Fem Jurisprudence K

1NC SHELL
A. The affirmative is legal liberalism which is used to legitimate and
continue masculine dominance through reliance on construction of social
norms as constitutional. This re-entrenches status quo violence
against women and makes it seem inevitable and natural.
MacKinnon, Harvard Law Professor, 1989 (Catherine, Toward a Feminist Theory of
the State, 237-240)

In male supremacist societies, the male standpoint dominates civil society in the form of
the objective standardthat standpoint which, because it dominates in the world,
does not appear to function as a standpoint at all. Under its aegis, men dominate
women and children, three quarters of the world. Family and kinship rules and sexual
mores guarantee reproductive ownership and sexual access and control to men as a
group. Hierarchies among men are ordered on the basis of race and class, stratifying
women as well. The state incorporates these facts of social power in and as law. Two
things happen: law becomes legitimate, and social dominance becomes invisible.
Liberal legalism is thus a medium for making male dominance both invisible and
legitimate by adopting the male point of view in law at the same time as it enforces that view
on society.

Through legal mediation, male dominance is made to seem a feature of life, not a onesided construct imposed by force for the advantage of a dominant group. To the
degree it succeeds ontologically, male dominance does not look epistemological:
control over being produces control over consciousness, fusing material conditions
with consciousness in a way that is inextricable short of social change. Dominance
reified becomes difference. Coercion legitimated becomes consent. Reality
objectified becomes ideas; ideas objectified become reality. Politics neutralized and
naturalized becomes morality. Discrimination in society becomes nondiscrimination in
law. Law is a real moment in the social construction of these mirror-imaged
inversions as truth. Law, in societies ruled and penetrated by the liberal form, turns
angle of vision and construct of social meaning into dominant institution. In the
liberal state, the rule of lawneutral, abstract, elevated, pervasive both institutionalize
the power of men over women and institutionalizes power in its male form.

From a feminist perspective, male supremacist jurisprudence erects qualities valued from
the male point of view as standards for the proper and actual relation between life
and law. Examples include standards for scope of judicial review, norms of judicial
restraint, reliance on precedent, separation of powers, and the division between
public and private law. Substantive doctrines like standing, justiciability, and state
action adopt the same stance. Those with power in civil society, not women, design
its norms and institutions, which become the status quo. Those with power, not
usually women, write constitutions, which become laws highest standards. Those

with power in political systems that women did not design and from which women
have been excluded, write legislation, which sets ruling values. Then,
jurisprudentially, judicial review is said to go beyond its proper scopeto
delegitimate courts and the rule of law itselfwhen legal questions are not confined
to assessing the formal correspondence between legislation and the constitution, or
legislation and social reality, but scrutinize the underlying substance. Lines of
precedent fully developed before women were permitted to vote, continued while
women were not allowed to learn to read and write, sustained under a reign of sexual
terror and abasement and silence and misrepresentation continuing to the present
day are considered invalid bases for defeating unprecedented interpretations or
initiatives from womens point of view. Doctrines of standing suggest that because
womens deepest injuries are shared in some way by most or all women, no individual
woman is differentially injured enough to be able to sue for womens deepest injuries.

Structurally, only when the state has acted can constitutional equality guarantees be
invoked. But no law gives men the right to rape women. This has not been
necessary, since no rape law has ever seriously undermined the terms of mens
entitlement to sexual access to women. No government is, yet, in the pornography
business. This has not been necessary, since no man who wants pornography encounters
serious trouble getting it, regardless of obscenity laws. No law gives fathers the right to abuse
their daughters sexually. This has not been necessary, since no state has ever systematically
intervened in their social possession of and access to them. No law gives husbands the right
to batter their wives. This has not been necessary, since there is nothing to stop
them. No law silences women. This has not been necessary, for women are
previously silenced in societyby sexual abuse, by not being heard, by not being
believed, by poverty, by illiteracy, by a language that provides only unspeakable
vocabulary for their most formative traumas, but a publishing industry that virtually
guarantees that if they ever find a voice it leaves no trace in the world. No law takes
away womens privacy. Most women do not have any to take, and no law gives them
what they do not already have. No law guarantees that women will forever remain
the social unequals of men. This is not necessary, because the law guaranteeing sex
equality requires, in an unequal society, that before one can be equal legally, one
must be equal socially. So long as power enforced by law reflects and correspondsin
form and in substance--to power enforced by men over women in society, law is
objective, appears principled, becomes just the way things are. So long as men
dominate women effectively enough in society without the support of positive law,
nothing constitutional can be done about it.

Law from the male point of view combines coercion with authority, policing society
where its edges are exposed: at points of social resistance, conflict, and breakdown. Since
there is no place outside this system from a feminist standpoint, if its solipsistic lock
could be broken, such moments could provide points of confrontation, perhaps even
openings for change. The point of view of a total system emerges as particular only
when confronted, in a way it cannot ignore, by a demand from another point of view.
This is why epistemology must be controlled for ontological domination to succeed,
and why consciousness raising is subversive. It is also why, when law sides with the
powerless, as it occasionally has, it is said to engage in something other than law
politics or policy or personal opinionand to delegitimate itself. When seemingly ontological
conditions are challenged from the collective standpoint of a dissident reality, they

become visible as epistemological. Dominance suddenly appears no longer inevitable.

When it loses its ground it loosens its grip.

B. This model of human relations based on domination and oppression

inevitably leads to omnicide.
Eisler, cultural anthropologist, 1987 (Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership
Studies, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, page 157)

Through the industrial revolution our technological evolution had been moving upward by leaps
and bounds. Soon so also would our cultural evolution. In the same way that new material
technologies souch as machines and medicines were bringing about seemingly miraculous
changes, new social technologies, such as better ways of organizing and guiding human
behavior, would speed the realization of humanitys higher potentials and aspirations. At long
last, the age-old human striving for justice, for truth, for beauty could bring our ideals to reality.
But gradually this great hope and promise began to wane. For during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries rational man continued to oppress, kill, exploit, and humiliate
his fellow and sister humans at every turn. Justified by such new scientific
doctrines as the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century, the economic slavery of
inferior races continued. Instead of being fought to save heathens or for the
greater glory and power of God and king, colonial wars were now waged for rational
economic and political purposes, such as the promotion of free trade and the
containment of rival economic and political powers. And if male control of women
could no longer be based on such irrational grounds as Eves disobedience of the
Lord, it would now be justified by new rational scientific dogmas proclaiming that
male dominance was a biological and/ or social law.
Rational man now spoke of how he would master nature, subdue the elements,
andin the great twentieth-century advanceconquer space. He spoke of how he had to
fight wars to bring about peace, freedom, and equality, of how he had to murder
children, women, and men in terrorist activities to bring dignity and liberation to
oppressed peoples. As a member of the elites in both the capitalist and communist worlds, he
continued to amass property and/or privilege. To make more profits or to meet higher
quotas, he also began to systematically poison his physical environment, thereby
threatening other species with extinction and causing severe illness in human adults
and deformities in human babies. And all the while he kept explaining that what he
was doing was either patriotic or idealistic andabove allrational.
Finally, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the promise of reason began to be questioned. What was
one to make of the rational and efficient use of human fat for soap? How could one explain the
carefully reasoned military experiments of the effect of atomic bombs and radiation on living and
totally helpless human beings? Could all this superefficient mass destruction be called an
advance for humanity?
Was explosive industrial overexpansion, the regimentation of whole populations into
assembly lines, the computerization of individuals into numbers a step forward for
our species? Or were these modern developments, along with the increasing
pollution of land, sea, and air, signs of cultural regression rather than cultural

progress? Since rational man seemed bent on desecrating and destroying our
planet, would it not be better to turn back to religious man, to the time before
scientific advances plunged us into our secular-technological age?
By the last quarter of the twentieth century, philosophers and social scientists were
not only questioning reason but all the progressive modern ideologies. Neither
capitalism nor communism had fulfilled its promise. Everywhere there was talk of the
end of liberalism as realists asserted that a free and equal society was never
anything but a utopian dream.
Disillusioned by the purported failure of the progressive secular ideologies, all over the world
people were returning to fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, and other religious teachings.
Frightened by increasing signs of impending global chaos, masses of people were turning back to
the old androcratic idea that what really matters is not life here on earth but whether, by
disobeying Godand the commands of the men speaking for him on earthwe will be violently
punished through all eternity.
Given the reality of global annihilation posed by nuclear bombs, from the perspective of a
worldview that offers no realistic alternatives to the prevailing system, there do seem only three
ways to respond to what increasingly look like insoluble global crises. One way is to go back to
the old religious view that the only way out is in the next world, whereas born-again Christians
or Shiite Muslims assertGod will reward those who obeyed his orders and punish those who did
not. The second is through more immediate forms of escape: nihilism, desensitivization, and
hopelessness that fuel the angry disillusionment of punk rock, the mind numbing excesses of
drugs, liquor, or mechanical sex, the decadence of grasping overmaterialism, and the deadening
of all compassion through a modern entertainment industry that begins to resemble the bloody
circuses of the last days of the Roman Empire. The third way is to try to drive society back to an
imaginary pastto the good old days before women and inferior men questioned their proper
place in the natural order.

But from the perspective we have been developing, based on the careful
reexamination of our present and past, all this hopelessness is unfounded. All is not
hopeless if we recognize it is not human nature but a dominator model of society that
in our age of high technology inexorably drives us toward nuclear war. All is not futile
if we recognize that it is this system, not some inexorable divine or natural law, that
demands the use of technological breakthroughs for better ways of dominating and
destroyingeven if this drives us to global bankruptcy and ultimately to nuclear war.
In short, if we look at our present from the perspective of Cultural Transformation theory, it
becomes evident that there are alternatives to a system founded on the force-based
ranking of one half of humanity over the other. What also becomes evident is that the
great transformation of Western society that began with the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment did not fail but is merely incomplete.

C. The alternative is to reject the status quo legal system in

favor of a feminist jurisprudence that reflects the reality of life
instead of forcing life to accommodate itself to the processes
of law.
MacKinnon, 89 (Catherine, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 248-249)
The relation between life and law would also change. Law, in liberal
jurisprudence, objectifies social life. The legal process reflects itself in its
own image, makes be there what it puts there, while presenting itself as
passive and neutral in the process. To undo this, it will be necessary to
grasp the dignity of women without blinking at the indignity of womens
condition, to envision the possibility of equality without minimizing the
grip of inequality, to reject the fear that has become so much of womens
sexuality and the corresponding denial that has become so much of
womens politics, and to demand civil parity without pretending that the
demand is neutral or that civil equality already exists. In this attempt, the
idealism of liberalism and the materialism of the left have come to much
the same for women. Liberal jurisprudence that the law should reflect
nature or society and left jurisprudence that all law does or can do is
reflect existing social relations are two guises of objectivist epistemology.
If objectivity is the epistemological stance of which womens sexual
objectification is the social process, its imposition the paradigm of power
in the male form, then the state appears most relentless in imposing the
male point of view when it comes closest to achieving its highest formal
criterion of distanced aperspectivity. When it is most ruthlessly neutral, it
is most male; when it is most sex blind, it is most blind to the sex of the
standard being applied. When it most closely conforms to precedent, to
facts, to legislative intent, it most closely enforces socially male norms
and most thoroughly precludes questioning their content as having a point
of view at all.

Abstract rights authorize the male experience of the world. Substantive

rights for women would not. Their authority would be currently
unthinkable: nondominant authority, the authority of excluded truth, the
voice of silence. It would stand against both the liberal and left views of
law. The liberal view that law is societys text, its rational mind,
expresses the male view in the normative mode; the traditional left view
that the state, and with it the law, is superstructural or ephiphenomenal,
expresses it in the empirical mode. A feminist jurisprudence, stigmatized
as particularized and protectionist in male eyes of both traditions, is

accountable to womens concrete conditions and to changing them. Both

the liberal and the left view rationalize male power by resuming that it
does not exist, that equality between the sexes (room for marginal
corrections conceded) is societys basic norm and fundamental
description. Only feminist jurisprudence sees that male power does exist
and sex equality does not, because only feminism grasps the extent to
which antifeminism is misogyny and both are as normative as they are
empirical. Masculinity then appears as a specific position, not just the way things
are, its judgments and partialities revealed in process and procedure, adjudication
and legislation.

Equality will require change, not reflectiona new jurisprudence, a new

relation between life and law. Law that does not dominate life is as
difficult to envision as a society in which men do not dominate women,
and for the same reasons. To the extent feminist law embodies womens
point of view, it will be said that its law is not neutral. But existing law is
not neutral. It will be said that it undermines the legitimacy of the legal
system. But the legitimacy of existing law s based on force at womens
expense. Women have never consented to its rule--suggesting that the
systems legitimacy needs repair that women are in a position to provide.
It will be said that feminist law is special pleading for a particular group
and one cannot start that or where will it end. But existing law is already
special pleading for a particular group, where it has ended. The question
is not where it will stop, but whether it will start for any group but the
dominant one. It will be said that feminist law cannot win and will not
work. But this is premature. Its possibilities cannot be assessed in the
abstract but must engage the world. A feminist theory of the state has
barely been imagined; systematically, it has never been tried.

2NC Impact card

Our politics of transformation solves structural, statist, and
interpersonal violence. The transition solves for nuclear war,
environmental destruction, poverty, and terrorism.
Eisler, 1987 (Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice
and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, page 199)

The most dramatic change as we move from a dominator to a partnership

world will be that we, and our children and grandchildren, will again know
what it means to live free of the fear of war. In a world rid of the mandate
that to be masculine men must dominate, and along with the rising
status of women and more feminine social priorities, the danger of
nuclear annihilation will gradually diminish. At the same time, as women
gain more equality of social and economic opportunitiesso that birthrates
can come into better balance with our resourcesthe Malthusian necessity
for famine, disease, and war will progressively lessen.

