[In the following essay, Bernick maintains that the position of MacKinnon's work in relation to radical feminism is analogous to the place of Parmenides's work in ancient Greek philosophy.]

Feminist theory is in crisis. Given the institutionalization of Women's Studies programs, the research grants funded, and the concomitant proliferation of feminist theories of all descriptions, one might be tempted to believe that any such claim must be an exaggeration at best, and perhaps even a touch hysterical. The belief that a multitude of voices is in and of itself a good thing is held as an article of faith in the religion of liberal tolerance; it is not a matter of reasoned consideration even among the politically sophisticated. While I would concur with those (both feminists and not) who assert that the feminist theory of the late 1970s and early 1980s failed to speak to the concerns of many women (both feminists and not), I would argue that (1) diversity of opinion and approach in feminist theory, as elsewhere, is not necessarily, without further explanation or comment, a good thing and (2) the particular kind of diversity that evolved in the face of the criticism of 1970s feminism was not the kind of diversity the criticism had demanded.

This second claim perhaps needs further elaboration. A careful examination of the evolution of what now passes as diversity in or of feminist thought would reveal that the splintering of radical feminist theory—that collection of views that has always been presented as a monolithic entity by its critics, but which was never a univocal theory even at its most singular moments—represents a failure of feminism that has not yet been faced, let alone solved. Once it became clear that we did not have and perhaps should not even want a single explanation for the whole thing, a unitary answer to the questions “Why sexism, and what do we do about it?”, we seem also to have given up on the struggle for a unified (not unitary) movement.¹ Feminists walked up to the edge of knowing what would be required of us to do this impossible thing that we must do to survive, but cannot imagine surviving having done, and for perfectly understandable reasons backed down, taking different paths on our various retreats. This would be considerably less tragic if we could bear to admit it.

This project, which does not directly address these issues, will, I hope, nonetheless contribute to the necessary task of sorting through the rubble of feminist theory by tracing back to one time when I believe the failure to connect began, or at least began to matter. Recently, however, I've been encouraged to find evidence that others are having similar reservations. These works² are filled with accounts of fear and frustration; there seems to be a growing awareness that something has gone terribly wrong somewhere. This is a small comfort after having felt for a very long time as if I were the only one who didn't believe that the fracturing of theory was going to solve all our problems.

Everyone has a different story to tell about how feminism has gotten to the place it is at present. I would suggest that a useful project for some feminist scholar to undertake would be a comparative analysis of the several genealogies³ of feminism that have been offered in recent introductory remarks in review essays on and anthologies of feminist theory. Perhaps the impetus to put writers into typologically labeled boxes and to trace their theoretical interrelationships derives from women's traditional role in maintaining and transmitting family histories:

“First there was your grandmother Betty, and your grandfather Karl,⁴ and together they had five daughters: Liberal, Radical, Socialist, Marxist, and Cultural.”

“No, no, Alison, that's not the way it was at all! You are forgetting great-grandmother Simone, and she had three daughters, Egalitarianism, Culturalism, and Nominalism,” said Alison's Aunt Julia. “Betty and Karl are from the other side of the family.”⁵

For myself, I tend to follow Catharine MacKinnon's view that radical feminism is the central trunk of feminist theory; the genus that needs no species name as modifier. Most of the other genealogies of feminism treat all the species as structurally co-equal (if not equally “true”). MacKinnon is characterized as a radical feminist, and she is typically consigned to share her pigeon hole with Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich, Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan, Susan Griffin and Mary Daly. MacKinnon herself is very critical of at least Brownmiller, Griffin and Daly, although this by itself does not prove which one of their versions of radical feminism is the genus, or if in fact radical feminism is the genus from which all other forms of feminism derive.⁶

I believe the following analysis will support my claim that radical feminist theory is the central expression of feminist activism and longing in the latter part of the twentieth century, although I will not argue directly for this assertion. I want to suggest, first, that Catharine MacKinnon's investigation of sexuality (and her extension of this theory to an inquiry into the role pornography plays in the subordination of women) is the rational conclusion of at least one strand of radical feminist thought. Second, I contend that the position of MacKinnon's work relative to radical feminist (and hence feminist) theory as a whole is analogous to the way the work of Parmenides was situated in ancient Greek philosophy. Finally, I argue that until post-MacKinnon feminists take her work as seriously as post-Parmenidean Greeks took his, feminist theory cannot progress further.

