On Discipline and Canon

Abstract

While the title of the panel I participated in was Do We Eat Our Young?, I think I prefer: On Discipline and Canon, or to rework the title of the panel in the program, Do We Eat Our Girlfriends? In my short remarks, I would like to raise a set not of answers, but of questions that over the last year or so a few of us have been discussing outside of our published work. These questions seem apt both for this panel and for this conference. Last November a group of really wonderful women at the University of Texas put together a conference called Subversive Legacies: Learning From History/Constructing the Future. A number of the people attending this conference at Columbia were in Austin for that gathering. What took place there was what Martha Fineman has termed an uncomfortable conversation (1) about what it means to write as a feminist, what it means to write about feminism, and what it might mean to write from outside feminism on issues that have been thought of as the intellectual property and proper terrain of feminism. Janet Halley raised some of these questions in Austin, and again at this symposium. I regard this last move as one that is epistemic in nature. It is primarily one of vantage point and offers an important heuristic opportunity. (2) What if we stepped outside of a perspective self-consciously labeled and re-examined issues typically regarded as the target of feminist inquiry? What do we see differently about them? What do we learn differently? I would like to pick up a set of those conversations that were started for me last fall in Austin and try to engage them here. This conference takes place at a particularly interesting moment for feminist theory, a time when we can say that feminist jurisprudence has in many ways become a discipline. We have mountains of casebooks. (3) Many law schools--not all, and I do not think that I can say most--offer a course called feminist jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, or the jurisprudence of gender. There is even an endowed chair in feminist theory that Martha Fineman held up at Cornell Law School. We might even say that a kind of canon has been established in feminist legal theory, concretized, or canonized if you will, in the various readers that many of us know well. There is Fran Olsen's two-volume set collecting the writings that were, in 1995, formative and that position[ed] feminist theory within the law. (4) There are Bartlett and Kennedy's reader, (5) Adrien Wing's Critical Race Feminism, (6) and Martha Chamallas's Introduction to Feminist Legal Theory, (7) that many of us use in our own teaching. While there are doubtless new readers in press--this is an evolving area of jurisprudence--I think you will see similarities across books that both create and reflect the canonical texts in feminist legal theory. It is exciting that we can claim, and we can claim credibly, that we are writing in a field called feminist legal theory. There is a thing there; there is a field there; there is a discipline there. But it is exactly these moments in field formation that I think are quite dangerous as we risk being disciplined by the field, by the canon, and by our more prominent scholars. In some ways and in some places we hear the charge that you are not doing feminism if you are not asking the question in such and such a way, according to either a set of substantive commitments, starting points, or accepted methodologies that are widely accepted as feminist. Why do I call these moments dangerous? I think it is precisely at this juncture, as feminist theory becomes disciplinized, that the nature of critical work becomes multivalent and more complicated. Many of us are undertaking projects designed to subvert or critique larger cultural and social inequalities based on gender, but we also need to undertake critical projects from within feminism--not from within feminism outward, but from within feminism inward--by resisting the disciplinary power of the canon and continuing to critically engage the baselines, the methodologies, or the settled questions in feminist theory from within and among us. …