Since they also are to a large extent related to overpopulation, to mans

conquest of nature and to the fact that environmental housekeeping is
not in androcracies a masculine policy priority, out problems of
environmental pollution, degradation, and depletion should likewise begin
to lessen during the years of transformation. So also should their
consequences in shortages of energy and other natural resources and in
health problems from chemical pollution.

As women are no longer systematically excluded from financial aid, land

grants, and modernization training, Third World economic development
programs for advancing education and technology and raising standards
of living will become much more effective. There will also be far less
economic inefficiency and less of the terrible human suffering that is the
lot of millions of people, in both the developed and developing world
today. For, as women are no longer treated as breeding animals and beasts of
burden and have greater access to health care, education, and political
participation, not only the female half of humanity but all of humanity will
benefit.

Along with more rational measures aimed at successful reducing the

poverty and hunger of the mass of the worlds poorwomen and children
the growing consciousness of our linking with all other members of our
species should gradually also narrow the gulf between rich and poor
nations. Indeed, as billions of dollars and work hours are rechanneled from
technologies of destruction to technologies that sustain and enhance life, human
poverty and hunger could gradually become memories of a brutal
androcratic past.

The changes in woman-man relations from the present high degree of

suspicion and recrimination to more openness and trust will be reflected
in our families and communities. There will also be positive repercussions
in our national and international policies. Gradually we will see a
decrease in the seemingly endless array of day-to-day problems that now
plague us, ranging from mental illness, suicide, and divorce to wife and
child battering, vandalism, murder, and international terrorism. As research
to be detailed in the second book of our report shows, these types of problems
in large part derive from the high degree of interpersonal tension inherent
in a male-dominated social organization and from dominator child-rearing
styles heavily based on force. Thus, with the move to more equal and
balanced relations between women and men and the reinforcement of
gentler, more human and caring behavior in children of both sexes, we
may realistically expect fundamental psychic changes. These, in a
relatively short time, will in turn exponentially accelerate the tempo of
transformation.

In the world as it will be when women and men live in full partnership, there will, of
course, still be families, schools, governments, and other social institutions. But,
like the already now emerging institutions of the equalitarian family and the socialaction network, the social structures of the future will be based more on
linking than ranking. Instead of requiring individuals to fit into pyramidal
hierarchies, these institutions will be heterarchic, allowing for both
diversity and flexibility in decision making and action. Consequently, the
roles of both women and men will be far less rigid, allowing the entire
human species a maximum of developmental flexibility .

LINKS

Privacy Links

Patriarchal cultural norms mean that the legal concept of

privacy is meaningless to women.
Dworkin 87

(Andrea Dworkin was an American feminist, author and outspoken critic of sexual
politics, particularly of the victimizing effects of pornography on women. Intercourse) DOA 7.2.15
MAY http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/IntercourseI.html

This is nihilism; or this is truth. He has to push in past boundaries. There is the outline of a body,
distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and

There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist

with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be
pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center.
She is occupied--physically, internally, in her privacy. A human being has a
body that is inviolate; and when it is violated, it is abused. A woman has a body
he has to push into it.

that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. The discourse of male truth--literature,
science, philosophy, pornography--calls that penetration violation. This it does with some consistency and some

intercourse. At the same time, the penetration is

taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use; it is appropriate to enter her, to push into
confidence. Violation is a synonym for

("violate") the boundaries of her body. She is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include

physical privacy. She is, in fact, human by a standard that precludes

physical privacy, since to keep a man out altogether and for a lifetime is
deviant in the extreme, a psychopathology, a repudiation of the way in
which she is expected to manifest her humanity. There is a deep recognition in culture
and in experience that intercourse is both the normal use of a woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a

her privacy irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in

a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable. And it is recognized that the use
and abuse are not distinct phenomena but somehow a synthesized reality:
both are true at the same time as if they were one harmonious truth
instead of mutually exclusive contradictions. Intercourse in reality is a use
and an abuse simultaneously, experienced and described as such, the act
parlayed into the illuminated heights of religious duty and the dark recesses of morbid and dirty brutality. S he, a
human being, is supposed to have a privacy that is absolute; except that
she, a woman, has a hole between her legs that men can, must, do enter.
This hole, her hole, is synonymous with entry. A man has an anus that can be entered, but
violative abuse,

his anus is not synonymous with entry. A woman has an anus that can be entered, but her anus is not synonymous

The slit between her legs, so simple, so hidden-- frankly, so

innocent-- for instance, to the child who looks with a mirror to see if it
could be true--is there an entrance to her body down there? and
something big comes into it? (how?) and something as big as a baby
comes out of it? (how?) and doesn't that hurt?--that slit which means entry
into her-- intercourse--appears to be the key to women's lower human
status. By definition, as the God who does not exist made her, she is intended to have a lesser
with entry.

privacy, a lesser integrity of the body, a lesser sense of self, since her
body can be physically occupied and in the occupation taken over. By
definition, as the God who does not exist made her, this lesser privacy,
this lesser integrity, this lesser self, establishes her lesser significance:
not just in the world of social policy but in the world of bare, true, real
existence. She is defined by how she is made, that hole, which is synonymous with entry; and intercourse, the
act fundamental to existence, has consequences to her being that may be intrinsic, not socially imposed.

Privacy as a legal concept means little or nothing to women

since their privacy is already abused in cultural and social
norms
Dworkin 87

(Andrea Dworkin was an American feminist, author and outspoken critic of sexual
politics, particularly of the victimizing effects of pornography on women. Intercourse) DOA 7.2.15
MAY http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/IntercourseI.html

The context in
which the act takes place, whatever the meaning of the act in and of itself,
is one in which men have social, economic, political, and physical power
over women. Some men do not have all those kinds of power over all
women; but all men have some kinds of power over all women; and most
men have controlling power over what they call their women--the women
they fuck. The power is predetermined by gender, by being male.
Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women.

Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible.

Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society-- when pushed to admit it--recognizes as
dominance. Intercourse often expresses hostility or anger as well as dominance. Intercourse is frequently
performed compulsively; and intercourse frequently requires as a precondition for male performance the
objectification of the female partner. She has to look a certain way, be a certain type--even conform to preordained
behaviors and scripts--for the man to want to have intercourse and also for the man to be able to have intercourse.
The woman cannot exist before or during the act as a fully realized, existentially alive individual. Despite all
efforts to socialize women to want intercourse-- e.g., women's magazines to pornography to Dynasty; incredible
rewards and punishments to get women to conform and put out--women still want a more diffuse and tender
sensuality that involves the whole body and a polymorphous tenderness. There are efforts to reform the
circumstances that surround intercourse, the circumstances that at least apparently contribute to its disreputable
(in terms of rights and justice) legend and legacy.

These reforms include: more deference to

female sensuality prior to the act; less verbal assault as part of sexual
expressiveness toward women; some lip service to female initiation of sex
and female choice during lovemaking; less romanticizing of rape, at least
as an articulated social goal. Those who are political activists working
toward the equality of women have other contextual reforms they want to
make: economic equity; women elected to political office; strong, selfrespecting role models for girls; emphasis on physical strength and selfdefense, athletic excellence and endurance; rape laws that work;
strategies for decreasing violence against women. These contextual
reforms would then provide for the possibility that intercourse could be
experienced in a world of social equality for the sexes. These reforms do

not in any way address the question of whether intercourse itself can be
an expression of sexual equality. Life can be better for women-economic and political conditions improved-- and at the same time the
status of women can remain resistant, indeed impervious, to change: so
far in history this is precisely the paradigm for social change as it relates
to the condition of women. Reforms are made, important ones; but the
status of women relative to men does not change. Women are still less
significant, have less privacy, less integrity, less self- determination. This
means that women have less freedom. Freedom is not an abstraction, nor is a little of it
enough. A little more of it is not enough either. Having less, being less, impoverished in freedom and rights,

women then inevitably have less self-respect: less self-respect than men
have and less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and
honest life. Intercourse as domination battens on that awful absence of
self-respect. It expands to fill the near vacuum. The uses of women, now,
in intercourse-- not the abuses to the extent that they can be separated
out--are absolutely permeated by the reality of male power over women.
We are poorer than men in money and so we have to barter sex or sell it
outright (which is why they keep us poorer in money). We are poorer than
men in psychological well-being because for us self-esteem depends on
the approval--frequently expressed through sexual desire--of those who
have and exercise power over us. Male power may be arrogant or elegant;
it can be churlish or refined: but we exist as persons to the extent that
men in power recognize us. When they need some service or want some
sensation, they recognize us somewhat, with a sliver of consciousness;
and when it is over, we go back to ignominy, anonymous, generic
womanhood. Because of their power over us, they are able to strike our hearts dead with contempt or
condescension. We need their money; intercourse is frequently how we get it. We need their approval to be able to
survive inside our own skins; intercourse is frequently how we get it. They force us to be compliant, turn us into
parasites, then hate us for not letting go. Intercourse is frequently how we hold on: fuck me. How to separate the
act of intercourse from the social reality of male power is not clear, especially because it is male power that
constructs both the meaning and the current practice of intercourse as such. But it is clear that reforms do not
change women's status relative to men, or have not yet. It is clear that reforms do not change the intractability of
women's civil inferiority. Is intercourse itself then a basis of or a key to women's continuing social and sexual
inequality? Intercourse may not cause women's orgasm or even have much of a correlation with it--indeed, we
rarely find intercourse and orgasm in the same place at the same time--but intercourse and women's inequality are
like Siamese twins, always in the same place at the same time pissing in the same pot. Women have wanted
intercourse to work and have submitted--with regret or with enthusiasm, real or faked--even though or even when it
does not. The reasons have often been foul, filled with the spiteful but carefully hidden malice of the powerless.

Women have needed what can be gotten through intercourse: the

economic and psychological survival; access to male power through access
to the male who has it; having some hold--psychological, sexual, or
economic--on the ones who act, who decide, who matter. There has been a
deep, consistent, yet of course muted objection to what Anais Nin has
called "[t]he hunter, the rapist, the one for whom sexuality is a thrust,
nothing more."3 Women have also wanted intercourse to work in this
sense: women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience
of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of
love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men,
including in the act of intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal
power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love. There has

been--despite the cruelty of exploitation and forced sex--a consistent vision for women of a sexuality based on a
harmony that is both sensual and possible. In the words of sex reformer Ellen Key: She will no longer be captured
like a fortress or hunted like a quarry; nor will she like a placid lake await the stream that seeks its way to her
embrace. A stream herself, she will go her own way to meet the other stream. 4 A stream herself, she would move
over the earth, sensual and equal; especially, she will go her own way. Shere Hite has suggested an intercourse in
which "thrusting would not be considered as necessary as it now is. . . [There might be] more a mutual lying
together in pleasure, penis-in-vagina, vagina-covering-penis, with female orgasm providing much of the stimulation
necessary for male orgasm." 5 These visions of a humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of
women; and even the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill them. They are not searching analyses
into the nature of intercourse; instead they are deep, humane dreams that repudiate the rapist as the final arbiter
of reality. They are an underground resistance to both inferiority and brutality, visions that sustain life and further
endurance. They also do not amount to much in real life with real men. There is, instead, the cold fucking, dutybound or promiscuous; the romantic obsession in which eventual abandonment turns the vagina into the wound
Freud claimed it was; intimacy with men who dread women, coital dread--as Kafka wrote in his diary, "coitus as
punishment for the happiness of being together." 6 Fear,

too, has a special power to change

experience and compromise any possibility of freedom. A stream does not
know fear. A woman does. Especially women know fear of men and of
forced intercourse. Consent in this world of fear is so passive that the
woman consenting could be dead and sometimes is. "Yeah," said one man
who killed a woman so that he could fuck her after she was dead, "I
sexually assaulted her after she was dead. I always see them girls laid out
in the pictures with their eyes closed and I just had to do it. I dreamed
about it for so long that I just had to do it." 7 A Nebraska appeals court did
not think that the murder "was especially heinous, atrocious, cruel, or
manifested exceptional depravity by ordinary standards of morality and
intelligence," and in particular they found "no evidence the acts were
performed for the satisfaction of inflicting either mental or physical pain
or that pain existed for any prolonged period of time." 8 Are you afraid
now? How can fear and freedom coexist for women in intercourse?

Women have failed to find the right relationship to the law due to the fact
that they are considered to have more private lives

West 88

(Robin West is the Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy and Associate Dean
at the Georgetown University Law Center. Jurisprudence and Gender) DOA 7.1.15 MAY
http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1642&context=facpub

Minimally, I want to suggest that feminists should think about the possibility that the notion of a "fundamental"
experienced contradiction, grounded in the material and existential state of connection with the other, might help
us explain women's subjective lives, as well as close the broadening gap between cultural and radical feminist
theory. The presence of such a contradiction, for example, explains why some women see the possibility of
intimacy in pornographic depictions of female sexual submission while others see the threat of invasion (and it
would explain why many women see both). The presence of a contradiction underlying women's subjective lives

It explains
why women insist upon and embrace an ethic of care and the right to
have children without economic hardship, while at the same time fighting
for rights of individuation, physical privacy, and freedom. Finally, it
explains the complex relationship between the emerging feminist legal
theory and dominant legal theory: it explains, for example, why legal
feminists are both attracted to liberal rights of individuation, physical
also clarifies the existential basis of many of the apparent tensions in feminist legal reforms.

privacy, and individual security, and at the same time are threatened by
them. The contradiction explains why feminists understand, and even
sympathize with, critical legal theory's rights critique, but will never
endorse it. That women live with a fundamental contradiction between
invasion and intimacy is much harder to test than the parallel claim that men
live in a fundamental contradiction between autonomy and alienation for this simple reason: the fundamental
contradiction that characterizes men's lives is manifested absolutely all over the place in public life. As Kennedy
correctly claims, once we are sensitized to it, we see the "fundamental contradiction" in art, literature, music, and,
perhaps most emphatically, in virtually every field of law. The fundamental contradiction that characterizes

does), by contrast, has no outlet. Women are silent,

particularly with respect to the injuries we suffer. This is, of course,
changing: Women speak, write books, compose music, produce art, drama
and dance, and increasingly even legislate, advocate and adjudicate law.
But nevertheless, women express their subjectivity with nowhere near
the voice of authority with which men express theirs. Women's subjectivity, unlike
men's subjectivity, is not expressed in the objective world. Women's silence, more than any
other single factor, inhibits the study of women's subjective lives. We can,
women's lives (if it

though, test the sense of this contradiction against the evidence of our own experienced lives, if not the evidence
of art, literature and legal doctrine. When I read Carol Gilligan's book for the first time several years ago, I had an
unequivocal shock of recognition. What she is saying, I thought then and still think, is important, transformative,
empowering, exciting, enlivening, and, most fundamentally, it is simply true. It is true of me, and was true of my
mother, and is true of my sisters. She has described the way I think, what I value, what I fear, how I have grown,
and how I hope to grow. And she has described the moral lives of the women I know as well. Her book captures
what I know and have always known but have never been able to claim as my own moral vision, and what parts of
that vision I share with women generally. When I read Andrea Dworkin's book, I had the same unequivocal shock
of recognition. What Dworkin is saying about intercourse is important, transformative, empowering, exciting,
liberating, enlivening, and most fundamentally, it is simply true. It is true of me, was true of my mother, and is true
of my sisters. She is describing how I have been debased, victimized, intruded, invaded, harmed, damaged,
injured, and violated by intercourse. Yet it also seems undeniably true to me that these two feminist visions of my
subjective life rest on flatly contradictory premises.