I need to clarify the claims that are being made so that there is no question about what I am not saying. First, this work (if not its author) is agnostic on the question of whether or not MacKinnon's account of sexuality is, ultimately, the best (or even the best available) theory of the subordination of women. In other words, I think it is possible for feminists who disagree with MacKinnon to agree that the comparison I will make between Parmenides and MacKinnon is both correct and illuminating. Second, the “MacKinnon is to feminist theory as Parmenides is to Greek philosophy” analogy I'm making is a logical analogy. The position I see Parmenides and MacKinnon sharing with respect to their philosophical traditions is a logical, not a substantive, position; I'm not saying they are both metaphysicians of a certain sort or philosophically idealist or materialist in interestingly similar ways. It follows from this that, although it is crucially important that MacKinnon's work has an activist component that (presumably) Parmenides's work lacks, I believe that this difference between the two is not fundamentally disruptive to the comparison I am making between them. The precise nature of this logical relationship will be developed further in the discussion below.

Although there is an enormous literature on Parmenides, and nearly as many interpretations of the meaning and import of his writings as there are commentators, most agree that he was the pivotal figure in the development of Greek thought between Thales and Plato.⁷ Before Parmenides, philosophers had sought a single essential reality that underlay the supposedly misleading appearance that there are multiply real things. All previous metaphysical accounts also assumed that change is a real (not just apparent) process and attempted to explain it. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, despite having differing accounts of which substance was the foundational “stuff” from which all things derived, maintained that the world evolved from simplicity to complexity. Heraclitus gave up the search for a physically foundational substance and posited change itself as the only knowably unchanging (and therefore real) thing. For the Pythagoreans, change meant that what began as unlimited became limited and thus quantifiable. Parmenides's critique of metaphysics was equally damaging to all of these theories since his argument, if accepted, condemned both change and differentiation of any kind as illusory.

Parmenides apparently only wrote one philosophical treatise, which was in the form of a long poem and which has come down to us in a series of fragments, only a few of them complete. It is estimated that approximately one-third of the total poem remains (Gallop 1984, 5). A youth travels to visit a goddess, and she delivers the theory in the form of a pronouncement to the youth. The goddess begins by describing the only three possible ways of inquiry. She produces reasons for ruling out two of them and insists that the remaining one is the only correct one.

The first way: “that [it] is, and cannot not be.”⁸ This she calls The Way of Truth.

The second way: “that [it] is not, and must necessarily not be.” This is ruled out on the grounds that “what is not” is unknowable and unsayable. The line of reasoning is that “being” is an either/or matter: “Either it is or is not.” It cannot be “is not,” or “nothing”; “nothing” is not. Therefore, it must be. “The basic premises, then, are that ‘nothing’ is nonexistent (presumably regarded as tautological) and that the object of thought can exist (that is, it is possible to think of something)” (Furley 1967, 48).

The third way: The Way of Seeming is the way followed by ordinary human beings. Their error is that they believe that “to be and not to be is the same and not the same,” which is usually interpreted to mean that we believe that “is not” and “is” can both be true of something at the same time.

The central section of the poem, the single longest fragment that has survived, is concerned with deriving certain conclusions about “what is” from the proof offered that the only possible way of inquiry is that “[it] is and cannot not be.” The conclusions seem bizarre and fantastical—for example, that “what is” is ungenerated, or put another way, that “coming into being” is impossible. “What is” turns out to be single, homogeneous, and eternal.

The arguments offered by Parmenides for these conclusions take the form of deriving absurdities or contradictions from an initial assertion that a commonsense view of the world—e.g., that there is change—is correct. These absurdities, like the proof that the Way of Truth is the only way of inquiry, turn on the impossibility of asserting of something that is, that it also “is not” in some way or another. Montgomery Furth, in his influential (if controversial) article, “Elements of Eleatic Ontology” has tried to convey the force of these arguments by translating them into a dialogue between an imaginary character, Betathon (who does not appear in the poem), and “Henry” Parmenides. Betathon, having been convinced that both the way of “is not” and the way of “is and is not” are closed, tries to engage Parmenides on the subject of “what is” (Furth 1974, 264-65).⁹

BETATHON:
Trees are.
PARMENIDES:
[silent]
BETATHON:
Lizards are.
PARMENIDES:
You're repeating yourself. …
BETATHON:
I said that something different was, the second time.
PARMENIDES:
How, “different”?
BETATHON:
Clearly, trees are different from lizards. …
PARMENIDES:
An example, please.
BETATHON:
Henry, here, is a lizard.
PARMENIDES:
[silent]
BETATHON:
And [it] is not a tree.
PARMENIDES:
Thou canst not be acquainted with what is not, nor indicate it in speech.

