Liberalism and the Death of Feminism (1990)
"What is the difference between the women’s movement we had and the one we have now, if it can be called a movement? I think the difference is liberalism. Where feminism was collective, liberalism is individualistic. We have been reduced to that. Where feminism is socially based and critical, liberalism is naturalistic, attributing the product of women’s oppression to women’s natural sexuality, making it “ours.” Where feminism criticizes the ways in which women have been socially determined in an attempt to change that determination, liberalism is voluntaristic, meaning it acts like we have choices that we do not have. Where feminism is based on material reality, liberalism is based on some ideal realm in the head. And where feminism is relentlessly political, about power and powerlessness, the best that can be mustered by this nouveau movement is a watered-down form of moralism: this is good, this is bad, no analysis of power or powerlessness at all."
Abortion: On Public and Private (1994)
"Women were granted the abortion right as a private privilege, not as a public right. Women got control over reproduction which is controlled by "a man or The Man;' an individual man or the doctors or the government. Abortion was not so much decriminalized as it was legalized. In Roe v. Wade, the government set the stage for the conditions under which women got this right. Most of the control that women won out of legalization has gone directly into the hands of men-husbands, doctors, or fathers-and what remains in women's hands is now subject to attempted reclamation through regulation. This, surely, must be what is meant by reform.
To fail to recognize the meaning of the private in the ideology and reality of women's subordination by seeking protection behind a right to that privacy is to cut women off from collective verification and state support in the same act. When women are segregated in private, separated from each other one at a time, a right to that privacy isolates women at once from each other and from public recourse. This right to privacy is a right of men "to be let alone" to oppress women one at a time. It embodies and reflects the private sphere's existing definition of womanhood. This instance of liberalism-applied to women as if they were persons, gender neutral reinforces the division between public and private which is not gender neutral. It is an ideological division that lies about women's shared experience and mystifies the unity among the spheres of women's violation. It polices the division between public and private, a very material division that keeps the private beyond public redress and depoliticizes women's subjection within it. Privacy law keeps some men out of the bedrooms of other men."
Points Against Postmodernism (2000)
“Yes, society is largely made of peoples’ consciousness of social relations. That doesn’t mean that everyone’s consciousness constitutes social reality equally. As long as social reality is a product of inequality, and postmodernists refuse to contend with social inequality methodologically, postmodernism will go on adopting the methodological position of male power, and the politics of the women’s movement of the 1970s will be dead, in theory. Meantime, women in the world will go on fighting to change the unequal social realities of women’s lives as if postmodernism did not exist.”
Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality (2011)
“To promote equality, the violators have to be closed down and the world has to be opened up to the violated. This is what they are asking for. They are under no illusion that prostitution is a job. If the lines between sex and labor can be indistinct, it is not because being sexually violated is work, but because a lot of forced labor also includes sexual exploitation, and many who are trafficked for labor end up in the sex industry. Not one prostituted woman I have ever met wants her children to have that life. What does that say except that prostitution chose her? What she wants, as several put it to me, is “away from this place,” and it is not migration she is imagining. Of labor trafficking, I have never heard anyone say that this, regrettably, is the best job these people are ever going to get, so leave them there. Yet, a recent research report to the South African Law Reform Commission characterized prostitution as “a viable alternative for women coping with poverty, unemployment, failed marriages and family obligations, especially where social welfare programmes are limited.” The conditions mentioned, along with the nasty low-paid jobs in which women predominate, hardly justify the sex industry. They do show how women with no real options in a sex-discriminatory economic setting where they have no human rights are pushed into a shortened desperate life of sexual abuse—to the tune of resigned sighs by some who think and write for a living. Even if other people cannot, prostituted women can imagine a world in which their options are not limited to domestic work versus lap dancing. Some who have the choices women in prostitution are denied cannot seem to envision prostituted women’s lives outside prostitution. The women themselves have no such trouble. They see real work, real love, dignity, and hope.”
Intersectionality as Method: A Note (2013)
“Intersectionality, in other words, is animated by a method in the sense of an operative approach to law, society, and their symbiotic relation, by a distinctive way into reality that captures not just the static outcomes of the problem it brings into view but its dynamics and lines of force as well. It is this that makes it transformative. Moved by the energy of the synergistic interaction of the variables whose relations it exposes, intersectionality pursues an analysis that “is greater than the sum of racism and sexism”.”
Rape Redefined (2014)
“The presence of consent does not make an interaction equal. It makes it tolerated, or the less costly of alternatives out of the control or beyond the construction of the one who consents. Intrinsic to consent is the actor and the acted-upon, with no guarantee of any kind of equality between them, whether of circumstance or condition or interaction, or typically even any interest in inquiring into whether such equality is present or meaningful, at least in the major definition of the most serious crime. Put another way, the concept is inherently an unequal one, simultaneously silently presupposing that the parties to it are equals whether they are or not. It tacitly relies on a notion of the freedom of the acted-upon, on the meaningfulness of the “voluntary” balancing the initiative of “the other,” under what are, in sex, typically invisible background, sometimes foreground, conditions of sex (meaning gender) inequality. It is as if one can be free without being equal— a proposition never explained or even seen as in need of explanation.”
Reconstituting the Future: An Equality Amendment (with Kimberlé Crenshaw, 2019)
"A new constitutional amendment embodying a substantive intersectional equality analysis aims to rectify the founding U.S. treatment of race and sex and additional hierarchical social inequalities. Historical and doctrinal context and critique show why this step is urgently needed. A draft of the amendment is offered."
Weaponizing the First Amendment: An Equality Reading (2020)
"This Article traces how and why the First Amendment has gone from a shield of the powerless to a sword of the powerful in the past hundred years. The central doctrinal role of “content neutrality” and “viewpoint neutrality” in this development is analyzed; the crucial tipping points of anti-Semitism, in Collin v. Smith, and pornography, in Hudnut v. American Booksellers, are identified. The potential for substantive equality to promote freedom of speech is glimpsed."