The dichotomy of private and public spheres of life has caused

womens lives to forever be different than mens
Landes 98

(Joan B. Landes is a Ferree Professor of Early Modern History and Women's Studies at
Penn State. Feminism, the Public and Private) DOA 7.3.15 MAY
A central platform of feminist critique and attempted revision of mainstream thought has focused on the

of femininity and masculinity, women and

men, woman and man, These classifications have in turn been linked to
the construction of the other highly significant categories, the
complicated and slippery notions if public and private. The everyday usage of
construction and boundaries of classifications:

public and private distinction has led to much confusion. When feminists, mainly anthropologists, first focused on
the distinction, there was an apparent universal sexual asymmetry that fitted neatly into an explanation of womens
subordinate position and as an ideology that constructed that position. As Ludmilla Jordanova has argued, The
distinction itself has to be treated as an artifact whose long life history requires careful examination.33

For feminist
historians, the public/private distinction has been linked to the notion of
separate spheres, one of the most powerful concepts within womens
history since its recrudescence in the 1960s. Such binary distinctions have
come under attack from a range to theoretical positions, including
powerful feminist solvents which stress multiplicity, plurality, and the
Furthermore, like gender itself, public and private have been used as a rich source of metaphor.

blurring of boundaries.

Yet there continued to be fascination with the seeming separation of private

we juggle the multi-layered

psychic structures of femininity as well as confronting feminine role of
daughter, wife, and mother with professional identity and/or political
activism. In Ann Sintows memorable phrase: Modern women experience moments of
free fall. How is it for you, there, out in space near me? Different I know.
Yet we share- some with more pleasure, some with more pain- this
uncertainty.4 Nevertheless, out of the confusion of a consensus is emerging that public and private are not
and public life in our own later twentieth-century situation as

(and have never been) conceptual absolutes, but a minefield of huge rhetorical potential.5 Despite their

public and private are concepts which also have had

powerful material and experiential consequences in terms of formal
institutions, organizational forms, financial systems, familial and kinship
patterns, as well as in language. In short, they have become a basic part of the way our whole
instability and mutability,

social and psychic worlds are ordered, but an order that is constantly shifting, being made and remade. Historians
grappling with this complicated web of structures, meanings, and behaviours have had to work on a number of
different levels. Should these dichotomous categories be treated only in terms of languages, or of attitudes and
values. Or should they be described in terms of languages, or of attitudes and values. Or should they be described
in terms of the organization of space, time, the location of people ?

Are they, and were they,

ideologies imposed, cultures created, or simply a set of given boundaries
to be observed? If the separate spheres of home and work, to take one
derivation, was a trope which hid its instrumentality even from those who
employed it, 6 then how can we retrieve more than the most partial
picture 100 or 200 years later? Part of the problem is the form in which historians of women have
entered the debate. For example, in a discussion of the eighteenth century, the claim has been made that: At the

the rise of the new domestic woman, the

separation of the spheres, and the construction of the public and private
all describe the same phenomenon in different words. 7 This may, indeed, be the way
bottom, the separation of the home and workplace,

these ideas have come to be used, but it is a profound misunderstanding to think that they are either analytically or
descriptively the same thing. For example, while conceptual dichotomies such as public and private are constructed
with a drive to fix boundaries between at least two different constructs which can be separated and contrasted, the
concept of domesticity and its concomitant, domestic ideology, seems historically to have no other half. (The
literal opposite of domesticity would be the wild untamed or, alternatively, foreign or strange, as in domestic goods

debates about the public and private have taken

the domestic for granted as well as being unaware of a gender dimension .
versus foreign imports.) Until recently,

The most common distinction has focused on the state as representative of the public in contrast with private
organizations such as the church, voluntary societies, and, particularly, privately owned business or professional

At times this private sector has been conflated into civil society,
regarded as above all else, the sphere of private interest, private
enterprise and private individuals.8 In this formulation, civil society
would include a notion of private life, the family, and sexuality,9
especially in the discussions of totalitarian as opposed to democratic
regimes.
enterprise.

The dichotomies of male/female, family/market, and state/civil

dictate the way women live and the political and social strides
they have the opportunities to take
Olsen 83 (Frances Elizabeth Olsen has a B.A. Goddard College, 1968; J.D. University of Colorado, 1971; S.J.D.
Harvard, 1984; and has been UCLA Faculty Since 1984. The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal
Reform) DOA 7.3.15 MAY
A central concern underlying the debate is the subordination of women to men. Both sides share
the goal of equality and independence for women. Repeated efforts at reform have resulted in a significant measure
of success, yet the subordination of women continues. Many different factors may help to
explain why the reform strategies adopted have had ambiguous and even contradictory effects. One factor that

reforms are
limited by their premises, by the unexamined assumptions upon which
they are based. One such assumption embodies the radical separation of the market
and the family, the idea that the market structures our productive lives
and the family structures our affective lives. In the nineteenth century, the family
was seen to constitute a separate sphere of activity a sphere particularly
suited to women. Womans sphere may no longer be considered to be
just home and family, but we do continue to view the family as something
sharply distinct from the market. The vision of the market and the family as a dichotomy1 the
often receives insufficient attention is the ideological foundations of social reforms. In particular,

perception that the social life comprises two separate though interdependent spheres can be describes as a
structure on consciousness.2 By structure of consciousness. I mean a shared vision of the social universe that
underlies a societys culture and also shapes the societys view of what social relationships are natural and,
therefore, what social reforms are possible. In my discussion of the market/family dichotomy, I shall refer frequently

The
state/civil society dichotomy is crucially related to the complexities of the
market/family dichotomy; and the dichotomy between male and female is
particularly important both to the ways in which the market/family
dichotomy now affects human existence and to out hopes for constructing
new ways of thinking about and leading out live s. These three dichotomies are each
to two other dichotomies the ones between state and civil society and between male and female.

distinct; none is logically dependent upon another and none necessarily entails another. Nevertheless, deep ties
exist among them, and each reflects a way of thinking that entails a radical division of the world. All three

by reconceiving the relationship

between the two elements in each of the three pairs and restructuring our
thoughts and lives to create, reflect, and reinforce those reconceptions,
we have the greatest possibility for bringing about changes that would
significantly improve our individual and collective lives.
dichotomies seem eternal; yet by transcending all three,

National Security Links

The international legal community took overwhelming action
after the 9/11 attacks but has yet to act against the same level
of violence towards women
MacKinnon 06 (Catharine MacKinnon is an Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law,
University of Michigan Law School, and Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, Stanford, Cal. Womens September 11 : Rethinking the International Law Conflict
DOA 7.1.15. MAY) http://www.harvardilj.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/HILJ_47-1_MacKinnon.pdf
th

The configuration of acts and actors of September 11, 2001 is not one that
international law, centered on states, has been primarily structured to address.1
Neither was most of mens violence against women in view when the laws of war,
international humanitarian law,2 and international human rights guarantees were
framed.3 The formal and substantive parallels between the two
prominently their horizontal legal architecture, large victim numbers, and
masculine ideology4make both patterns of violence resemble dispersed
armed conict, but the worlds response to them has been inconsistent.
Since September 11th, the international order has been newly willing to treat
nonstate actors like states as a source of violence invoking the law of armed
conict. Much of the international community has mobilized forcefully
against terrorism.5 This same international community that turned on a
dime after September 11th has, despite important initiatives,6 yet even
to undertake a comprehensive review of international laws and
institutions toward an effective strategic response to violence against
women7 with all levels of re- sponse on the table, even as the responsibility to
protect from gross and systematic violence is increasingly emerging internationally
as an afrmative duty.8 The postSeptember 11th paradigm shift, permitting potent
response to massive nonstate violence against civilians in some instances,
exemplies if not a model for emulation, a supple adaptation to a parallel challenge.
It shows what they can do when they want to. If, in tension with the existing
framework, the one problem can be confronted internationally, why not the other?

Violence against women has the same magnitude as 9/11 but

the war on women has little to no recognition under the law
MacKinnon 06 (Catharine MacKinnon is an Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law,
University of Michigan Law School, and Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, Cal. Womens September 11 : Rethinking the
International Law Conflict DOA 7.1.15. MAY) http://www.harvardilj.org/wpth

content/uploads/2010/10/HILJ_47-1_MacKinnon.pdf

Viewed through a gendered lens, September 11th was markedly sex-neutral on the
victims side. Women, along with menif, one supposes due to sex discrimination
in employment, not equal numbers of themwere people that day.9 At the World
Trade Center, women and men together rushed up and up to help, crawled down
and down being helped, jumped unbearably, ran covered with fear and ash,
became ash. Then, day after day, month after month, there they all were, one at a
time on the special memorial pages of The New York Times, 10 often smiling,
before. In remembrance, they were individuals, did everything, had every prospect.
Then on one crushing day, they were vaporized without regard to sex. On the
perpetrators side, the atrocities were hardly sex- or gender-neutral. Animated by a
male-dominant ethos, this one in the guise of religiona particular fundamentalist
extremism that has silenced women, subordinated them in private, and excluded
them from public lifethese men bound for glory and pleasure, some for virgins in
a martyrs paradise,11 exterminated people by the thousands to make a point.
The rest of the world is still trying to gure out exactly what that point was. But this
aggression, these atrocities, this propaganda by deed, made September 11th an
exemplary day of male violence. Every other day, as well as this one, men as well
as women are victimized by mens violence. But it is striking that the number
of people who died at these mens hands on September 11th, from 2800
to 3000, is almost identical to the number of women who die at the hands
of men every year in just one country, the same one in which September
11th happened.12 Women murdered by male intimates alone could have
lled one whole World Trade tower of September 11s dead.13 This part
of a war on women in only one country, variously waged in all
countries,14 is far from sex-equal on either side. To call violence against
women a war, especially in a legal context, is usually dismissed as metaphorical,
hyperbolic, and/or rhetorical. Since the U.N. Charter, when war ceased being the
definitive legal term, international law speaks of armed conflict or armed
attack. This body of law primarily regulates the use of force between or within
states or for control of states.15 If one side is armed and the other side is not, or if
states are not the units or focus of the ghting, the conflict may not qualify.
Whether the ghting has reached the point where peacetime law and institutions
have broken down is a prime criterion. Violence against women has not looked like
a war in this system in part because states are not seen to wage it, nor does it
present armies contending within or across or against or for control or for denition
of states. It is not about state power in the usual way. Nor do the sexes look like
combatant groups are thought to look. Neither sex is considered to be in uniform.
The regularities of their social behavior are not seen as organized, so their conict
looks more chaotic than ordered. Women are usually unarmed, many
weapons used against women are not regarded as arms, and women do
not typically ght back. Even attacks on women by men that employ
conventional weapons are not considered armed attacks or a use or
threat of force in the international legal sense.16 The battle of the
sexes simply does not look the way a war is supposed to look.