This is one reconstruction of the “argument” for the claim that “what is” cannot be differentiated in any way, is homogeneous and indivisible. Similar arguments are given for the assertions that “what is” is ungenerated and indestructible. “What is” cannot have come into being from “what is not” because “what is not” is absolutely unthinkable, hence unknowable, hence nonexistent. Since there is no change in what exists, “either it is or it is not.” But the decision between these has already been made.

It is, as a whole, entirely. … There are no degrees of being. … Any form of change … implies the destruction of one state of affairs that exists and the generation of one that does not exist.

(Furley 1967, 49)

I have provided this admittedly sketchy summary simply to provide the flavor of the poem and its argument. To modern readers, the logic seems contrived; the point, if there is one at all, seems merely a juvenile delight in words and their negations or a game of peekaboo with “nothing.” One common suggestion from the middle part of this century, for example, was that the puzzle left by Parmenides was no more than an erroneous conflation of the existential and predicative uses of the verb “to be.” In other words, Parmenides had confused “it is,” meaning “it exists,” with “it is,” meaning “it is x,” where “x” is a property or characteristic of “it” (Guthrie 1975, 47). The Parmenidean riddle did not seem so simple, however, to the Greeks who followed him.

Part of the difficulty for modern commentators (equipped with the tools of philology and symbolic and modal logics) has been to make plausible the degree to which Parmenides stopped Greek thought in its tracks. His conclusions were seen by those who followed him to be absolutely unassailable but equally inconceivable. Until Plato “solved” the Parmenidean puzzle in his dialogue that bears Parmenides's name, no one who wrote could avoid confronting his legacy, the extent to which his arguments seemed to make any further speculations into metaphysics not just difficult or discomforting but literally impossible.

I think MacKinnon's conclusions ought to have stopped feminist theory in its tracks, in precisely the same way and for precisely the same reasons Parmenides stopped Greek thought. Further, to the extent that MacKinnon's conclusions have not had that effect, to that extent has she been misread or ignored. In her writings, she has pushed one strand of radical feminist theory to its logical conclusion. She hoped to demonstrate that if one took sexism seriously, one had, ultimately, to take sex seriously as a (perhaps the) genesis of sexual oppression.

Her initial premises are the bedrock of radical feminist thought: “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one's own; yet most taken away” (MacKinnon 1982, 515). Sexuality is constructed through the practice of sex. Sexism is the oppression of women as women, and through sex.¹⁰ “What defines woman as such is what turns men on” (MacKinnon 1982, 531). As one would expect, then, her description of sex as it is currently practiced is instrumental. She describes and defines sexuality in terms of what it does, not in terms of what it is. Sexuality for MacKinnon isn't anything at all. It is a social process that eroticizes dominance and submission and that creates men and women as the social creatures as we know them.

I define sexuality as whatever a given society eroticizes. That is, sexual is whatever sexual means in a particular society. … If sexuality is seen in this way, it is fundamentally social, fundamentally relational, and it is not a thing. … Because sexuality arises in relations under male dominance, women are not the principal authors of its meanings. In the society we currently live in, the content I want to claim for sexuality is the gaze that constructs women as objects for male pleasure. I draw on pornography for its form and content, for the gaze that eroticizes the despised, the demeaned, the accessible, the there-to-be-used, the servile, the child-like, the passive, and the animal. That is the content of the sexuality that defines gender female in this culture, and visual thingification is its method.

(MacKinnon 1987, 53-54)

She then asks that feminism take seriously that sexuality so understood might be neither just one feature of social life among many deformed by sexism (and perhaps other forms of oppression as well), nor socially constructed through social relations between men and women acting out gender roles that are in turn socially constructed (by something else higher [or lower] on the scale). “Sexuality in feminist light is not a discrete sphere of interaction or feeling or sensation or behavior in which preexisting social divisions may or may not be played out” (MacKinnon 1989a, 318). The claim is much deeper, and stranger, and has been fully understood by few, if any, of her critics. The claim is that men, women, and the social relations they engage in are all constructed by sex, the activity, rather than the other way around. “Sexuality is that social process which creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire, creating the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society” (MacKinnon 1982, 516).

