THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION first formulated the equation between individual freedom and sexual selfexpression, thus raising the Freudian lid on both the porn industry and gay liberation. Millet, a self-proclaimed anarchist and lesbian in her fifities, places first priority on "freedom of expression," less out of respect for constitutional law than because she distrusts all legal institutions. She depicts anti-porn legislation as handing over "the power of judgment" to the "puritannical" realm of "patriarchal" authority--not necessarily male--whose legitimacy she mocks.
If "the pursuit of happiness" for Millet is the quest for a new woman-based eroticism, the key to MacKinnon's view of sexuality is gender. A crude distinction one could make between the two structuralist conceptions is the exploitation of women as viewed in sexual vs. economic terms--which translates roughly to the difference between repression and oppression.
It is no coincidence that MacKinnon's analysis relies heavily upon comparisons to racism and anti-Semitism, to highlight the claim of minority oppression. The emphasis of her bill on civil damages rather than on criminal prosecution, for example, identifies "womanhood" as a separate class interest within American pluralism. This is a limited and misleading conception which only perpetuates the myth of feminism's "ghettoed" status as a political and intellectual domain for-women-only.
Furthermore, it aggravates the problem of maintaining an open debate. Her reading of a "supreme court woman judge's" vote against a so-called women's issue as an act of disloyalty contains a dangerously ideological edge to its judgment based on a conception of monolithic gender.
By ironic coincidence, on the same afternoon of the symposium, the Center for European Studies sponsored a conference on feminism whose topics included "Varieties of Feminisms." The pluralism is crucial. Feminism has come a long way from its associations of militant castration tactics and aesthetics of neuterdom; the term itself is an outdated one which cannot encompass the scope of cultural impact its present activity implies.
THE SOPHISTICATION of current-day feminist thinking is slowly leaving behind the tired battlefields of ideological tug-of-wars over sexual libidos. The new challenge it confronts, instead, is one of internal harmony; of coordinating theory and practice within a newly mobilized body hetero-politic. Even the notorious schism between French and Anglo feminisms--one noted for its theoretical avant-garde elegance, the other for its sensible economics--is really a matter of secret vanity; in actuality, it is an intellectualized space for self-consciously trying out new images of both feminists and women, thus transforming their cultural representations through selfexpression.
Freedom of expression implies, literally, the freedom of interpretation of individual process. While Professor Susan Suleiman's textual reading of George Bataille's "The Story of the Eye" as pornographic art may have felt marginal and esoteric to those uninitiated in the Marxist-Freudian syntheses of feminist literary criticism on which she drew, nevertheless the premises of authority and desire questioned had a very practical aim. Such a reading as Suleiman's illustrates how pornography, like art, lies in the eye of the beholder. The process of intellectual questioning is crucial to transforming cultural values and the kind of sexual economy they engender within our personal and social relationships.
THE PROBLEM, therefore, with MacKinnon's bill lies in a sense precisely in its explicitness, "the quick-fix appeal" of coding into law a short-term memory of more deeply rooted, that is, historical inequalities. "Should we burn it?," Suleiman warns, is a trap. Scrubbing away at unpleasant surfaces is a domestic chore. On one hand, one wants to sling mud for mud; on the other, one is then reduced to a similar level of indecency, instead of providing new examples of civil education.
The art of feminist politics requires a delicate balance between playing into oppositional logic and sidestepping difficult political issues. If "the privileged locus of drama" is, in fact, the female subject, it is time feminism's serious play turned its attention to a female as well as male audience.