Even in matters of national security, masculine crimes are

considered war while violence against women is hidden by
an indifferent legal system
MacKinnon 06 (Catharine MacKinnon is an Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law,
University of Michigan Law School, and Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, Cal. Womens September 11 : Rethinking the
International Law Conflict DOA 7.1.15. MAY) http://www.harvardilj.org/wpth

content/uploads/2010/10/HILJ_47-1_MacKinnon.pdf

The threshold legal barrier to addressing male violence against women

internationally has been that both the perpetrators and the victims are
private persons, termed nonstate actors. But Osama bin Laden and his Al
Qaeda networkassuming they are behind the 9/11 attacks32are also
private citizens. Allegations have been made of varying levels of state
involvement, linkage, and backup to their plot, but, so far as is known, Al Qaeda
was not working for any state. If anything, Osama bin Laden may have hijacked
Afghanistan, its illegitimate regime potentially working for him rather than the
other way around. An Al Qaeda connection with Saddam Husseins regime has been
officially oated in the United States and is widely believed, but no direct evidence
for it has yet surfaced.33 Under the laws of war, conduct of private persons or
entities has required some degree of state control or adoption to be attributable to
states.34 As to September 11th, state action has not only not been proven; it has
so far barely been credibly alleged. On the victim side, the Pentagon would have
been a military target in a war (although it cannot legally be hit with civilian
aircraft), but the World Trade towers, which Mr. bin Laden apparently regarded as
some sort of official target, were private buildings full of mostly private citizens
working for private corporations. The twin towers certainly were in the United
States, symbolized the nation to some, and were a cultural icon of sorts, but for
legal purposes, they were not the United States. They were not a military
target, for which, in a war, a military response is legal. In a war, they
would be a civilian target, a war crime to attack, to be pursued judicially.
And before, on, and since September 11th, Al Qaedas victims have transcended
national boundaries, as do the victims of the war on women. So, on September
11th, nonstate actors committed violence against mostly nonstate
(nongovernmental and civilian) actors. It has been basically inconceivable
within the Westphalian system that such an act could be so damaging or provide
the predicate for the level of response it has occasioned.35 Yet from that moment
forth, in a usage that slides between the legal and the ordinary, the concrete and
the rhetorical, the United States has told the world, We are at war.36
With no state yet in view behind the aggression, U.N. Security Council resolutions
concerning September 11th implied that the events of that dreadful day were an
armed attack.37 NATO invoked collective defense for the first time in its

history.38 So this becomes a warcomplete with war crimes, military tribunals,

potentially justified acts of self-defense, and prisoners of war.39 The fact that the
existing structure of international law does not have a conflict like this primarily in
mind has not stopped the wartime scale response, complete with military
mobilization, nance, ordnance, rhetoric, and alliances. Few have called the time
since September 11th peacetime. This international effort, the war on terror, calls
the acts of September 11th terrorism, a term that has a far less settled
international definition than armed conflict has.40 Yet U.N. Security Council
resolutions have used it repeatedly in reference to the events of September 11th
without definition,41 over little protest. Clearly, the acts of that day fall within a
widely understood meaning of the term. Common elements include premeditation
rather than spontaneity, ideological and political rather than criminal motive,
civilian targets (sometimes termed innocents), and sub-national group agents.42
What about violence against women fails to qualify? Much of it is
planned, including many gang rapes and serial murders, much stalking
and sexual harassment, a lot of pornography production, and most sex
trafficking. Are women somehow not innocent, qua women existentially
at fault? If the language of war reveals women as de facto conscripts, always noncivilians yet never combatants, the language of terrorism shows that women are
seldom innocent enough. And just what about womens status relative to
men is not political? If sex is one way power is socially organized,
forming a sexual politics, sexual violence is a practice of that politics,
misogyny its ideology.43

Law Links

Patriarchal hierarchies are the building blocks of the law and

inherent to the system that governs usminute changes to the
system cant solve it, and claims to make the law less biased
are disingenuous.
Smith 1995
(Patricia, contributor to the book "Theory Philosopy law: contemporary challenges to
mainstream critical theory and practice, edited by David S Caudill and Steven Gold
essay Feminist Legal Critics: The Reluctant Radicals, page 77)

The problems caused by the general rationale that bases a discrimination

claim solely on the differential treatment of similarly situated persons
show that it cannot deal with questions of fair treatment where
differences are real. There is something so obviously wrong with the idea
that where differences are real equal protection of the law cannot apply,
that a raft of critical commentary has been generated which has led to a
more radical feminist critique of law. What feminists have realized is that
equal protection itself, while claiming to be neutral, in fact assumes a
male standard of what is normal. For example, the average working woman will
be pregnant twice during her working career. Pregnancy is abnormal only for a
working man. Thus, the standard of normality that discounts pregnancy for working
persons is male. The question, of course, is why should that be the
standard?

Christine Littleton has summarized the feminist critique of current equality

analysis in the following three points that demonstrate its male bias. First,
it defines as beyond its scope precisely those issues that women find
crucial to their concrete experience as women (such as pregnancy). Second,
it construes difference (which is created by the relationship of women to
particular, contingent social structures, such as home and work responsibilities) as
natural (that is, unchangeable and inherent) and as located solely in the
woman herself (women are naturally domestic). Third, it assumes (without
evidence) the gender neutrality of social institutions, as well as the notion
that practices must distinguish themselves from business as usual in
order to be seen as unequal.

More briefly put, equality analysis is biased against women in three

respects: (1) it is inapplicable once it encounters a real difference from
men; (2) it locates the difference in women, rather than in relationships;
and (3) it fails to question the assumption that social institutions are

gender neutral, and that women and men are therefore similarly related
to those institutions.

This analysis made many feminists acutely aware of the arbitrariness of

norms and of the fact that the inability of the courts to deal with sex
discrimination in many cases is directly related to the inability to evaluate
biased norms. And some feminists reasoned that if the liberal
presumption of neutral legal processes retards the ability to evaluate
norms as biased, then the liberal approach is sharply limited in its ability
to correct systematic injustice, such as that which grows out of systematic
patriarchal norms.

Selective application of the law also uniquely impacts women

and results in patriarchal domination.
Kairys 82
(David, Professor of Sociology at U. Penn, The Politics of Law)

Exclusion of Law from the Domestic Sphere. Feminists point out that law has
been conspicuously absent from the domestic sphere and that this has
contributed to womens subordination. On a practical level, it leaves
wives without a remedy against domination by their husbands, and on an
ideological level, it devalues women and their functions. The important
activities of our society are regulated by law, and when law maintains a
hands-off posture, it implies women simply are not sufficiently important
to merit legal regulation. The insulation of the womens sphere conveys
an important message: In our society law is for business and other
important things. The fact that the law in general has so little bearing on
womens day-to-day concerns reflects and underscores their
insignificance. Thus, once again law has failed truly to be rational,
objective, abstract, and principled.

A distinction should be made between this description of part of the ideology and
the more complicated picture of ideas and reality. The history of laissez-faire
policies toward domestic life is considerably more complex than this description
suggests. Laws have regulated family life, directly and indirectly, for
centuries. Laws have also long reinforced the dichotomy between the
private home and the public market, and they have done so in ways
that have been peculiarly destructive to women.

Incremental Reforms Link

The aff functions as an incremental reform which serves to
mask the patriarchy of the status quo by hiding it in reforms
that do nothing to restructure the fundamental hierarchies of
our political system.
Reardon, 85
(Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia, Sexism and the War
System, Syracuse University Press, pg 89-90)

The masculine mode approaches transformation and transition of the

global order in the same analytic abstract fashion as it approaches other
intellectual issues. The two concepts are perceived as a discrete set of
end circumstances and a specific sequence of strategies to achieve them.
The transformation, the end circumstances, generally are described in
terms of specific structures and processes. These very often take the
form of models that frequently appear to feminist and Third World eyes to
be a rearrangement of traditional forms of power rather than a full and
authentic transformation of the present reality.

Masculine models of transformation, frequently referred to as system

change, tend to be abstracted from everyday human conditions, to
display a central concern with power arrangements, and to be preoccupied
with the concept of sovereignty, an essentially patriarchal notion. Some
focus much attention on determining which component of the revised
structures will be endowed with the power and the right legitimately to
use force, whether that force be armed or non-violent. Such models can be
depicted by charts, diagrams, computer games, and institutional descriptions, but
almost never do they have any explicit element of human relations or
affective, emotional content, and few have displayed any cultural
dimension.

The strategies set forth in the masculine mode for the transition process
tend to be primarily political and economic. They are at their best in
proposals for staged disarmament and plans for industrial conversion.
They are conceived as steps to be taken in the public arena, in a
particular, incremental style (though of varying degrees of rapidity) and
impacting primarily on public life. The value changes included in
transition scenarios tend to be norms for social and public policies such as
protection for human rights and procedures for conflict resolution. They
are corporate rather than personal and conceived so as to have a direct
impact on the public domain. The consequent effects of value changes on

the private and personal spheres are given little if any more attention in
world order transition strategies than in present public policy formation.
This blindness to secondary consequences gives feminists, who do assess
policy impact on women, cause for concern that the proposals are indeed
more rearrangement than transformation. Indeed, it is this masculine
preoccupation with the public and structural that has aborted the
transformative potential of most twentieth-century revolutions. It kept
them as just that: a revolution, a turning of the major power wheels that
failed to produce changes in the fundamental global order. Such changes
remove a particular group from political power but do not make
connections to changes in the interpersonal realm nor to the nonmaterial
sources of personal empowerment that feminism emphasizes. (It must be
noted that some women researchers and futurists, myself included, have produced
these same kinds of masculine scenarios.) The transition scenarios in the masculine
mode have always been far weaker, less convincing, and less relevant either to the
goal or the present reality than are their visions of transformed structures. In
general there is a significant disjuncture between the transformative
visions and the plans for the process to achieve them. Masculine models
of transformation exhibit little or no consideration of the personal and
individual changes that will be required. It is my opinion that this
weakness in world order modeling results from the lack of the human,
explicit, behavioral elements that are characteristic of the feminine mode.

State Link
Status quo analyses of international law center on the State as
the primary actor in global politicsthis confines women to a
domestic sphere outside the scope of international analysis
Sassen-96 (Saskia, Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at Columbia,
Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy, 4 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 7
1996-1997)
The particular form that the feminist critique of international law is taking has the
effect of avoiding the question of sovereignty, and the implications of its unbundling
for the emergence of new actors in cross-border relations and as subjects of
international law. In a critical review of the feminist scholarship on international law,
Knop notes that personifying the State has the effect of denying the individual and
collective identity of women within a State and across States.' Women are confied to
the realm of the given State and rendered invisible from the perspective of
international law insofar as they are subsumed under the State's sovereignty. Her
central argument is that we need both a critical examination of sovereignty and of
the assumption that it pertains exclusively to the State.6 The impact of globalization
on sovereignty has been significant in creating operational and conceptual openings
for other actors and subjects.62 Feminist readings that personify the State leave
sovereignty unexamined; the State remains the exclusive subject for international
law. This is not to deny the importance of the types of critiques evident in this
feminist scholarship. But when it comes to a critique of international law, leaving
out the issue of sovereignty and taking its confinement to the nation-state as a
given represents a fall-back on statism--the legitimacy of the State as the subject of
international law regardless of whether it is representative of the people's will, or
more fundamentally, rigorous in its adherence to the precepts of democratic
representation.63 Why does it matter that we develop a feminist critique of
sovereignty today in the context of globalization? It matters because globalization is
creating new operational and formal openings for the participation of non-State
actors and subjects. Once the sovereign State is no longer viewed as the exclusive
representative of its population in the international arena, women and other nonState actors can gain more representation in international law; contribute to the
making of international law; and give new meaning to older forms of international
participation, such as women's longstanding work in international peace efforts.'
Beyond these issues of participation and representation is a question about the
implications of feminist theory for alternative conceptions of sovereignty.65

The state restricts and fails to protect the interests of women

in the domestic and international realms.
Blanchard 03 (Eric, PhD in Political Science from University of Southern
California and American Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellow, Gender,
International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory,
http://people.reed.edu/~ahm/Courses/Reed-POL-240-2012S1_IP/Syllabus/EReadings/05.1/05.1.zFurther_Blanchard2003Gender.pdf, pg. 1297)

Like Tickner, many IR feminists problematize the state and raise questions as to its
status as protector of women. Peterson argues that, in addition to its relegation of
sexual violence and its threat to the private domestic realm, the state is implicated
in the ways that women become the objects of masculinist social control not only
through direct violence (murder, rape, battering, incest), but also through
ideological constructs, such as womens work and the cult of motherhood, that
justify structural violenceinadequate health care, sexual harassment, and sexsegregated wages, rights and resources (1992c, 46). However, while not denying
the possibility of limited protection offered by the state (Harrington 1992), FST
contests the notion of protectionthe exchange of obedience/subordination for
(promises of) securityas a justification for state power (Peterson 1992c, 50).
Peterson likens the states provision of security for women to a protection racket,
implicated in the reproduction of hierarchies and in the structural violence against
which they claim to offer protection (1992c, 51). In addition, Stiehm argues that
the state typically denies women the opportunity to be societal protectors, assigning to them the role of protected despite the predatory threat often posed by
their ostensible guardians (1983a). Governmental attempts to achieve total security
versus an external threat can result in predictable oppression: The problem is that
the potential victim is both more accessible and compliant than the marauder.
Because the protector is embarrassed and frustrated by his failure to protect, he
restricts his protectee instead (373). By circumscribing the possibilities of the
female deployment of legitimate force, the masculine state effectively denies the
development of what Stiehm calls a defender society, one composed of citizens
equally liable to experience violence and equally responsible for exercising societys
violence (367).

Impacts

Impact: Nuclear War

Acting out patriarchal rituals of masculine dominance and
ritual warfare is no longer feasible in the world of nuclear
weapons.
Reardon, 1993
(Betty. Director of Peace Education Program at Columhia University, Women find
Peacej
Feminist Visions of Global Security, page 29)

In an article entitled "Naming the Cultural Forces That Push Us Toward War" (1983),
Charlene Spretnak focused on some of the fundamental cultural factors that
deeply influence ways of thinking about security. She argues that patriarchy
encourages militarist tendencies.
Since the major war now could easily bring on massive annihilation of
almost unthinkable proportions, why are discussions in our national
forums addressing the madness of the nuclear arms race limited to
matters of hardware and statistics? A more comprehensive analysis is
badly needed ...
A clearly visible element in the escalating tensions among militarized
nations is the macho posturing and the patriarchal ideal of dominance not
parity, which motivates defense ministers and government leaders to
"strut their stuff" as we watch with increasing horror.
Most men in our patriarchal culture are still acting out old patterns that
are radically inappropriate for the nuclear age. To prove dominance and
control, to distance one's character from that of women, to survive the
toughest violent initiation, to shed the sacred blood of the hero, to
collaborate with death in order to hold it at bay-all of these patriarchal
pressures on men have traditionally reached resolution in ritual fashion on
the battlefield. But there is no longer any battlefield. Does anyone
seriously believe that if a nuclear power were losing a crucial, large-scale
conventional war it would refrain from using its multiple-warhead nuclear
missiles because of some diplomatic agreement? The military theater of a
nuclear exchange today would extend, instantly or eventually, to all living
things, all the air, all the soil, all the water.
If we believe that war is a "necessary evil," that patriarchal presumptions
are simply "human nature," then we are locked into a lie, paralyzed. The
ultimate result of unchecked terminal patriarchy will be nuclear holocaust.
The causes of recurrent warfare are not biological. Neither are they solely
economic. They are also a result of patriarchal ways of thinking, which

historically have generated considerable pressure for standing armies to

be used.

Patriarchy will cause global nuclear war.