Sexuality, then, is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed, embodies it, not the reverse. Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality.

(MacKinnon 1982, 533)

Despite the apparent strangeness of this conclusion, if one follows MacKinnon's argumentation carefully, and if one has any sympathy whatsoever for the premises with which she begins, the conclusions seem inescapable and unassailable. There is a sense, after reading a long piece of MacKinnon's prose with a pencil in hand, working out the arguments, of having been caught in a trap.

Parmenides's argument was essentially a negative one. Montgomery Furth notes that typically the practice of the elenchus (the technical term for this type of argument) had two distinct motivations. The first, which he identifies with Socrates, is to get the respondent in the dialogue to admit the truth of a premise that at the beginning of the procedure of argumentation the respondent has rejected. The second, which he attributes to Parmenides,

is to compel the respondent, by the very outlandishness of the conclusion, to begin searching for the tacit assumptions with which it was obtained. In the later case, the elenchus functions as an instrument for forcing the assumptions to the surface.

(Furth 1974, 268)

MacKinnon's intention is slightly different. Her argument is negative in the sense that she is interested in forcing into the open the assumptions of her critics. Her primary motivation is the conceptually prior one of setting the “Agenda for Theory.”¹¹ The resulting feminist theory of sexuality that the agenda calls for

would locate sexuality within a theory of gender inequality, meaning the social hierarchy of men over women. … Such an approach centers feminism on the perspective of the subordination of women to men as it identifies sex—that is, the sexuality of dominance and submission—as crucial, as fundamental, as on some level definitive, in that process. Feminist theory becomes a project of analyzing that situation in order to face it for what it is, in order to change it.

(MacKinnon 1989a, 316)¹²

After Parmenides, Greek philosophy splintered into several competing and inconsistent schools of thought. All of them attempted to “save the appearances,” to save some reality for the natural world, but they were also constrained by the belief that Parmenides' logic could not be violated (Furley 1967, 50). Empedocles posited the existence of a universe made up of four elements: earth, air, fire and water. All the elements were unchangeable and homogeneous, that is, met the criteria Parmenides had set for anything that “is.” Anaxagoras multiplied the number of fundamental substances to be coextensive with the number of natural kinds. All natural substances, not just a privileged small number, were elementary and unchangeable.

The atomists also tried to solve the problems of multiplicity and change, not by increasing the number of fundamental substances, but by asserting that “what is not” could exist in the form of a void. They agreed that no qualitative differences of being were possible, but asserted that quantitative differences could be measured by the empty space separating atoms of a single kind of substance.

Plato, who was both the culminating figure in the early development of Greek thought and the first philosopher in the Western tradition of philosophy, finally worked out how “[it] is not” could be possible. Like Parmenides, he thought that anything of which we have knowledge must necessarily exist. Plato's Theory of Forms owes a great deal to Parmenides in that it was the Parmenidean elenchus that convinced Plato that the objects of knowledge must be eternal and unchanging. The world of appearances received an intermediately real status in Plato as the object of human belief; Parmenides granted the world of appearances no ontological status at all. Plato's analysis of the different senses of “not being” that were possible was undertaken at the height of his powers; in this effort he tried to answer directly the paradox that Parmenides had set for Greek thought.

Post-MacKinnon, the situation is quite different. Instead of trying to untie the conundrum of women, men, feminism, and sex that MacKinnon has bequeathed, her critics (note that Parmenides is not represented as having critics, just followers) have in the main simply walked around her as if she were not there. Rather than analyzing the logic of the arguments MacKinnon marshals in favor of her position (and those negative arguments she uses against other interpretations of women's situation), her critics in the main reject her logic without or prior to engaging it.

