2AC FW
Our affirmative approach as a foundational criticism is necessary to resolve the
structural antagonisms that formulate law – even the most progressive left legal
reforms recreate those problems and attempt to disentangle the complexities of
gender issues – your framework results in serial policy failure – Our aff is a
prerequisite
Wendy Brown & Janet Halley, 2002 (Left Legalism/Left Critique, Wendy Brown is First Professor of
Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Rhetoric,
and where she is a core faculty member in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Janet Halley is the Royall
Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. p. 18-25 // JED)
Left legalistic projects, entwined as they are with the regulatory tugs of liberalism and legalism, are going
to produce unintended consequences. We want a critical theoretical engagement with left legalism in part because we want to
apprehend these side effects. To see and to evaluate them, we need to step back from our legalism, to open up the space
for politics that can put legalism under a viewfinder, and to examine both politics and legalism with the
attitude of critique. Legalism's Political Outside Is there such a thing as nonlegalistic political practice, a politics even a few degrees
outside legalism, especially if legalism is not defined simply in reference to the state and law, but no less institutionally codified practices and
So saturated by legalism is contemporary political life that it is often difficult to imagine alternative
ways of deliberating about and pursuing justice. Yet the legal realist point that law is politics by other means should not
commit us to its converse: that all endeavors to shape and order collective Iife are legalistic. Legalism not only carries a politics
(and liberal legalism carries a very specific politics) but also incessantly translates wide-ranging political questions into
more narrowly framed legal questions. Thus politics conceived and practiced legalistically bears a certain
hostility to discursively open-ended, multigenre, and polyvocal political conversations about how we
should live, what we should value and what we should prohibit, and what is possible in collective life.
The preemptive conversion of political questions into legal questions can displace open-ended discursive
contestation: adversarial and yes/no structures can quash exploration; expert and specialized languages
can preclude democratic participation; a pretense that deontological grounds can and must always be found masks the
historical embeddedness of many political questions; the covertness of norms and political power within
legal spaces repeatedly divests political questions of their most crucial concerns. When the available
range of legal remedies preempts exploration of the deep constitutive causes of an injury (think hate speech and
the racial order that makes it sting), when the question of which rights pertain overrides attention to what occasions
the urgently felt need for the right (think abortion and the way reproductive work is organized, valued and [un]remunerated in maledominant orders), we sacrifice our chance to be deliberative, inventive political beings who create our
collective life form. Legalism that draws its parameters of justice from liberalism imposes its own
standards of fairness when we might need a public argument about what constitutes fairness; its
formulas for equality when we may need to reconsider all the powers that must be negotiated in the
making of an egalitarian order; its definitions of liberty at the price of an exploratory argument about the
constituent elements of freedom. As we incessantly refer our political life to the law, we not only sacrifice
opportunities to take our inherited political condition into our own hands, we sacrifice as well the chance
to address at a more fundamental or at least far-reaching level various troubling conditions which appear to
require redress. Consider: What if some of the disturbing aspects of contemporary sex harassment doctrine,
in which redress of gender subordination has been increasingly usurped by greater sexual regulation, can
be traced to a certain failure on the part of second-wave feminism actually to effect a significant
transformation in the social construction of women and men, a project that was once deeply constitutive
of that political and cultural enterprise? And what if the tendency toward ever more intensive legal
effects?