Eisler, 1987
(Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice and The Blade:
Our History, Our Future, page 184)

Just as the Kurgan invasions truncated our early cultural evolution, totalitarians
and would-be totalitarians still block our cultural evolution at every turn
today, aided by both old and new androcratic myths. In the last few
centuries, the partial shift from a dominator to a partnership society has
partly freed humanity, allowing some movement toward a more just and
equalitarian society. But at the same time there has been a strong
countermovement, on both left and right, to more deeply entrench the
dominator society in its modern or totalitarian form.

Given the strong inertial pull of androcratic social and ideological

organization and the new technologies of both body and mind control
(modem propaganda, drugs, nerve gases, and even experiments in psychic control),
a totalitarian future is a real possibility. Such a world order, however,
probably would not last very long.

For be they religious or secular, modern or ancient, Eastern or Western,

the basic commonality of totalitarian leaders and would-be leaders is their
faith in the power of the lethal Blade as the instrument of deliverance. A
dominator future is therefore, sooner or later, almost certainly also a
future of global nuclear war-and the end of humanity's problems and
aspirations.

We solve nuclear wareliminating patriarchy shifts resources

from technologies of destruction to technologies of life.
Eisler, 1987
(Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice and The Blade:
Our History, Our Future, page 15)

What, at our level of technological development, would be the political and

economic implications of a complete shift from a dominator to a
partnership society? We have the technologies that in a world no longer
governed by the Blade could vastly accelerate our cultural evolution. As
Ruth Sivard records in her yearly report World Military and Social Expenditures, the
cost of developing one intercontinental ballistic missile could feed 50 million
children, 'build 160,000 schools, and open
340,000 health care centers. Even the cost of a single new nuclear submarine-equal
to the annual education budget of twenty-three developing countries in a world
where 120 million children have no school they can go to and 11 million babies die
before their first birthdaycould open new opportunities for millions of people now
doomed to live in poverty and ignorance.
What we lack, as futurist writings stress again and again, is the social
guidance system, the governing values, that would redirect the allocation
of resources, including our advanced technological know-how, to higher
ends.
Willis Harman, when has headed major futurist studies at the Stanford Research
Institute, writes that what is needed-and evolvingis metamorphosis in
basic cultural premises and all aspects of social rules and institutions." He
describes this as a new consciousness in which competition will be
balanced with cooperation and individualism will be balanced with love. It
will be a "cosmic consciousness," a fuller awareness," which "relates selfinterest to the interests of fellow man and of future generations." And it
will entail nothing short of a fundamental transformation of "truly
awesome magnitude."
Similarly, in the second Club of Rome report we read that in order to avoid major
regional and ultimately global catastrophe," we must develop a new world
system "guided by a rational master plan for long-term organic growth,"
held together by "a spirit of truly global cooperation, shaped in free
partnership."' This world system would be governed by a new global ethic
based on a greater consciousness of and identification with future as well
as presentation generations and will require cooperation, rather than
confrontation and harmony with, rather than conquest of, nature become
our normative ideals.
A striking aspect of these projections is that these futurists do not see
technology or economics as the main determinants of our future. They
recognize instead that our roads to the future will be shaped by social
arrangement, in other words, that our future will be primarily determined
by the way we human beings conceive its possibilities, potentials, and
implications. In the words of the futurist John McHale, "Our mental blueprints are
its basic action programs.

But what is most remarkable is that what many futurists are actually sayingpractically, in so many words-is that we must leave behind the hard,
conquest-oriented values traditionally associated with "masculinity." For is
not the need for a "spirit of truly global cooperation, shaped in free
partnership," "a balancing of individualism with love," and the normative
goal of "harmony with rather than conquest of nature," the reassertion of
a more "feminine ethos"? And to what end could "drastic changes in the
norm stratum" or a "metamorphosis in basic cultural premises and all
aspects of social institutions" relate if not to the replacement of a
dominator with a partnership society?
The transformation from a dominator to a partnership society would
obviously bring with it a shift in our technological direction: from the use
of advanced technology for destruction and domination to its use for
sustaining and enhancing human life. At the same time, the wastefulness
and overconsumption that now robs those in need would also begin to
wane. For as many social commentators have observed, at the core of our
Western complex of overconsumption and waste lies the fact that we are
culturally obsessed with getting, buying, building and wasting things, as a
substitute for the satisfactory emotional relationships that are denied us
by the child-raising styles and the values of adults in the present system.
Above all, the shift from androcracy to gylany would begin to end the
politics of domination and the economics of exploitation that in our world
still go hand in hand. For as John Stuart Mill pointed out over a century ago in his
groundbreaking Principles of Political Economy, the way economic resources are
distributed is a function not of some inflexible economic laws, but of political-that is,
humanchoices.

Impact: Violence
The patriarchy itself is a form of violence.
Reardon, 1993
(Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia University, Women and
Peace:
Feminist Visions of Global Security, page 14)

While a comprehensive concept of peace far more than the absence of war is the
notion that informs and motivates most of the women's peace movement, war
itself, the political uses of armed conflict, is the starting point of the search for
peace; for peace will ultimately depend on the abolition of war, the negation of
armed conflict. The field of peace research has identified this negation as negative
peace. Negative peace, it has been asserted, is essential to the transcendence of all
other forms of violence; and, it is argued, it is violence, not conflict, that is the core
issue to be addressed in confronting the problem of war. Feminists, especially,
argue that there is a fundamental interrelationship among all forms of
violence, and that violence is a major consequence of the imbalance of a
male-dominated society. Force of various types, from the intimidation of
rape to the social imposition of dependency, maintains this balance, In
itself, the patriarchy is a form of violence.
War has always been the most well organized and destructive form of violence in
which human beings have engaged, However, physical or direct violence,
particularly military violence, in the twentieth century appears to be more
varied and is certainly more socially destructive than it has ever been.
Armed conflict itself is a common condition of life throughout the world.
"Low intensity conflict, the constant and pervasive warfare that has
plagued Central America, the Philippines, and other areas where internal
violence and other struggles characterize politics, has become the rnost
common form of war in our time. It is waged by governments, political
factions and drug lords. Such "civil conflicts, and the excessive
violence that currently plagues urban society, take more civilian lives than
lives of combatants, and disrupt and debase the life of entire societies. For
example, gunfights have occurred between rival gangs in cities; children have been
shot on playgrounds and have shot each other in their schools. In the fall of1991,
the New York Times reported that many children, some as young as nine, carry guns
for "protection.
While the media and policymakers focus more on the major events of armed conflict
among nations, such as that which has kept the Middle East In a constant state of
hostility, these other incidents of warfare go on unabated.

Direct intentional violence of this kind is evidence of a militarized society,

one in which the power of coercion is the main social currency, and one
from which numerous other forms of violence are condoned. While states
continue to rely on war for their ultimate defense, they also continue to
claim the sole right to use such organized violence. Maintaining the claim
perpetuates the institution itself that both sanctions and inspires a level
of violence that the state can no longer control.

Impact: Fascism
The model of Man as Dominator is responsible for fascism.
Eisler, 1987
(Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice and The Blade:
Our History, Our Future, page l66.)

The modern rise of fascism and other rightist ideologies is most lamented
by those who still harbor hope that we may continue our cultural
evolution. They note with alarm that rightist ideologies that reimpose
authoritarianism and push us back to a time of even greater injustice and
inequality. They are particularly alarmed by the unilateralism of rightists and
neorightists, their idealization of violence, bloodshed and war, recognizing the
imminent danger this way of thinking to our safety and survival. But there is a third
aspect of rightist ideology that is rarely noted. This is that rightists-all the way
from the American Right at the end of this century to the Action Franco
used at its start-not only accept, but openly recognize the systems
relationship between male dominance, warfare, and authoritarianism.

If we objectively reexamine the political regimes of modern times, we see

that it is no accident that rigid male dominance, and with it the dominance
of "masculine" values, have marked some of the most violent and
repressive modem regimes. This was the case in Hitlers Germany, in
Franco's Spain, and in Mussolini's Italy. Such repressive regimes as those of Idi
Amin in Africa, Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, Aqiil in the West Indies, and Ceausescu in
Romania further illustrates the point.

Impact: Diplomacy
Patriarchal playacting kills diplomacy.
Cohn et al. 2005
(Carol Cohn[Senior Research Scholar in Political Science, Wellesley College; Senior
Researcher, Fletcher School of Law and DiplomacyTufts], Felicity Hill [Peace
and Security Adviser, United Nations Development Fund for Women], and Sara
Ruddick [Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Womyns Studies, The New School for
Social Research], The Relevance of Gender for Eliminating Weapons of Mass
Destruction, Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission 6-7, 12 June 2005, available
at http://www.wmdcommission.org/files/No38.pdf)

By correlation, although the practice of diplomacy is also ritualised and

masculinised in many ways, US culture has never accorded diplomacy the
strong, muscular attributes that are heaped on soldiering. US movies are
not filled with brawny movie stars playing heroes in the diplomatic corps.
Manly action heroes seldom carry briefcases (unless they are undercover
James Bonds). Nor do they, in the cultural meanings of masculinity
dominant in the United States, make treaties and depend on the other
parties to honour their obligations under those treaties. This point was
acutely represented in a recent political cartoon in a US newspaper that featured
the earth as a jigsaw puzzle with one piece missing from the centre. President
George W. Bush was depicted walking away with that piece under his arm saying,
treaties are for wimps.
In other words, consulting, negotiating, acknowledging interdependence
and worst of all depending on others, are activities that are culturally
marked down as weak and lacking in masculinity. In the US cultural and
symbolic system, trying to get what you want by talking and persuading,
depending, trusting and compromising is feminine; having the power to
enforce your will is much more masculine.

Alternatives

Alternative: World Without Violence

The alternative is to embrace life and conceptualize a world

without violence.
Reardon, 1993
(Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia University, Women and
Peace:
Feminist Visions of Global Security, page 3'5)

The ultimate and fundamental value that informs women's peace efforts is
the sanctity of all life, including the lives of those whom militaristic
thinking designates as enemies. For example, it was women's groups who spoke
most forcefully of the callous lack of concern for the thousands of Iraqi civilian lives
exhibited in the use of excessive force to expel the occupying forces of Iraq from
Kuwait in January and February 1991. These views and values are very
different from those that now govern security policy making. Current
policy makers do not seem to be able to envision a truly different world,
one that is authentically secure, peaceful, and humane. In The New World
Order they seem to see a future very much the same as the present, with
minor adjustments in power arrangements still held in place by force or
the threat of force to be applied with the sanction of the United Nations.
They seldom grasp the possibilities for alternatives to arms and violence
in extreme conflict situations. Women know the world can be very
different, and they can and do envision alternative futures in which the
peoples of the world can live together as to enhance the quality of life for
all. Women have conceptualized a peaceful world, not one without conflict,
but as one without violence. Women's visions of the future involve the
achievement of authentic, comprehensive global security. Such visions
are evident in the emergent framework of global security that can be
discemed in womens major campaigns and actions for peace, justice, and
the environment.

Alternative: Personal Change

Personal relational change must precede structural change so
as to avoid being dictated by structures.
Reardon, 85
(Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia, Sexism and the War
System, Syracuse University Press, pg 83-84)

For me, transformation involves a profound cultural change of such

consequence and dimension as to constitute a different world. Social and
political institutions certainly would have to be changed radically, but,
more significantly, so too would human relations, both social and
personal. My preferred future is one without sexism or racism, which
among other attributes of the present I hope to see banished from that
different world. This would mean a very different way of relating to others, even
for those very few who had not in pretransformation days been afflicted with those
particular social diseases.
Structural design certainly figures into my notion of transformation, but
its role in the total change process is secondary to that of significant
changes in human relations. The fundamental values of equity and
mutuality, which I advocate as the norms to guide the changes, would of
necessity also influence social and political structures. The structural
changes, however, should emerge from the changing relations rather than
coming prior to them. In other words, structures should facilitate human
relations and give institutional form to the fundamental values rather than
dictate and control relations and values as they have in male-dominated
society. Thus a blueprint is not part of these reflections on the question of
transformation. The emphasis here is more on the need for personal and
relational change. If we cannot change ourselves, I doubt we can change
the world.

Structural change that is not coupled with personal human

change is ineffective.
Reardon, 85
(Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia, Sexism and the War
System, Syracuse University Press, pg 85)

It has long been my belief that authentic transformation of the global order is
as much a matter of emotional maturity as of structural change. The crux
of the argument set forth in this book, that neither sexism nor the war
system can be overcome independently from the other, lies in the

assumption that structural, even revolutionary, changes in the public

order without significant inner psychic changes in human beings will be
ineffective, old wine in new bottles. Authentic transformations have occurred
only when people themselves have changed their world views, their
values, and their behaviors as a basis for change in the social and political
structures. Such change usually involve the society coming to perceive
itself as a manifestation of a new set of human, sometimes cosmic,
relationships. This assumption about the interrelationship of personal and
political change, which has been a major influence on my approach to peace
education, began as an intuition but has evolved into a fundamental
hypothesis, one that is shared by other feminists.

This hypothesis is what lies at the base of feminist insistence that the
personal circumstances of women have political roots and political
significance. It is central to what some have perceived as an inordinate
feminist emphasis on specific details of personal relationships between
men and women and preoccupation with domestic social and economic
policies that affect the everyday quality of life for women. Child care,
abortion rights, and payment for housework, although conceptualized and
expressed in terms of improving womens lot, are at base as structural as
the concerns with such issues as peace-keeping forces and adjudication
procedures that world order models have emphasized.