Another tactic that has been employed is to simply redefine the terms used by MacKinnon in her argument. MacKinnon herself is painfully aware of this strategy and often scathingly criticizes those she sees engaging in it:

Given that this characterizes the reality [victims' reports of rape are similar to the sex depicted in pornography], consider the content attributed to “sex itself” in the following … quotations on the subject: “Only if one thinks of sex itself as a degrading act can one believe that all pornography degrades and harms women”. … Given the realization that violence against women is sexual, consider the content of the “sexual” in the following criticism: “The only form in which a politics opposed to violence against women is being expressed is anti-sexual”. … And “the feminist anti-pornography movement has become deeply erotophobic and anti-sexual”. …

(MacKinnon 1989a, 336, n. 73; italics in the original)

From the point of view from which MacKinnon writes, the authors of these quotations are advocating the sexuality that feminism has identified as exploitative, in the name of feminism. There has still been no direct answer to the account she has offered of sexuality and its place in the subordination of women, in the sense that no one who finds her conclusions inconceivable has criticized them in the face of their logic and their unassailability. Nothing that has happened on the theoretical front in any way addresses the arguments she has advanced about the meaning of sex and its place in the construction of an unequal social order, “gendered to the ground” (MacKinnon 1987, 173).

There is not a little irony and even perhaps a touch of paradox here. On the face of it, it is hard to identify the source of the commitment on the part of Parmenides's followers that would have led them to try so hard to maintain their faith in both his premises and his logic at the same time that they felt compelled to find a way to reject his conclusions. In the end, a few of the later thinkers did reject the premise that ultimately the universe must be composed of a single fundamental substance, but not without serious reservations; this belief had been the absolute bedrock of Greek speculative thought for the previous one hundred and fifty years. MacKinnon's critics share a political and intellectual commitment to feminism with her, and this commitment limits the number of premises that can be simply tossed out. The irony is that in the modern-day case, where shared feminist commitment would seem to require that any critic of any writer proceed with a kind of serious respect, entire books have been dismissed with a wave, and arguments have been so twisted in the retelling that they bear no resemblance to their originals.¹³

Following Foucault, it has become a commonplace of feminist theory to claim that power is not congealed in any single institution or person, that power is diffused, multiply situated. MacKinnon, on the other hand, defines power in terms of male dominance and claims that “[male dominance] is metaphysically nearly perfect” (MacKinnon 1983, 638).

Male power is real; it is just not what it claims to be, namely, the only reality. Male power is a myth that makes itself true. What it is to raise consciousness is to confront male power in this duality: as total on one side and a delusion on the other.

(MacKinnon 1982, 542)

The duality of power for MacKinnon is thus total/delusional, while for the post-Foucauldian feminist, the duality, if there is one, would be better characterized as unitary/fractured. What puzzles me about the relationship of Foucault to feminism, and to the critique of MacKinnon offered by feminists following Foucault, is that no one, including to some extent MacKinnon herself, seems to treat the questions of what power is, and how it is exercised, resisted, overthrown or accommodated as empirical, which it seems to me they ultimately must be. For example, MacKinnon writes:

Women's acceptance of their condition does not contradict its fundamental unacceptability if women have little choice but to become persons who freely choose women's roles. For this reason, the reality of women's oppression is, finally, neither demonstrable nor refutable empirically.

(MacKinnon 1982, 542; italics in the original)

What MacKinnon wants women to be able to have is something like integrity, something like selves of our own. She says, for example, “Women have been deprived not only of terms of our own in which to express our lives, but of lives of our own to live” (MacKinnon 1987, 15). If a life is understood as the project of a self, then we are pushed into consideration of how this concept of self is deeply tied to Western ideas about the value of the individual, and, indeed, to Western individualism. The postmodern, postliberal reply to this demand is that having an integral self is impossible for anyone, not just women—just when women (and others) have begun to articulate what it means to be limited in the kind of self one can have, why and how we have been denied selves, and the cost to human beings of being denied a self. I take this point from Hartsock (1990, 163-64).

What is overlooked in this effort to “change the subject” is that if sexism is real, in any meaningful sense of real, whatever is defined by the postmodern sensibility as the “new self” will also be something men will have and women will be both denied access to and defined by our lack of. Attempts, like MacKinnon's, to provide a coherent and all-encompassing feminist theory are met with charges of essentialism, mistaking the result for the cause, as if the experience of oppression were an entirely random one that left no telltale mark, no similar brand to distinguish its presence. MacKinnon and other feminists do not deny that the meaning of womanhood, femaleness, and/or femininity has changed and will change again. The claim is that unless the change is liberating for women, it is merely a modification in the mechanisms of oppression; a particular form of womanhood might disappear from the face of the earth without it being the case that any woman has ceased being oppressed.¹⁴

