sommers's work, for example, deeply flawed in its failure to acknowledge the seriousness of the problems that feminists tackle; this is only one of its serious flaws.)

Second, I think that if we're going to spend time saying critical things about some feminists, it becomes all the more important to seek opportunities to publicize and give prominence to the feminist work that one thinks good. The major media do a terrible job of covering feminist books and issues. They don't give any coverage to feminism most of the time, and when they do so it is likely to be coverage of popular journalism, or other less than serious work. But sometimes a concerted effort can help bring good work, even philosophical work, to a wider public. I've tried hard to get major media for whom I write to let me review some good feminist books-sometimes with success (reviews of Susan Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family2 and of Antony and Witt's A Mind of One's Own3 (in The New York Review of Books4), sometimes with no success (a review of the Virginia Held collection on care ethics that I wrote for Robert Silvers and then spent a year and a half struggling to get a revision we could both accept, until we agreed that it was hopeless), sometimes with an uncertain outcome (a new piece on Eva Kittay's fine book, written for Silvers and under revision now in response to his comments). I've also tried to make sure that the work I did at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, and the books edited there5 gave prominence to good feminist work, including the work of feminists from other nations, such as Margarita Valdés, Roop Rekha Verma, and Nkiru Nzegwu. My new book, Women and Human Development6 is mostly about the work of feminist activists in India and their academic colleagues, most of whom, even the most distinguished (for example, Bina Agarwal, Zoya Hasan) are undeservedly unknown in U.S. academic, and even feminist, circles. Similarly, when I wrote the Presidential Address for the Central Division, knowing that some in that audience would think of me as the critic of Judith Butler, I made a major effort to give credit to the tradition of philosophical feminism for having made what I called the most creative contribution in this century to political philosophy, something I think absolutely true.

Third, I also think that when work of feminists has been caricatured and misrepresented by critics of feminism, it's good to spend some time correcting those misunderstandings in the public media, if one has the opportunity to do so. Thus, despite some serious disagreements with Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, I do think their work, which is of major importance, has been caricatured in a ridiculous fashion by the misogynist media, both academic and popular. In my teaching and in my writing, both academic (the paper on "Objectification" in Philosophy and Public Affairs7) and popular (the review of Andrea Dworkin's Life and Death in The New Republic8) I've tried to articulate their positions carefully and accurately, so that people can see what they are really up to. I also devoted a chapter in Cultivating Humanity9 to rebutting charges made against women's studies programs by Christina Hoff Sommers and others, and a chapter in Sex and Social Justice10 to rebutting other charges made by Sommers. (This material originated as a review of the Sommers book written for The New York Review of Books; but by the time Silvers got round to giving me his suggestions for revision it was a year later, and the book was already being remaindered. So we agreed that it was not worth publishing a review of it at that late date.)

At the end of the day, however, I do think that there is also a time for saying of some work that it is simply bad work. And that is what I did with Judith Butler.11 I had several different points to criticize. Her obscurantism and cultishness seem to me subversive of the Socratic and democratic character of philosophical inquiry, a point that I've made throughout my career against any thinkers who strike me as either hierarchical and cultish themselves, or enamored of hierarchical practices of reasoning.12 (It's a theme in my reviews of Allan Bloom13 and Alasdair MacIntyre,14 and in a different way in my critical review of Alexander Nehamas's book on aesthetic self-fashioning.15) I also had substantive criticisms to make both of Butler's attack on ethical norms and of a more general quietism about the possibility of political change that substitutes a politics of gesture for a type of politics that might actually improve people's lives. I feel that Butler's positions on these questions are both inadequate intellectually and somewhat perilous for political practice, so I said both of those things. The parts of her thought that I found promising and valuable I also found rather underdeveloped, and more derivative than many had given them credit for being-derivative, I thought, from work that had done more to develop them adequately. Finally, I thought some parts of the work just sloppy and badly done: her use of Austin, her treatment of First Amendment legal materials.

However, I spent a great deal of time with the work before saying all this, far more than I do with most books I review, and far more than I could demonstrate in a brief review piece in a journal that avoids detailed textual references.16 As with my critical reviews of Bloom and MacIntyre, I'd be prepared to stand up and argue page by page with anyone about my account of the work, and indeed I agreed to do so with Butler herself through a mutual friend who proposed the idea, on condition that we would really talk about the ideas and try to figure out what the right account of the issues was. (Butler apparently didn't like the friend's proposal, since I've heard no more about it.) I also made sure that in the review itself I included praise of good feminist work (Nancy Chodorow, Catharine MacKinnon, and others), and good work in queer theory (David Halperin),17 and that I followed up that negative piece with a positive review (initiated by me), also in The New Republic, of Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal,18 a book that is related to Butler in the sense of being part of the general "queer theory" movement, but one that I find clearly written and argued, insightful about human life, and valuable both in its theoretical analysis and its recommendations for practice.