Alternative: Transformation
Feminist models are key to transformation because oppression
and militarism are interrelatedonly feminist viewpoints
observe the interrelation and solve the root of the problem.
Reardon, 85
(Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia, Sexism and the War
System, Syracuse University Press, pg 2)

My reflections during these years have been related primarily to the actual and
potential roles of women and womens movements in the process of structural
transformation, which the world order movementcomprising scholars and activists
seeking to end war and oppressionsees as fundamental to the achievement of
peace. These reflections on the need for womens perspectives and participation in
the transformational process have led me to recognize the common characteristics
and manifestations of womens oppression and warfare. It is clear that
interrelationships exist between contemporary militarization and other reactionary
trends, including opposition to womens struggle for equality. A few feminist peace
researchers, in fact, have moved from disciplined speculation to serious substantive
study regarding the causes of both sexism and the war system, their common
characteristics, and the interrelationships between sexist oppression and
militarization. I have come to believe that the two problems not only are
symbiotically related, but are twin manifestations of the same underlying cause.
This requires that they be viewed as twin, not separate, problems. They should
command simultaneous and equal attention from those fields of research,
education, and political action that purport to be devoted to their abolition.

Alternative: Solves Rules

Rules and structures are essential to authoritarianism. The K
solves the aff because a feminist perspective would bend
existing rules to solve the advantagesthe aff cant solve the
K because it relies on structural hierarchies to solve.
Reardon, 85
(Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia, Sexism and the War
System, Syracuse University Press, pg 30-31)

Care and concern tend to be person- and relationship-oriented rather than

structures- and rules-oriented. When the structures or rules are seen as
harmful to persons, particularly related persons (friends, family, dependents), a
feminine perspective would bend the rules or go around the structures.
Unquestioning adherence to rules or structures is essential to
authoritarianism. Social justice depends more on respect for persons and
is less abstract than justice unqualified because it can be conceived and
described in personal terms of concrete human experience.
Authoritarianism generally ignores social justice issues in these human
terms. Frequently, however, especially in socialistically oriented
authoritarian governments the social justice issues are translated into
economic, structural issues. So while women and minorities still may be
subject to other forms of oppression, they are less likely to be desperately
poor. The economic benefits are, however, conceived and distributed in
abstract categories, usually defined according to economic function (that
is, factory worker, teacher, dependent children). Clever authoritarian states
sometimes even can present the image of caring. This is more easily accomplished
if the authority is a woman or has a devoted wife and helpmate. There are more
recent examples, but Eva Peron is still a shining example of that class.

AT: Aff Args

AT: White Feminism

The K the Next Step in Bringing All Women Together
recognizing gender differences key.
Lindsey BENDER 2015
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handle=hein.journals/vlr15&div=6&g_sent=1&collection=journalsfrom From:
Gender Difference To Feminist Solidarity: Using Carol Gilligan And An Ethic Of Care
In Law affirmed feminist lawyer who often writes for several accolade law journals. Her written works
are the source of many gender inequality/ feminist research papers and testimonials
We can say meaningful things about

women

that respond to the concerns, needs and experiences of women from different

with all of our differences

accounted for, can achieve a feminist solidarity for social and legal transformation.
Gender difference theories, which investigate and work from these acknowledged
commonalities among women, provide a rich vein (a mother lode) for us to tap in
our reconstructive and transformative efforts. Even though some feminist theories
may be so advanced that they triumph over gender difference analysis, the
historical and particularized context of the 1990s in which feminists are working for
is mired in the consequences and experiences of gender differences. In reflecting on
economic classes, different races, different privileges and statuses. Women,

feminisms contributions in the 1980s and envisioning its future for the 1990s and beyond, I want to share some of
my thoughts about the continued usefulness of a theory sown in the field of gender differences. Whether we like it

gender is still (and historically has been) an organizing concept in our society. We
have no choice but to work and theorize for change from a position within a bi-polar
gender system. We can challenge a dichotomized thinking and bi-polar substantive
construction, but we cannot ignore is systematic, political, practical, and lived
experience. Gender may not be a unified concept or separable experience, but it is a coherent, functional springboard for change. By combining
or not,

what we gain from existing differences analyses with a dominance (or power) analysis and emphasizing feminist methods, we can design a useful
theoretical base for our next decade. I prefer to call this modification of gender difference theory by another name feminist solidarity. My argument is
that gender difference analysis can give birth to feminist solidarity. I offer these thoughts as a part of an ongoing conversation.

The exclusion of women, by men, from society leads to the

exclusion and dehumanization of even more oppressed groups
such as people of color, the physically challenged, the lower
class and homosexuals leaving only fully able, rich, white, men
to be completely unsuppressed reject the institutionalized
male power for feminist solidary
Lindsey BENDER 2015
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Gender Difference To Feminist Solidarity: Using Carol Gilligan And An Ethic Of Care
In Law affirmed feminist lawyer who often writes for several accolade law journals. Her written works
are the source of many gender inequality/ feminist research papers and testimonials

Feminists ought not let our theory- building be immobilized by the much of this causation quagmire. However it was that

the

domination of women

got started, throughout our history and up to the present, women

have lived in a society that treats us differently from men. Difference Theorists claim that different treatment, roles, expectations,
and experiences based on gender correlate with different modes of thinking, acting, and interrelating, and interpreting reality. These

creates issues of common concern and interest for women. Dominance

theorists may even agree, but they utilize these differences. At a minimum, difference theorists clearly understand that
differences from men

privileging some speakers and stories ( mens) excludes and marginalizes others (womens) because of those power dynamics
gender difference theorists insist on uncovering the stories of people, particularly women, who traditionally have been excluded and
subordinated and marginalized in the power structures of society. As difference theorists have developed and as gender theorists

feminists have come to understand that even

people who have been excluded from power In important ways ( for example, white
middle class, heterosexual women) can unconsciously reproduce patterns of
exclusion in their own theorizing ( by excluding women of color, lower class and
impoverished women, lesbians) this failing, to which difference theories can begin
anew without giving up on gender difference theories entirely. We can learn the
consequences of exclusion and the need for inclusion from the experience of being
excluded. Women have multiple experiences of exclusion or oppression because of our sex/gender. Womens shared
experiences of family and interpersonal responsibilities, of invisibility and
marginality, of violence and harassment, of the limitations on our political power
and public roles, and of our support systems and successes help shape a feminist
solidarity. Part of the feminist struggle is to name these experiences as political rather than personal.
have learned more about the structures of domination,

All Feminists Identities Suppressed By Men: We Must Work

Together To Rise Out Of Feminist Solidary To End Unjust Male
Discrimination.
Lindsey BENDER 2015
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Gender Difference To Feminist Solidarity: Using Carol Gilligan And An Ethic Of Care
In Law affirmed feminist lawyer who often writes for several accolade law journals. Her written works
are the source of many gender inequality/ feminist research papers and testimonials

Without a doubt, women of color are excluded and oppressed in more complex and
different ways from white women, just as poor women are oppressed and excluded in a more dramatic ways that rich women.
We cannot separate which parts of our oppression are gender-based and which parts are race or class based. These dominating and oppressing forces

that doesnt mean women of all races, classes and identities cannot
work together in a feminist solidary to end unjust discrimination against all women
and all people. In the United States for example, sexual difference remained a formal barrier to
womens rights to vote until 1920, long after formal barrier of race and property
ownership had been eliminated for men. No woman whether white or black, rich or
interact synergistically. But

poor, physically challenged, or able bodied, heterosexual or lesbians- was allowed to

vote in federal elections. Although the constitution was amended over a century ago in an attempt to provide equal rights and mark a
formal end to race discrimination, an Equal Right Amendment, Designed to achieve a similar constitutional guarantee for women because we are women

The supreme court decided that legislatively enacted discriminations based

on race are subject to the strictest scrutiny by the courts under the equal protection
clause of the fourteenth amendment, but discriminations based on gender do not
require as close attention . Furthermore, there is an underlying assumption that discriminations that disadvantage women based on
continues.

their sex, as opposed to their race, may be justified on some occasions. For example, Title VII, a federally enacted equal employment law, permits sex-

. Women can work together to change these legal impediments to

substantive equality for all women. Where necessary, we can treat gender
separately without obscuring racial, economic, or other group struggles.
based discriminations

A feminist standpoint is key to rejecting other forms of

oppression like racism and militarism, until they reject the
legal system that props up oppression their harms are
inevitable and are replicated post-plan.
Steans, professor of International Relations at Keele
University, 1998
(Jill, Gender and International Relations: An Introduction, Rutgers University Press,
pg 171-172)

Standpoint feminists have attempted to address such criticisms by arguing

that ones world-view is fundamentally shaped by social position and
experience. Thus to make a standpoint claim is not to universalize
womanhood, but to draw out the implications of the public/private
dichotomy and the implication of gender difference in the social world on
identity formation. Standpoint thinkers insist that feminist theology must
be able to show how women are positioned in relation to dominant power
structures and how this forges a sense of identity and a politics of
resistance and to suggest ways in which both theory and practice can be
directed in liberatory directions. If material life is structured differently for
different groups, not only will the vision available to each represent an
inversion of others in systems of domination, but a standpoint will also
suggest ways of moving beyond these relations. To overcome female
subordination involves real struggle which involves far-reaching social
transformations. A feminist standpoint is not the world-view of all women,
but an engaged position, an achievement, a claim to know which is
struggled for. Standpoint theorists thus recognize the historical and
political nature of all knowledge as power and understand that theory is
inexorably linked to practice. The theory/practice relationship here is
explicitly linked to an emancipatory politics. However, it is a view of
emancipation that does not depend upon the scientific discovery and
application of universal laws but on social practice associated with critical

reflection on dominant knowledge/power relations. The political subject of

feminism has been integral to debates about feminism and identity
politics. Indeed, feminism has understood the subject in terms of
identity; the political subject is that which remains identical to itself in the
face of contradiction. Debates within contemporary feminist theory have
centered on the possibility of combining identity politics with a
ceonception of the subject as non-essentualized and emergent from
historical experience, retaining gender as a point of departure. Some of
the positions taken in this debate parallel debates which have taken place
between standpoint feminist thinkers and their critics. For example, some
feminists insist that ones identity is taken as a point of departure, as a
motivation for action and as delineation of ones politics. Here, the
concept woman is not understood as a set of particular characteristics or
attributes, but a particular position. Women then use their positional
perspective as a place from which values are interpreted and constructed.
Such an approach does not construct women as the passive victims of
patriarchy but as self determining agents who are capable of challenging
and resisting structures of domination and in so doing of constructing new
identities of themselves.

Your understanding of multiple different feminisms functions

as biological determinism which is a new link to the K.
Mackinnon, 2005 (Catharine, Law Professor at University of Michigan,
Womens Lives, Mens Laws, DVOG, 25-26)
Thus cohering the theory of women out of the practice of women produces the
opposite of what Elizabeth Spelman has criticized as a reductive assumption of
essential sameness of all women that she identifies in some feminist theory. The
task of theorizing womens practice produces a new kind of theory, on that
is different from prior modes of theorizing in form, not just content. As
Andrea Dworkin said quite a long time ago, womens situation requires new
ways of thinking, not just thinking new things. Woman as abstraction,
distillation, common denominator, or idea is the old way of thinking; or at
most a new thing to think, but it is not a new way of thinking. Nor is
thinking like a woman, largely a misogynist slur for reproducing ones
determinants when thinking like a victim, all there is to thinking as a
woman, as one embodiment of a collective experience.
Some recent work, especially Elizabeth Spelmans, could be read to argue
that there is no such thing as experience as a woman and that women
of color prove it. This theory converges with the elevation of
differences as a flag under which to develop diverse feminisms. To do
theory in its conventional abstract way, as many do, is to import the
assumption that all women are the same or they are not women. What
makes them women is their fit within the abstraction woman or their
conformity to a fixed, posited female essence. The consequence of such

theorizing is to reproduce dominance on the level of theory. While much

work subjected to this criticism does not do this, one can trace it, surprisingly, in the
works of Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Brownmiller.
De Beauvoir, explaining why women are second class citizens, says: Here we have
the key to the whole mystery. On the biological level a species is maintained only
by creating itself anew; but this creation results only in repeating the same Life in
more individualsHer [womans] misfortune is to have been biologically destined
for the repetition of Life, wen even in her own view Life does not carry within itself
its reasons for being, reasons that are more important than Life itself.
Here women are defined in terms of biological reproductive capacity. It is unclear
exactly how any social organization of equality could change such an existential
fact, far less how to argue that a social policy that institutionalized it could be sex
discriminatory.
Susan Brownmiller argues the centrality of rape in womens condition in the
following terms: Mens structural capacity to rape and womans corresponding
structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the
primal act of sex itself. Had it not been for this accident of biology, and
accommodation requiring the locking together of two separate parts, penis and
vagina, there would be neither copulation nor rape as we know itBy anatomical
fiatthe inescapable construction of their genital organsthe human male was a
natural predator and the human female served as his natural prey.
Exaclty how to oppose sexual assault from this vantage point is similarly unclear.
Do we make a law against intercourse? Although both theorists have considerably
more to offer on the question of what defines womens condition, what we have in
these passages is simple biological determinism presented as a critical theory of
social change.
The problem here, it seems to me, does not begin with a failure to take
account of race or class, but with the failure to take account of gender. It
is not only or most fundamentally an account of race or class dominance
that is missing here, but an account of male dominance. There is nothing
biologically necessary about rape, as Mechelle Vinson made abundantly
clear when she sued for rape as unequal treatment on the basis of sex.
And, as Lillian Garland saw, and made everyone else see, it is the way
society punishes women for reproduction that creates womens problems
with reproduction, not reproduction itself. Both women are Black. This
only supports my suspicion that if a theory is not true of, and does not
work for, women of color, it is not really true of , and will not work for, any
women, and that it is not really about gender at all. The theory of the
practice of Mechelle Vinson and Lillian Garland, because it is about the
experience of Black women, is what gender is about.