As a final illustration of the difference between legitimate and illegitimate ways to counter an argument, consider the example of the recent plant closings that have plagued the industrial sector of this country. In several cases, the labor force of the plant has tried to keep the plant open through concessions, or attempts to buy out management, or through legal arguments concerning their contracts. During these negotiations it is an accurate description of the state of affairs to say that the business is experiencing a labor-management problem. If, ultimately, the factory is closed, however, there ceases to be a labor-management problem. The situation has been transformed into an unemployment problem. That a labor-management problem had ceased to exist would be equally true if the workers had bought out the owners and transformed the concern into a cooperative. In the former case, however, there is a large number of relatively unskilled unemployed people. In the latter case, there is not.¹⁵ The difference is crucial, and an analogous difference is crucially overlooked in the response to MacKinnon. One can dissolve the “sex problem” by linguistic fiat—sex is not what you say it is. But this is not the same thing as reconstituting the world such that the conditions described by MacKinnon are no longer present to be described.

Other than the move of redefining terms, there are at least two other approaches that might be taken. The first is to claim that sex, sexuality, and perhaps even gender are natural and, in their natural state, can or do exist in nonoppressive forms.¹⁶ This approach is usually considered politically dangerous for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that women do not control research into “nature.” It is also considered false by large numbers of feminists, and so objectionable for that reason. A second alternative is to develop a competing theory of sexuality. The challenge for any such theory is that it must do at least as well as does MacKinnon's in accounting for the prevalence of sexual abuse without making it women's fault. If some account of women's sexual agency is desired (the lack of this possibility under MacKinnon's account is the most common complaint lodged against it), the new theory must give an account of how such agency is theoretically possible. Merely asserting its existence or even its possibility is insufficient, especially since MacKinnon has some powerful arguments for how such agency is theoretically impossible.

A more profitable direction for post-MacKinnon feminist theory can be gleaned if we examine once more the example of Parmenides. Parmenides's legacy to the Greeks was the impossibility of any future metaphysics. MacKinnon's legacy to feminism is the impossibility of any future feminism. Her account makes feminism theoretically impossible. There are numerous places in her writings where she acknowledges that if male dominance were as total in fact as she presents it as being in theory, then feminism could not exist. To give just a few examples:

[T]he problem of how the object can know herself as such is the same as how the alienated can know its own alienation. This, in turn, poses the problem of feminism's account of women's consciousness. How can women, as created, “thingified in the head,” complicit in the body, see our condition as such?

(MacKinnon 1982, 542; footnote omitted)

The practice of a politics of all women in the face of its theoretical impossibility is creating a new process of theorizing and a new form of theory.

(MacKinnon 1983, 638)

How sisterhood became powerful while women were powerless will take its place among the classic alchemies of political history. How did they do that? students will be encouraged to wonder.

(MacKinnon 1987, 3; footnote omitted)

This is the same tension, contradiction, or paradox that Plato was faced with after Parmenides. Plato's work didn't look exactly like Parmenides's; they did not agree on everything, and Plato did, ultimately, reject some of what Parmenides had said. But Plato did not reject Parmenides; he scooped out an arc of the world in thought that had basically the same shape, basically the same relationship to the rest of the world. No one has even come close to trying this approach to MacKinnon. Few commentators have noted the paradoxical nature of her conclusions, except in passing, and I find it significant that none of her harshest critics has argued against her on these grounds, opting instead for the illegitimate move of redefining terms discussed above. Now that the dust from the first round of this battle has more or less settled, I suggest that it is time to begin again; maybe we can do it better this time. Feminist theory could use a Plato of our own.

Notes

1. To give just two examples of what's wrong with the current diversity: in the first place it has not been matched with an equal diversity of theorizers. The same white and upper-middle-class bias of the academy still permeates most of the writing; if anything, the content of what is being written is becoming less and less connected to the everyday concerns of the majority of women. Moreover, one of the primary concerns of the majority of women now surely has to be the imminent loss of the right to abortion; that we can be this close to losing this right after twenty years of theory suggests to me that it has not done us much good.

2. I am thinking in particular of recent work by Susan Bordo (1990) and Teresa de Lauretis (1989). In Lauretis's essay, which introduces a special issue of Differences on the topic of essentialism, she confronts in an endearingly audacious way the possibility that the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate is really the lesbian/straight split revisited.