regulation of gender and sexuality is a compensatory response to that failure, a response that
effectively gives up on the project of transforming gender in favor of protecting a historically
subordinated group from some of the most severe effects of that subordination, even as it tacitly defines
women through those effects? If feminism once aimed to make women the sexual equals of men, this aim
entails the complex social, psychological, and political project of making gender differently, and not
simply the legal one of protecting (historically and culturally produced) vulnerable women from
(historically and culturally produced) rapacious men. Indeed, the legal project, in its instantiation of
sexuality as subordinating, especially of women, may be substantially at odds with the political project of
fashioning women as men's substantive equals, that is, as people who cannot be "reduced to their gender" through
an unwanted sexualizing gesture or word. This is not to argue that there is some pure left political space independent of legalism,
nor that left political projects implicated in legalism inevitably sacrifice their aims and values. Rather, it is to assert the possibility of
political life and political projects not fully saturated by legalistic constraints and aims. It is to recover
radically democratic political aims from legalism's grip in order to cultivate collective political and
cultural deliberation about governing values and practices. We remember a mode of activism among
antipornography feminists that was more political than legalistic. Women walked into porn shops and
trashed the pornography, shamed the customers, and mock-shamed themselves. They also led tours through the
porn districts, offering feminist interpretations of pornographic representations and marketing of women, interpretations which others could and
sometimes did argue with. The antiporn activists worked in the name of feminism, and though all feminists did not condone the stance toward
porn and the depiction of women that this activism represented, our dissension itself was not monolithic or fully codified. This
mode of
antiporn activism thus provoked argument and reflection among and across feminists and nonfeminists
alike. This political mode presupposed an interlocutory relationship between those who valued
pornography and those who condemned it, indeed between porn and its consumers or audiences. In that
interlocutory relationship, many women encountered and studied pornography for the first time. As this occurred, women found
themselves having all kinds of responses to porn that could not simply be classified as for or against: some
were distressed by it but grasped their distress as an index of the sexual shame their gender construction entailed; others were drawn to it and
flatly delighted to be let into a sexual order previously designated for men; others were more ambivalent, liking the idea of porn or liking bits of it
but troubled or turned off by the misogynistic (or racist or colonial) strains in it (some were confusingly turned on by these very same strains);
still others were inspired to try to make good porn for women. What was the political cache of this rich array of responses? It produced a wave
old new feminist work on sexuality: new questions, new theories, new domains of research, new practices, new arguments, new positions in every
sense of the word. Hence followed as well new possibilities of alliances with gay men as well as new forms of alliance across a presumed
heterosexual-homosexual divide, the possibility of queer thought, and the invention of new sexual subjectivities and identities through a
proliferation of cultural discourses of and cultural struggles over sexuality. "Feminism"
so constituted was a field of widely
divergent values, beliefs, and practices, all of which had to contest with one another over the question of
"the good" for women. Compare this marvelously fertile political contestation and intellectual exploration
with the social and ideological concomitants of antipornography activists' turn to the state. Antipornography
activism took a legalistic turn with the invention of a tort claim for damages arising from the injury to women's sexual status supposedly inflicted
by pornography (rights legalism) and the deployment of zoning ordinances to shut down the public space devoted to sex commerce (governance
the politics of sexuality in feminism and feminist communities, and the
form of feminist internal critique, changed dramatically. Defining porn narrowly (and badly) as "the graphic sexual
subordination of women," the legalists promulgated local ordinances establishing porn as a violation of women's
civil rights. This move brought into play local governments and judges as authoritative decision
makers. And the arguments that could then be addressed to those decision makers were as flat and impoverished as the arguments
characteristic of the political struggle were multidimensional and rich: to participate in the legalistic moment, feminists had
to declare themselves for or against porn, and even for or against sex, as they took a position on the
ordinances.4 The debate about porn became framed by the terms of free speech, censorship, and privacy rights. In short, it
became consolidated by a narrow rights framework: Should your right not to be violated/offended trump my right to
consume what I want? Does Larry Flynt's free speech silence Catharine MacKinnon's? In this consolidation, all the complexities of
sexual representation, of the imbrication of sexuality and gender, of the relation of fantasy to reality, and
above all, of the extraordinary and detailed range in the sexual construction and desires of women and
men were eclipsed. The adversarial structure of rights legalism as deployed by all the parties meant that the stakes
legalism). Wherever feminists took this turn,
were now "winner takes all." In that context neither side could risk nuance, internal dissension, or
differentiation of positions along a continuum. Hence the debates produced a new form of internal
silencing of each side's constituents; solidarity and a united front became mandatory. Above all, neither side could afford to
break with liberalism (a notoriously impoverished discourse on the subject of sexuality) in its arguments:
the terms of the new debate were set not only by established definitions of equality, civil rights, and free
speech, but by flat and monolithic conceptions of gender, women, sexuality, and representation. And
this debate, desiccated because it adopted rather than contested the terms of liberal legalism, was the form in which the feminist question about
open-ended
political contestation in unbounded spaces and unregulated by settled rules of engagement can be an arena for
raw aggressions and un-self-knowing posturing of the most grandiose sort. Thus, in the political struggle, women
pornography hit the mainstream. To be sure, the porn wars in their political mode had their brutal and punitive dimensions;
accused each other of false consciousness, mocked each other's sexual desires, set themselves up as sexually righteous, and denounced each other
viciously for their positions in these battles. But the
political mode had several virtues that the legalistic mode
distinctively lacked: it was open-ended in the questioning and conversations it incited; it was accessible
to a wide variety of participants (and was probably the most interracial, cross-class, and intersexual
political moment second-wave feminism had); and it occurred in a range of different idioms, from
analytic position papers to poetry to biography. Perhaps most important, because the arguments were about sex,
gender, and representation rather than free speech, censorship, and civil rights, the political mode incited
a substantial body of rich new political, cultural, and psychological inquiry and political
understandings that were both valuable in themselves and gave new life to the social movements that
bred them.