This argument is used to frighten women into silence and

prevent them from discussing their own oppression.
Mackinnon, 2005 (Catharine, Law Professor at University of Michigan,
Womens Lives, Mens Laws, DVOG, 27-28)
In recent critiques of feminist work for failing to take account of race or
class, it is assumed that there is such a thing as race and class, although
race and class are generally treated as abstractions to attack gender
rather than as concrete realities, if indeed they are treated at all. Spelman, for
example, discusses race but does virtually nothing about class. In any event, race
and class are regarded as unproblematically real and not in need of
justification or theoretical construction. Only gender is not real and needs
to be justified. Although many women have demanded that discussions of
race or class take gender into account, typically these demands do not
take the form that, outside explicit recognition of gender, race or class do
not exist. That thre is a diversity to the experience of men and women of
color , and of working class women and men regardless of race, is not said
to mean tat race or class is not a meaningful concept. I have heard no one
say that, without sex or gender specificity, there can be no meaningful
discussion of people of color. Thus the phrase people of color and white
women has come to replace the previous women and minorities, which women of
color rightly perceived as not including them twice, and as embodying a white
standard for sex and a male standard for race. But I hear no talk of all women and
men of color for instance. When women of color refer to people who look like
me, it is understood that they mean people of color, not women, in spite of the fact
that both race and sex are visual assignments, both possess clarity as well as
ambiguity, and both are marks of oppression, hence potentially of community.
In this connection, it has recently come to my attention that the white
woman is the issue here, so I decided I had better find out what one is.
This creature is not poor, not battered, not raped (not really), not
molested as a child, not pregnant as a teenager, not prostituted, not
coerced into pornography, not a welfare mother, and not economically
exploited. She doesnt work. She is either the white mans image of her
effete, pampered, privileged, protected, flighty, and self-indulgentor the
Black mans image of herall that, plus the pretty white girl (meaning
ugly as sin but regarded as the ultimate in beauty because she is white).
She is Miss Anne of the kitchen, she puts Frederick Douglass to the lash,
she cries rape when Emmett Till looks at her sideways, she manipulates
white mens very real power with the lifting of her very well-manicured
little finger. She makes an appearance in Barakas rape the white girl,
as Cleavers real thing after target practice on Black women, as Helmut
Newtons glossy upscale hard-edged, distanced vamp, and as the Central
Park Jogger, the classy white Madonna who got herself raped and beaten
nearly to death. She flings her hair, feels beautiful all the time, complains
about the colored help, tips badly, cant do anything, doesnt do anything,
doesnt know anything, and alternates between fucking Black men and

accusing them of raping her. As Ntzoke Shange points out, all Western
civilization depends on her. On top of all of this, out of impudence,
imitativeness, pique, and a simple lack of anything meaningful to do, she
thinks she needs to be liberated. Her feminist incarnation is all of the
above, and guilty about every single bit of it, having by dint of repetition
refined saying Im sorry to a high form of art. She cant even make up
her own songs.
There is, of course, much to much of this, this woman, modified, this
woman discounted by white, meaning she would be oppressed but for her
privilege. But this image seldom comes face to face with the rest of her
reality: the fact that the majority of the poor are white women and their
children (at least half of whom are female); that white women are
systematically battered in their homes, murdered by intimates and serial
killers alike, molested as children, actually raped (mostly by white men);
and that even Black men, on average, make more than they do. If one did not
know this, one could be taken in by white mens image of white women:
that the pedestal is real, rather than cage in which to confine and
trivialize them and segregate them from the rest of life, a vehicle for
sexualized infantalization, a virginal setup for rape by men who enjoy
violating the pure, and a myth with which to try to control Black women.
(See, if you would lie down and be quiet and not move, we would revere
you too.) One would think that the white mens myth that they protect
white women was real, rather than a racist cover to guarantee their
exclusive and unimpeded sexual accessmeaning they can rape her at
will, and do, a posture made good in the marital-rape exclusion and the
largely useless rape law generally. One would think that the only white women
in brothels in the South during the Civil War were in Gone With the Wind. This is
not to say there is no such thing as skin privilege, but rather that it has
never insulated white women from the brutality and misogyny of men,
mostly but not exclusively white men, or from its effective legalization. In
other words, the white girls of this theory miss quite a lot of the reality
of white women in the practice of male supremacy.
Beneath the trivialization of the white womans subordination implicit in
the dismissive sneer straight white economically-privileged women (a
phrase that has become one word, the accuracy of some of its terms being rarely
documented even in law journals) lies the notion that there is no such thing as
the oppression of women as such. If white womens oppression is but an
illusion of privilege and a rip off and reduction of the Civil Rights
movement, there is no such thing as a woman, our practice produces no
theory, and discrimination on the basis of sex does not exist. To argue
that oppression as a woman negates rather than encompasses
recognition of the oppression of women on bases such as race and class is
to say that there is no such thing as the practice of sex inequality.
Lets take this the other way around. As I mentioned, both Mechelle Vinson and
Lillian Garland are African American women. Wasnt Mechelle Vinson

sexually harassed as a woman? Wasnt Lillian Garland pregnant as a

woman? They thought so. The whole point of their cases was to get their
injuries understood as based on sex, that is it happened because they
were women. The perpetrators, and the policies under which they were
disadvantaged, saw them as women. What is being a woman if it does not
include being oppressed as one? When the Reconstruction Amendments gave
Blacks the vote, and Black women still could not vote, werent they kept from
voting as women? When African American women are raped two times as often
as white women, arent they raped as women? That does not mean their race is
irrelevant and it does not mean that their injuries can be understood
outside a racial context. Rather it means that sex is made up of the
reality of the experiences of all women, including theirs. It is a
composite unit rather than a divided unitary whole, such that each
woman, in her way, is all women. So when white women are sexually
harassed or lose their jobs because they are pregnant, arent they women
too?

Deriding white women is another mechanism to oppress and

shame all women for their woman-ness.
Mackinnon, 2005 (Catharine, Law Professor at University of Michigan,
Womens Lives, Mens Laws, DVOG, 30-31)
In my view, the subtext to the critique of oppression as a woman, the critique that
holds that there is no such thing, is dis-identification with women. One of its
consequences is the destruction of the basis for a jurisprudence of sex equality. An
argument advanced in many critiques by women of color has been that
theories of women must include all women and when they do, theory will
change. On one level, this is necessarily true. On another, it ignores the
formative contributions of women of color to feminist theory since its
inception. I also sense, though that many women, not only women of
color and not only academics, do not want to be just women, not only
because something important is left out, but also because that means
being in a category with her, the useless white woman whose first
reaction when the going gets rough is to cry. I sense here that people feel
more dignity in being part of any group that includes men than in being
part of a group that includes that ultimate reduction of the notion of
oppression, that instigator of lynch mobs, that ludicrous whiner, that
equality coattails rider, the white woman. It seems that if the oppression
that is done to you is also done to a man, you are more likely to be
recognized as oppressed as opposed to inferior. Once a group is seen as
putatively human, a process helped by including men in it, an oppressed
man falls from a human standard. A woman is just a womanthe
ontological victimso not victimized at all.
Unlike other women, the white woman who is not poor or working-class or
lesbian or Jewish or disabled or old or young does not share her

oppression with any man. That does not make her condition any more
definitive of the meaning of women than the condition of any other
woman is. But trivializing her oppression, because it is not even
potentially racist or class-biased or heterosexist or anti-Semitic, does
define the meaning of being anti-woman with a special clarity. How the
white woman is imagined and constructed and treated becomes a
particularly sensitive indicator of the degree to which women, as such, are
despised.
If we build a theory out of womens practice, comprised of the diversity of
all womens experiences, we do not have the problem that some feminist
theory has been rightly criticized for. When we have it is when we make
theory out of abstractions and accept the images forced on us by male
dominance. The assumption that all women are the same is part of the
bedrock of sexism that the womens movement is predicated on
challenging. That some academics find it difficult to theorize without
reproducing it simply means that they continue to do to women what
theory, predicated on the practice of male dominance, has always done to
women. It is their notion of what theory is, and its relation to its world,
that needs to change.
If our theory of what is based on sex makes gender out of actual social practices
distinctively directed against women as women identify them, the problem that the
critique of so-called essentialism exists to rectify ceases to exist. And this bridge,
the one from practice to theory, is not built on anyones back.

AT: Perm
The political system is inevitably patriarchalnational security
concerns supercharge our willingness to submit to asserted
authority.
Reardon, 85
(Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia, Sexism and the War
System, Syracuse University Press, pg 32-33)

The two most relevant points to be noted are (1) the psychological factors
that incline most of us to accept limitations on participation when national
security is said to be threatened, and (2) the relationship of womens
participation to the level of political freedom and democratic participation
in general. As mentioned earlier, the more repressive a regime is, the
more sexist it is likely to be. Sexism, militarism, and repression are
emotionally conditioned, produced by fear, strengthened by intimidation,
and maintained largely as a consequence of the paralysis of the critical
capacities of the citizenry. As Fornari observes:

In dealing with the problem of the emotional implications of the phenomenon of

war, Bouthoul reaches the conclusion that it is sufficient to convince people that
they are threatened in order to induce them to give up their rights. He
consequently defines sovereignty as the right granted to one to intimidate others.

One of the most typical effects of the warlike impulse is that it dulls the critical
sense of the people, paralyzing above all their ability to evaluate the destruction
rationally.

The second point brought to light by sexism in politics is an indication that

most of our present political structures and practices are rooted in
patriarchy. Contrary to von Clausewitz, politics as the exercise of power is
more an outgrowth of the war system than the other way around, for
politics as much as war is an essentially masculine enterprise. This is an
assertion that stems from the fact that politics is, even today, primarily
conducted by men, according to masculine standards, and in the
masculine style. Success in politics as in warfare is viewed as evidence of
masculinity and requires its own degree of ferocity. Nothing attests to
this requirement more than the political performances of the worlds most

powerful women, who have to continue proving their toughness even

(especially) after they have reached the heights of power.

Powerful women are masculinized by the systemjust

increasing the number of women in government cant solve.
Reardon, 85
(Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia, Sexism and the War
System, Syracuse University Press, pg 70-71)

This interplay between limited feminist analysis of the war system and the
exclusion of even that limited analysis from most research and policy
discussions perpetuates the same masculine exclusion of the feminine
from peace research and world order studies as it has from the traditional
social sciences and virtually all institutions of authority and legitimation.
This exclusion in turn leads to an even more negative trend among some
feminists who interpret feminism as seeking equal advantage for women.
Seeking equal advantage places the emphasis on advantage, and in
essence buys into the system of advantaged and disadvantaged. Policies
and strategies tend to concentrate on how to move more women from the
latter into the former category.

Such policies and strategies encourage women to seek success within the
dominant structures characterized by masculine values and behaviors.
Thus many feminists even in the academic, research, and social change
fields have accommodated to the dominant masculine value structure.
Indeed, business and professional women are encouraged to do so by some
womens magazines and special training workshops that teach them how to dress
for success and how to behave more professionally. Most such instruction is
based on a not-too-subtle process of masculinization, including wearing business
suits and partaking in completely objective decision making. These behaviors
call forth understandable criticism from many feminists as reinforcing the
present system, which peace researchers and world order scholars assume
to be in need of total transformation. Unfortunately for both feminism
and transformation, among those few women who have gained real power
status in boardrooms, in the professions, and at the highest levels of state
are too many examples of such masculinization who serve as oft-quoted
evidence that women in power would be no different from men.

AT: Capitalism
A just political and economic system is impossible until we
solve for gender based oppression.
Eisler, 1987
(Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice and The Blade:
Our History, Our Future, page l96.)

Many people today recognize that in their present form neither capitalism
nor communism offers a way out of our growing economic and political
dilemmas. To the extent that androcracy remains in place, a just political
and economic system is impossible. Just as Western nations like the United
States, where slates of candidates are financed by powerful special interests, have
not yet reached political democracy, nations like the USSR, ruled by a powerful,
privileged and mostly male managerial class, are still far from economic democracy.

In particular, the politics of domination and the economics of exploitation

are in all androcracies exemplified by a dual economy in which womens
unpaid, or at best low paid, productive activities are systematically
exploited. As the United Nations State of the Worlds Women 1985 points out,
globally women are half the population, perform two thirds of the worlds
work, earn one tenth as much as men earn, and own one hundredth the
property that men own. Moreover, the unpaid labor of womenwho in
Africa do most of the food growing and who worldwide provide as many
health services for free as all formal health care sectors combinedis
routinely excluded from calculations of national productivity. The result,
as the futurist Hazel Henderson points out, is global economic projections
based on statistical illusions.

Solving for patriarchal dominance integrates caring labor into

the economic mainstreamthis transforms the economic and
political status quo.
Eisler, 1987
(Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice and The Blade:
Our History, Our Future, page l97.)

In The Politics of the Solar Age, Henderson describes a positive economic

future in which the roles of women and men are fundamentally
rebalanced. This will entail facing up to the fact that our masculine
militarism is the most energy-intensive entropic activity of humans, since

it converts stored energy directly into waste and destruction without any
useful intervening fulfillment of basic human needs. Following the
present period marked by the decline in systems of patriarchy,
Henderson predicts neither economic nor ecological reality will be
governed by the masculinized values now deeply associated with male
identity.

Similarly in The Sane Alternative, the British writer James Robertson contrasts
what he terms the hyper expansionist or HE future with a sane humane,
ecological or SHE future. And in Germany Professor Joseph Humber
dexcribes his negative economic scenario for the future as patriarchic.
By contrast, in his positive scenario, the sexes are on a socially equal
standing. Men and women share in paid positions as well as household tasks, child
rearing, and other social activities.

The central theme unifying these and other economic analyses, though of
critical importance for our future, still remains largely unarticulated. This
is that traditional economic systems, be they capitalist, are built upon
what, borrowing from Marxist analyses, may be called the alienation of
caring labor. As this caring laborthe life-sustaining labor of nurturing,
helping, and loving othersis fully integrated into the economic
mainstream, we will see a fundamental economic and political
transformation. Gradually, as the female half of humanity and the values
and goals that in androcracy are labeled feminine are fully integrated into
the guidance mechanisms of society, a politically and economically healthy
and balanced system will emerge. Then, unified into the global famly
envisioned by the feminist, peace, ecology, human potential, and other
gylanic movements, our species will begin to experience the full potential
of its evolution.