3. The term is Nancy Fraser's; she uses it in her introduction to the special issue of Hypatia on French Feminist Philosophy that she edited (Fraser 1989).

4. Friedan and Marx, respectively.

5. The imaginary conversation between Alison Jaggar and Julia Kristeva is drawn from Jaggar (1983 and Fraser (1989). Fraser's source for Kristeva's feminist family tree is Kristeva (1986).

6. MacKinnon criticizes Brownmiller for finding rape biologically inevitable; Daly and Griffin for being philosophically idealist and therefore liberal. MacKinnon interprets Daly as being idealist about women generally; Griffin is read as idealist about Eros. On Brownmiller, see MacKinnon (1983, 646-47) and MacKinnon (1989a, 323); on Daly and Griffin, see MacKinnon (1989b, 50-51). On Griffin, see also MacKinnon (1983, 639n.8; 1989b, 197-98).

7. See, for example, Guthrie (1967, 1975), Furley (1967), Hussey (1972), Furth (1974), Owen (1975), Barnes (1979), Gallop (1984). My account is an attempt to summarize and amalgamate these various sources into a balanced but simplified version of their considerably more complex presentations.

8. The relevant passage in Greek—here translated “[it] is”—is apparently the bare verb “is” without any subject attached. Most of the debate about Parmenides concerns (1) which meaning of “is” is intended (existential, predicative, veridical), (2) whether or not the Greek “is” carries with it an implicit subject, and (3) whether or not Parmenides intended a different subject, and if so, which one. While the debate makes for fascinating reading, none of the fine points of the dispute are relevant to the comparison I want to make. I have tried to steer a course through the treacherous shoals of Parmenidean scholarship without committing myself to any one interpretation.

9. There is no mention in the poem of either lizards or trees; Furth has simply tried to give an account that makes sense of the elliptical remarks Parmenides does make. I have added the bracketed “it” in Betathon's final speech.

10. Another way to put this: As against Irigaray, who describes women as “the sex which is not one,” MacKinnon would describe women as “the sex which is sex.”

11. “An Agenda for Theory” is the subtitle of MacKinnon (1982). See also, MacKinnon (1984): “The subtitles of the articles to which these comments refer—‘an agenda for theory’ and ‘toward feminist jurisprudence’—were not the false postures of tentativeness they typically are. They stated what I meant to do. An agenda sets the terms of a discussion, it does not have it” (184).

12. Feminism Unmodified (MacKinnon 1987) is a collection of papers initially given as talks at conferences or invited lectures. In the Afterword to this book MacKinnon addresses some of the objections to her analysis that have been raised. She mentions that her audiences often ask her “after all this negative, what do I have to say positive” (MacKinnon 1987, 219). While she thus acknowledges that her audiences perceive her to be a negative theorist, she does not accept this characterization of her position:

    [T]o consider “no more rape” as only a negative, no more than an absence, shows a real failure of imagination. Why does “out now” contain a sufficiently positive vision of the future for Vietnam and Nicaragua but not for women?

    (219)

13. The feminist insight that ontological and epistemological commitments are basic, while political commitments are contingent, is once more proven true.

14. This poses an interesting question, however—namely, how will we know when what has happened is not just another transformation in our prison, but that we are, finally, free? On the other hand, and equally important, it is a different thing to be Nelson Mandela in jail and Nelson Mandela “free” in a South Africa still ruled by apartheid; Nelson Mandela in a majority-rule, one-person-one-vote South Africa and Nelson Mandela in a world where racism (and sexism) have been eliminated.

15. The unemployed, if any, are the more highly skilled former managers.

16. Despite their insistence that sexuality is socially constructed, most critics of MacKinnon adopt this strategy. Sexuality is socially constructed at the level of society; sex is essential at the level of the individual. Nominally nominalist, this view posits particular sexual preferences as the source of identity (understood as essence), as completely immutable (and therefore never to be criticized), and of miraculous (unknown and unidentifiable) etiology.

An earlier version of this paper was read at the Midwest Society for Women in Philosophy, February 1991. Helpful suggestions on the paper and the ideas in it have come from Meg Baldwin, Naomi Scheman, Michael Root, Melinda Vadas, and Carol Mickett.

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