Obviously I may be wrong about many of these things. I think it would have been very productive to have had an exchange on Butler (whether with her or not) in which people who have learned from her work would actually try to show me that I had gotten something wrong, or that the ideas I found good in her work were less derivative, less half-baked, and more illuminating than I believe. Among the letters received by The New Republic, and later published as an exchange, there was one, by Drucilla Cornell19 which did this sort of thing very well. I admitted in that exchange20 that Cornell was correct: the contrast I drew between MacKinnon and Butler/Foucault, and thence between material and symbolic politics, was in one respect too simple, because there is an important symbolic element in MacKinnon's thought that might with profit be compared to elements in Foucault's thought. I thought that the other letters were disappointing because they either missed the points I was making or failed to engage with them altogether. I hope that at some point there will be an opportunity to explore these issues more thoroughly.

In our symposium here, Naomi Scheman's comments about Ruth Ginzberg seem to me another example of a constructive and valuable response to a critique. I'm not sure we'll get too far adjudicating our differences, because Ginzberg's piece21 is very brief and cryptic. I think perhaps to those who know her work in a more general way her intention was clear, whereas to me, who had read only that one piece, the surface meaning of the piece looked like what I said it was. We'd have to go back and see. But in any case, I'm grateful for the response, and if I ever republish that piece, as I might in a collection of reviews, I'll rethink that bit of it.

Notes

1. See Martha Nussbaum, "The Softness of Reason: A Classical Case for Gay Studies," The New Republic 207 3/4 (July 13/20, 1992): 26-35 for further development of these images.
2. Martha Nussbaum, " Justice for Women!" review of Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, The New York Review of Books 39/16 (October 8,1992): 43-48.
3. Martha Nussbaum, "Feminism and Philosophy," review of Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds., A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, The New York Review of Books 41/17 (October 20, 1994): 59-63.
4. My earlier review of Jane Roland Martin's Reclaiming a Conversation: the Ideal of the Educated Woman ("Women's Lot," The New York Review of Books 33/1 [January 30, 1986]: 7-12), the first piece I ever wrote for The New York Review of Books, was written at the invitation of Robert Silvers, and not at my own initiative. As this note reveals, writing for The New York Review of Books is a long and sometimes grueling process, in which one waits for long periods of time to get comments, and simply doesn't know what the final outcome will be. Often the time elapsed between the submission of a draft and the appearance of the piece is over a year. I have recently preferred to write for The New Republic because its editorial policies are so much more helpful and straightforward, and they usually let me write what I want to write, making changes of a straightforward editorial nature rather than rewriting the piece completely.
5. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover, eds., Women, Culture, and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
6. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
7. Martha Nussbaum, "Objectification." Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1995): 249-91. Reprinted with revisions in Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
8. Martha Nussbaum, "Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women," review of Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death, The New Republic 217 6/7 (August 11, 1997): 36-42. Among my reviews for The New Republic, about half are instigated by Leon Wieseltier, the other half by me. The Dworkin review came about in the following way: because he had no intention of commissioning a review of the book, Wieseltier gave the bound page-proofs to me as a free book, when I was in his office one day. I read it and reflected, and convinced him that I should review it.
9. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
10. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice.
11. Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody-The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler," review of Judith Butler, Excitable Speech, The Psychic Life of Power, Bodies that Matter, and Gender Trouble, The New Republic 220/8 (February 22, 1999): 37-45.
12. This distinction is necessary because some who are enamored of cultishness and hierarchy do not write that way themselves: thus Nehamas, as I stressed, is a clear and quite democratic arguer, although he seems to love figures who draw attention to their own personalities as the center of a cult of the person. MacIntyre defends a picture of philosophy in which first principles will be handed down by authority; but since he thinks that authority is the Pope, he does not argue in an authoritarian way himself.
13. Martha Nussbaum, "Undemocratic Vistas," review of Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, The New York Review of Books 34/17 (November 5, 1987): 20-26.
14. Martha Nussbaum, "Recoiling from Reason," review of Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? The New York Review of Books 36/19 (December 7,1989): 36-40.
15. Martha Nussbaum, "The Cult of Personality," review of Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living, The New Republic 220/1 (January 4/11, 1999): 32-37.
16. One slight drawback to working with The New Republic is that they don't permit footnotes, and remove all page references to the work under review, whereas The New York Review of Books encourages a more academic style, with page references and footnotes.
17. See David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1989), and Saint Foucault (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). To get that one sentence on Halperin's work into the review involved a two-stage struggle with my editor Leon Wieseltier, who took it out twice as irrelevant. My concern that I would be mistakenly read as condemning all work in queer theory was exacerbated by the fact that The New Republic had published, several months before, a review of Halperin and others by Lee Siegel that I thought snide, ill-argued, and not illuminating.
18. Martha Nussbaum, "Experiments in Living," review of Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal, The New Republic 221/1 (January 3, 2000): 31-36.
19. Drucilla Cornell, Letter in Exchange about Nussbaum," Review of Judith Butler, The New Republic 220/16 (April 19, 1999): 43-44.
20. Martha Nussbaum, Replies to Letters about Review of Butler," The New Republic 220/16 (April 19,1999): 43-45.
21. Ruth Ginzberg, "Feminism, Rationality, and Logic," American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 88:2 (March 1989): 34-39.

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2