Postmodern Pride: Mary Joe Frug's Manifesto

Abstract

I never met Mary Joe Frug. So I have fewer resources than others with which to develop an analysis of her text, Postmodern Legal Feminism. Yet I nonetheless feel the act of reading this work allowed me to meet her, in some way, and I am grateful for that opportunity. But reading this book leaves me with a yearning-its fulfillment ever deferred-to talk to this author. I am left unsatiated but not unsatisfied. I year to talk to Mary Joe Frug because what is most striking about the collection of essays contained in this work-discussions ranging from the impossibility doctrine in contract law to the point of view of a married woman who cannot exercise her desire to be celibate-is the astonishing psychological sophistication of her analysis. It is the attention to the particular and the peculiar in people and practices that captivates. The repeated refusals to reduce people, laws, or social practices to a seamless, singular, simple truth suggest to me someone who never ceased questioning things. Everything must have continually been open to review. The product of that seemingly uncompromising approach is a unique and provocative text, one in which her voice is simultaneously restless, exhausting, curious, careful, and carefree and, above all, confident and humble enough to revel in the inevitable and productive