Deliberation is a fallacy – framework uses masculine claims of rationality to
determine what knowledge is legitimate for public debate pushing unproductive
knowledge to the private sphere – We must interrogate the façade of a neutral stasis
point of political and academic argument
Tomlinson, 10 [Barbara, “Feminism and Affect at the scene of argument”, Ch 1 – transforming the
terms of reading]
Contemporary U.S. political and academic discourse abounds with a recurring set of formulaic claims that
feminist scholars (and feminists in general) are angry, unreasoning, shrill, humorless, ugly, man- hating,
perverse, and peculiar. This “trope of the angry feminist” is designed to delegitimize feminist argument
even before the argument begins, to undermine feminist politics by making its costs personal, and to foreclose feminist
futures by making feminism seem repulsive to young women. The trope is a convention, a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, a character
type. 2 Its incessant repetition constitutes part of a cultural training program that makes antifeminism and
misogyny a routine element in everyday speech and written argument. Instigated by expressly po liti calopposition to
feminism, deploying affectively charged strategies that float free of evidence, clichés like the angry feminist put animosity— not argument— at
the center of politi cal discussions, interpellating readers as always already antifeminist. The
repetition and circulation of such
tropes produces a cumulative overdetermined quality that makes them seem already true before the
moment of argument. One never encounters the feminist’s argument for the first time because it comes
already discredited. Because the trope of the angry feminist encourages unacknowledged ways of interpreting feminist affect, its inveterate
irruption is consequential in journalism, entertainment, po liti cal, and quasi- intellectual arenas, as I describe in this introductory chapter. It is
perhaps even more consequential in its influence on academic discourses, the subject of the remainder of the book: affect
in academic
discourses on social justice is often policed through “ideologies of style” that purport to be neutral
but operate to entrench current conditions of power. In this book I argue that we have failed to theorize
adequately the role of such pervasive affective and ideologically encapsulated arguments in
academic and political discourses. In consequence, we do not recognize that our conventional reading practices
mislead us about ways to comprehend and counter them. I argue that transforming the terms of reading can
reframe the problem, and propose for that purpose a critical toolkit that I call “feminist socioforensic discursive
analysis.” My argument here constitutes a provocation to transform the terms of reading, to reframe interpretation of affect in both feminist and
antifeminist writing. Th e trope
of the angry feminist is a familiar conceit, like many similar phrases deployed to
delegitimize social criticism, one that draws on a deep well of related clichés, affective rhetorical strategies, and familiar tropes. Th
ese discursive moves circulate as instantiations of power. Th e trope of the angry feminist presents itself as fresh each time it is uttered, its
repetitious banality framed as mere reflection of the repetitious banality of the feminist’s argument. Th is leads to the absurd but po liti cally effi
cacious situation where readers are weary of arguments they have never heard. These argumentative tactics often succeed in part because our
normal reading and writing practices lead us to object or counterargue in ways that fail to come to grips with the specific nature of the rhetorical
situation that the tropes instantiate. Our
conventional reading practices reinscribe ways of thinking that seem
“logical” or “fair” because they are so familiar; they lead us to treat the tropes as surface features of
discourse that serve to “skew” debate from its direct and proper form. These conventional
practices, permeated by unacknowledged power relations, encourage us to respond to the tropes
“normatively,” with reproaches about textual etiquette, textual responsibility, or textual
appropriateness, to complain about inadequate evidence, to provide counterexamples, or to
condemn the person proffering the trope, as though its use violates an agreement about the proper
nature of civic discussion, and as if there is a mechanism of accountability. None of this is the case. Responses that might chastise,
correct, or even complain about the trope of the angry feminist are inadequate in part because they rest, ultimately, on an imaginary ideal: a
Framing political and even
academic discussion in this commonsense way treats rhetoric as a neutral technology to be deployed or
evaluated in isolation from its conditions of production, the situations of speakers, or the general societal
power relations that give utterances friendly to prevailing power relations an overdetermined
“reasonableness” while rendering most oppositional arguments automatically suspect. Our reading
practices already rest on uninterrogated and deeply gendered and racialized models of textuality, argument,
authorship, politeness, and emotion. Under such conditions, affect is a potent tool of dominance, infusing the reading
discursive arena regulated by impartial principles in which utterances are adjudicated by unbiased observers.
