Beyond Accommodation: The Legacy of Feminist Critique and the Search for Justice

Abstract

In this short reflection on Drucilla Cornell’s work, I focus on the journey that her search for both a symbolic and substantive form of justice has taken and the influence that her particular conception of justice has had on my own work. Beginning with her analysis in Beyond Accommodation (1991) and its theoretical debt to postmodernism, I indicate the legacy that this postmodern reliance has in relation to her later works, The Imaginary Domain (1995) and At the Heart of Freedom (1998). 1 These later works, flagged as a theoretical departure from the postmodern critique that informed Beyond Accommodation, chart Cornell’s move towards liberalism. This brief analysis of her journey seeks to highlight three things. Firstly, that the insights of deconstruction are still prevalent in these later, more liberally-informed analyses. Secondly, Cornell’s shift towards liberalism nevertheless pursues similar questions, concerns and conversations to those posed in her earlier writing. Thirdly, in taking those conversations in new directions, Cornell has created a legacy of analysis that traverses methodological and theoretical boundaries. I claim it is Cornell’s attempts to rethink the possibilities of justice that inspire her to engage with multiple theoretical and methodological traditions in order to rethink legal futures; it is these legal futures which bear purchase for my own engagement with her work, chiefly her concept of the ‘imaginary domain’. Cornell as a ‘thinker of the future’ 2 Cornell’s explicit reliance on, and productive relationship with, Derrida’s notion of differance and Levinas’s ethical responsibility to the Other in Beyond Accommodation has contributed to her unique form of postmodern feminist engagement. In Beyond Accommodation these theoretical foundations were put to use via critiques of certain strands of feminist analyses of gender equality, namely the work of Catharine MacKinnon, Robin West and to a more muted degree Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. 3 Cornell’s concern lay with the essentialist nature of these critiques and the effect that such essentialism had in its exclusivity and oppression of other actors. Cornell’s analysis also extended to a broader critique of law and justice, thinking beyond the possibilities of the current system and delving into the place of myth and metaphor in the reinscription, rewriting and re-evaluation of the feminine. 4 The political project that resonated and continues to resonate throughout Cornell’s works