situation to teach us what power is, who has it, how to get it, how to be rewarded, and how to avoid the punishments power can deliver. Louis
Althusser (1971) argues that concrete individuals become constituted as “subjects” through ideology, but the most powerful ideological
influences do not come to us in the form of ideological pronouncements. Th at would make them visible, controversial, and refutable. Instead, he
argues, the
most powerful ideologies exist in “apparatuses,” in practices, and these practices are
always material. Reading, writing, and argument are social practices sedimented with ideologies of legitimacy,
propriety and fairness so powerful and pervasive that we presuppose their value rather than examining
their effects.
2AC Neolib
2AC
They are in a double bind - if they do not think the body is material – that’s a DA to
the alt – they erase the ways bodily difference and experiences result in violence
towards prostitution. OR, the body is material, which makes it a necessary
component of Historical Materialism; ONLY the perm can solve.
Coole and Frost 2010 – Dr. Diane Coole is a Professor of Political and Social Theory in the School
of Politics and Sociology at the University of London. Dr. Samantha Frost is a Professor of Political
Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign. 2010 New Materialisms
Ontology) Agency) and Politics DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham & London
For new materialists, no adequate political theory can ignore the importance of bodies in situating
empirical actors within a material environment of nature, other bodies, and the socioeconomic structures
that dictate where and how they find sustenance, satisfy their desires, or obtain the resources necessary for
participating in political life. This is in fact something that feminists and class theorists have often insisted
upon, and we would add in this context only our concern that such material dimensions have recently
been marginalized by fashionable constructivist approaches and identity politics. Of course, the latter
have had a good deal to say about the body and its imbrication in relationships of power, but we are not
convinced that they pay sufficient attention to the material efficacy of bodies or have the theoretical
resources to do so. From this perspective we draw attention to a new materialist predilection for a more
phenomenological approach to embodiment. In addition to focusing on the way power constitutes and is
reproduced by bodies, phenomenological studies emphasize the active, self-transformative, practical
aspects of corporeality as it participates in relationships of power. They find bodies exhibiting agentic
capacities in the way they structure or stylize their perceptual milieu, where they discover, organize, and
respond to patterns that are corporeally significant. Such theories thus introduce elements of creative
contingency, meaning, difference, efficacy, and a limited freedom for improvisation or resistance into
nature before cognition begins. In other words, they complement ontologies of immanently productive
matter by describing how living matter structures natural and social worlds before (and while) they are
encountered by rational actors. Again, they give materiality its due. This emphasis on corporeality further
dislocates agency as the property of a discrete, self-knowing subject in as much as the corpus is now
recognized as exhibiting capacities that have significant effects on social and political situations. Thus
bodies communicate with other bodies through their gestures and conduct to arouse visceral responses
and prompt forms of judgment that do not necessarily pass through conscious awareness. They are
significant players in games of power whenever face-to-face encounters are involved, such as in
deliberative models of democracy. Paying attention to corporeality as a practical and efficacious series of
emergent capacities thus reveals both the materiality of agency and agentic properties inherent in nature
itself.29 Both have important implications for the way we understand political processes. In this emphasis
on corporeality, we also glimpse one of the most distinctive characteristics of the new materialist
ontologies: their avowed posthumanism. They displace what Giorgio Agamben calls "the anthropological
machine of humanism."3o While new materialists' conceptualization of materialization is not
anthropocentric, it does not even privilege human bodies. There is increasing agreement here that all
bodies, including those of animals (and perhaps certain machines, too), evince certain capacities for
agency. As a consequence, the human species, and the qualities of self-reflection, self-awareness, and
rationality traditionally used to distinguish it from the rest of nature, may now seem little more than
contingent and provisional forms or processes within a broader evolutionary or cosmic productivity. If
human perfection or redemption is no longer understood as the destiny of history, neither is it the goal of
evolution. While it does not follow that cognitive capacities for symbolism or reflexivity are no longer
valued, the new materialism does prompt away of reconsidering them as diffuse, chance products of a
self-generative nature from which they never entirely emerge.
Marxism operates from a starting point that ignores sexual difference and footnotes
any feminist struggle
Hartmann, 2006 - Heidi Hartmann is a feminist economist and the founder of the Institute for Women's
Policy Research, a scientific research organization formed to meet the need for women-centered, public
policy research, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,
HEIDI I. HARTMANN, United States 1945- . Economist. Founding Director of the Institute for Women's
Policy Research (1987). Capitalism and Women's Work in the Home, 1900-1930 (1976), Women's Work,
Aden's Work: Sex Segregation on the Job (1981), Comparable Worth: New Directions for Research
(1985), Women, Work, and Poverty: Woman-Centered Research for Policy Change (2006).
The "marriage" of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage husband and wife depicted in
English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism. Recent attempts to
integrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume the
feminist struggle into the "larger" struggle against capital. To continue our simile further, either we
need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce. The inequalities in this marriage, like most social
phenomena, are no accident. Many marxists typically argue that feminism is at best less important
than class conflict and at worst divisive of the working class. This political stance produces an
analysis that absorbs feminism into the class struggle. Moreover, the analytic power of marxism
with respect to capital has obscured its limitations with respect to sexism. We will argue here that
while marxist analysis provides essential insight into the laws of historical development, and those of
capital in particular, the categories of marxism are sex-blind. Only a specifically feminist analysis
reveals the systemic character of relations between men and women. Yet feminist analysis by itself is
inadequate because it has been blind to history and insufficiency materialist. Both Marxist analysis,
particularly its historical and materialist method, and feminist analysis, especially the identification
of patriarchy as a social and historical structure, must be drawn upon if we are to understand the
development of western capitalist societies and the predicament of women within them. In this essay
we suggest a new direction for marxist feminist analysis. I MARXISM AND THE WOMAN QUESTION
The woman question has never been the "feminist question." The feminist question is directed at the
causes of sexual inequality between women and men, of male dominance over women. Most marxist
analyses of women's position take as their question the relationship of women to the economic
system, rather than that of women to men, apparently assuming the latter will be explained in their
discussion of the former. Marxist analysis of the woman question has taken three main forms. All see
women's oppression .in our connection (or lack of it) to production, Defining women as part of the
working class, these analyses consistently subsume women's relation to men under worker's
relation to capital. First, early marxists, including Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin, saw capitalism
drawing, all women into the wage labor force, and saw this process destroying the sexual division, of
labor. Second, contemporary marxists have incorporated, women into an analysis of evervdav life in
capitalism. In this view, all aspects of our lives are seen to reproduce the capitalist system and we are all
workers in the system. And third,, marxist feminists have focused on housework and its relation to
capital, some arguing that housework produces surplus value and that houseworkers work directly for
capitalists. . . . While the approach of the early marxists ignored housework and stressed women's labor
force participation, the two more recent approaches emphasize housework to such an extent they ignore
women's current role in the labor market. Nevertheless, all three attempt to include women in the
category working class and to understand women's oppression as another aspect of class
oppression. In doing so all give short shrift to the object of feminist analysis, the relations between
women and men. While our "problems" have been elegantly analyzed, they have been
misunderstood. The focus of Marxist analysis has been class relations; the object of marxist analysis has
been understanding the laws of motion of capitalist society. While we believe marxist methodology can
be used to formulate feminist strategy, these marxist feminist approaches discussed above clearly do not
do so; their marxism clearly dominates their feminism. Marxism enables us to understand many aspects
of capitalist societies: the structure of production, the generation of a particular occupational structure,
and the nature of the dominant ideology. Marx's theory of the development of capitalism is a theory of
the development of "empty places." Marx predicted, for example, the growth of the proletariat and the
demise of the petit bourgeoisie. More precisely and in more detail, Braverman among others has
explained the creation of the "places" clerical worker and service worker in advanced capitalist societies.2
Just as capital creates these places indifferent to the individuals who fill them, the categories of
marxist analysis, class, reserve army of labor, wage laborer, do not explain why particular people,
fill particular places. They give no clues about why women are subordinate to men inside and
outside the family and why it is not the other way around. Marxist categories, like capital itself, are
sex-blind. The categories of Marxism cannot tell us who will fill the empty places. Marxist analysis
of the woman question has suffered from this basic problem.