The kritik functions as a rejection of economic systems that

operate based on control and dominance of others.
Eisler, 1987
(Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice and The Blade.
Our History, Our Future, page 201)

Since technologies of destruction would no longer consume and destroy

such a vast portion of our natural and human resources, as yet undreamed
(and presently undreamable) enterprises will be economically feasible. The

result will be the generally prosperous economy foreshadowed by our

gylanic prehistory. Not only will material wealth be shared more equitably,
but this will also be an economic order in which amassing more and more
property as a means of protecting oneself from, as well as controlling,
others will be seen for what it is: a form of sickness or aberration.
In all this, there will be a number of economic stages. The first of these,
already emerging, will be what is termed a mixed economy, combining
some of the best elements of capitalism and communism and in the sense
of a variety of decentralized cooperative units of production and
distribution-also anarchism. The socialist concept that human beings have
not only basic political but basic economic rights will certainly be central
to a gylanic econorny based on caring rather than domination. But as a
partnership society replaces a dominator one, we can also expect new
economic inventions.

Eliminating patriarchy shifts resources from technologies of

destruction to technologies of life and shares resources among
all, the end goal of communism. The K solves for economic
exploitation through our ethic of care.
Eisler, 1987
(Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice and The Blade:
Our History, Our Future, page 15)

What, at our level of technological development, would be the political and

economic implications of a complete shift from a dominator to a
partnership society? We have the technologies that in a world no longer
governed by the Blade could vastly accelerate our cultural evolution. As
Ruth Sivard records in her yearly report World Military and Social Expenditures, the
cost of developing one intercontinental ballistic missile could feed 50 million
children, 'build 160,000 schools, and open 340,000 health care centers. Even the
cost of a single new nuclear submarine-equal to the annual education budget of
twenty-three developing countries in a world where 120 million children have no
school they can go to and 11 million babies die before their first birthdaycould
open new opportunities for millions of people now doomed to live in poverty and
ignorance.
What we lack, as futurist writings stress again and again, is the social
guidance system, the governing values, that would redirect the allocation

of resources, including our advanced technological know-how, to higher

ends.
Willis Harman, when has headed major futurist studies at the Stanford Research
Institute, writes that what is needed-and evolvingis metamorphosis in
basic cultural premises and all aspects of social rules and institutions." He
describes this as a new consciousness in which competition will be
balanced with cooperation and individualism will be balanced with love. It
will be a "cosmic consciousness," a fuller awareness," which "relates selfinterest to the interests of fellow man and of future generations." And it
will entail nothing short of a fundamental transformation of "truly
awesome magnitude."
Similarly, in the second Club of Rome report we read that in order to avoid major
regional and ultimately global catastrophe," we must develop a new world
system "guided by a rational master plan for long-term organic growth,"
held together by "a spirit of truly global cooperation, shaped in free
partnership."' This world system would be governed by a new global ethic
based on a greater consciousness of and identification with future as well
as presentation generations and will require cooperation, rather than
confrontation and harmony with, rather than conquest of, nature become
our normative ideals.
A striking aspect of these projections is that these futurists do not see
technology or economics as the main determinants of our future. They
recognize instead that our roads to the future will be shaped by social
arrangement, in other words, that our future will be primarily determined
by the way we human beings conceive its possibilities, potentials, and
implications. In the words of the futurist John McHale, "Our mental blueprints are
its basic action programs.
But what is most remarkable is that what many futurists are actually sayingpractically, in so many words-is that we must leave behind the hard, conquestoriented values traditionally associated with "masculinity." For is not the
need for a "spirit of truly global cooperation, shaped in free partnership,"
"a balancing of individualism with love," and the normative goal of
"harmony with rather than conquest of nature," the reassertion of a more
"feminine ethos"? And to what end could "drastic changes in the norm
stratum" or a "metamorphosis in basic cultural premises and all aspects of
social institutions" relate if not to the replacement of a dominator with a
partnership society?
The transformation from a dominator to a partnership society would
obviously bring with it a shift in our technological direction: from the use
of advanced technology for destruction and domination to its use for
sustaining and enhancing human life. At the same time, the wastefulness
and overconsumption that now robs those in need would also begin to
wane. For as many social commentators have observed, at the core of our
Western complex of overconsumption and waste lies the fact that we are

culturally obsessed with getting, buying, building and wasting things, as a

substitute for the satisfactory emotional relationships that are denied us by
the child-raising styles and the values of adults in the present system.
Above all, the shift from androcracy to gylany would begin to end the
politics of domination and the economics of exploitation that in our world
still go hand in hand. For as John Stuart Mill pointed out over a century ago in his
ground-breaking Principles of Political Economy, the way economic resources are
distributed is a function not of some inflexible economic laws, but of political-that is,
humanchoices.

AT: Realism
Realism positions women as a dangerous other who must be
dominatedthis functions as another link to the kritik.
Steans 98
(Jill, professor of International Relations at Keele University, Gender and
International Relations: An Introduction, pg 54-55)

Feminists have pointed out that the use of gender in the imagery in realist
texts is highly significant. The realist conception of the autonomous state
is frequently juxtapositioned against images of anarchy or a disorderly
international state of nature. The use of such imagery must be seen in
terms of a deeply rooted fear of the feminine. In realist texts, the
political community can be seen as a community of men whose power is
based upon the domination of those outside. Once again much of the
gendered imagery and symbolism in realism is derived from political
theory. While Machiavelli did not explicitly personify nature, it is clear
that the masculine world of human agency in history and autonomy is
juxtapositioned against the world of women and relations of dominance
and dependence. In Machiavellis work, the male world of order, law, and
liberty is constantly threatened by fortuna, a force which threatens the
overextended state or ambitious ruler, and fortuna is a woman. Pitkin
argues that the masculine world of order and virtue is haunted from
behind the scenes by female forces of great power. The feminine in
Machiavelli represents the Other, that which is opposed to the
masculinized world of order and discipline. Women represent the Other,
a force that not only threatens the political order, but mens very sense of
self. Machiavellis notion of autonomy is misogynistically defined. It leads
to relations which must be seen in terms of dominance and dependence.
Hobbess conception of anarchy and order is also profoundly gendered.
However, the female force which appears in these writings, which had to
be mastered, is no longer fortuna, but the state of nature.

Realism requires the exclusion of women.

Steans 98
(Jill, professor of International Relations at Keele University, Gender and
International Relations: An Introduction, pg 46)

Gender has been denied salience as an issue in International Relations because

the discipline has been seen as constituted by a system of states which
relate to one another in a context of anarchy. Realists assume that the
proper way to understand the international system is via concepts of
power and security, concepts that are ungendered and universal. With
respect to gender, International Relations theory grounded in realist assumptions
has either been seen as neutral or assumptions about the position and status of
women have not been made explicit. However, International Relations is a
gendered discourse. The invisibility or marginalization of gender issues in
the study of International Relations is a consequence of methodological
individualism which begins with a high level of abstraction, taking the
state to be the key actor. The realist conception of the state as actor has
been built upon the supposedly unproblematic figure of sovereign man.
Sovereign man is an abstraction which is under-pinned by a conception of
the warrior, Prince or modern-day practitioner of Realpolitik. These same
concepts and categories employed by realism make necessary the
exclusion of women. Indeed the whole theoretical approach to
International Relations rests on the foundation of political concepts which
it would be difficult to hold together coherently were it not for the trick of
eliminating women from the prevailing definitions of man as the political
actor.

AT: Violent Transition

New models can replace the patriarchal status quo without
violence.
Eisler, 1987
(Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice and The Blade:
Our History, Our Future, page 162)

If we pursue the analysis of modern history from the perspective of the underlying
conflict between androcracy and gylany, as the different paths for our cultural
evolution, the emergence of the modern secular ideologies acquires a new and far
more hopeful meaning. By using the new analytic tools provided by Cultural
Transformation theory, we can see how the replication of ideas like equality and
freedom gradually led to the formation of new ways of looking at the world. Acting
as attractors, such gylanic ideas served as a nuclei for the formation of new
systems of belief, or ideologies, which were gradually disseminated through the
social system and in part replaced the androcratic paradigm. In bits and pieces
these ideologies challenged a pyramidal world ruled from the top by God, with men,
women, children, and finally the rest of creation in descending dominator order.

AT: Hurt Men

Status is not Zero Sum Status of Women improves without
Status of Men Declining
Eisler 87
(Riane, codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies, The Chalice and The Blade:
Our History, Our Future, page 39)

Under the prevailing paradigm, where ranking is the primary

organizational principle, if women have high status the inference is that
mens status must be lower. Earlier we saw how evidence of matrilineal
inheritance and descent, a woman as a supreme deity, and priestesses
and queens with temporal power is interpreted as indicating a
matriarchal society. But this conclusion is wholly unwarranted by the
archaeological evidence. Nor does it follow from the high status of Cretan
women that the Cretan men had a status comparable to that of women in
male-dominated social systems.
In Minoan Crete the entire relationship between the sexesnot only
definitions and valuations of gender roles but also attitudes toward
sensuality and sexwas obviously very different from ours. For example,
the bare breasted style of dress for women and the skimpy clothes emphasizing the
genitals for men demonstrate a frank appreciation of sexual differences and the
pleasure made possible by these difference. From what we now know through
modern humanistic psychology, this pleasure bond would have
strengthened a sense of mutuality between women and men as
individuals.
The Cretans more natural attitudes toward sex would also have had other
consequences equally difficult to perceive under the prevailing paradigm,
wherein religious dogma often views sex as more sinful than violence. As
Hawkes writes, The Cretans seem to have reduced and diverted their
aggressiveness through a free and well-balanced sexual life. Along with their
enthusiasm for sports and dancing and their creativity and love of life, these
liberated attitudes toward sex seem to have contributed to the generally peaceful
and harmonious spirit predominant in Cretan life.
As we have seen, it is this matter of spirit that sets Crete apart from the
other high civilizations of its time. As Arnold Hauser put it, Minoan
culture is exceptional in the essential differences of its spirit from that of
its contemporaries.

Aff Answers

2AC Block
Perm Solves: Plans reform of the law is key--Policy change is
the first step of structural change
Reardon , 1993 (Betty, Director of Peace Education Program at Columbia
University, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security, pg 166)

I have tried to make two things sharply evident in this review of the
relationship between women and peace: the need to change the modes of
thinking we bring to issues of national and world security and the need to
change the structures that exclude womens full and vitally needed
contribution to the peacemaking process. To bring about structural
change we need policy change. In other words, just as women are now
asserting a new and unprecedented effort to gain a voice and articulate
their perspectives to the public, they must also find ways to be heard by
policy makers. Feminists in seeking ways to bring womens experience
into politics are raising new policy questions based on criteria from
womens ways of thinking. From such questions, steps toward the
evolution of a transition scenario may arise.
As I have tried to demonstrate, womens ways of thinking lead to a distinctly
feminine approach to security issues that is quite different from the
current approaches to national security applied by the dominantly male
political leadership. Throughout, I have tried to demonstrate the need to
bring the feminine approach into policy making, and to bring more women
into the policy making process, to introduce feminine perspectives and
criteria, and to provide the benefits of womens ways of thinking. The
feminine approach suggested here produces a particular set of criteria
that women bring to the assessment of security policy. These criteria, like
womens visions of a world at peace, derive directly from the four
essential security expectations outlined in the introduction that comprise
the feminist concept of authentic global security. They can be designated
as sustainability, vulnerability, equity, and protection.

Gender difference theory excludes everyone but rich white

cisgendered women.
Lindsey BENDER 2015
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?
handle=hein.journals/vlr15&div=6&g_sent=1&collection=journalsfrom From:
Gender Difference To Feminist Solidarity: Using Carol Gilligan And An Ethic Of Care
In Law affirmed feminist lawyer who often writes for several accolade law journals. Her written works
are the source of many gender inequality/ feminist research papers and testimonials

Even those of you who do not spend your time reading

feminist theory

have probably heard of Carol Gilligans and her book, IN A

is cited frequently in legal

scholarship, and I include myself among her followers. Gilligans work epitomizes a school of clarity, I will call this school
of feminism difference theory or gender difference theories when I refer to Gilligans work in this essay, it
is as a heuristic device or metaphor for these feminist theories that recognize
gender differences as a salient point for analysis. Feminist gender difference is typically associated with women,
my argument about using feminist theories that transform law rely on this aspect of gender
differences theories. Gilligans work and thee work of feminist gender difference theorists have generated a certain degree of
DIFFERENT VOICE, Although she is a psychologist and not a lawyer, her wor k

controversy. Feminists who struggle against acknowledgement of sex or gender differences find Gilligans Varity of theory damagingly reminiscent of a
romanticized 19th century separate spheres ideology, and hence quite pernicious. Other feminists, who assert that gender relations are power
hierarchies and about institutionalized privilege, consider Gilligan type works disturbing, because they valorize voices of women that are arguably
results of subordination and oppression. Some feminists combine both these arguments and criticism. Some feminists combine both these arguments and
criticize Gilligans work for its vulnerability to cooptation, misuse, or appropriation by the conservative right. Late, another

feminist critique

of gender difference theories has emerged. This criticism is laced with postmodernist/ poststructuralists theoretical
concepts. It eschews difference theorys reliance upon a universalized liberal-humanist
subject or more potentially, on an unspoken assumption of a white, economically
comfortable, heterosexual woman. A similar criticism is wielded by critical race and
sexuality theorists, these powerful challenges contend that gender difference
theorists are estialists, ahistorical, and insensitive to race, class and sexual
preference, ethnicity, age, motherhood, and physical challenges. Specific criticisms of Gilligan and
other feminist difference theory projects are more prevalent in the non-legal literature, but they have made their way into law journals and legal
conferences as well

No linkthe aff defines privacy as inaccessibility of personal

information to the government, were not the concept of
privacy the neg is criticizing. You can believe that women are
harmed by certain aspects of privacy and still agree that what
the government is doing is wrong and should be rejected.
Allen 88 (Anita LaFrance Allen-Castellito is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of
Law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society) DOA 7.6.15 MAY

To describe privacy as having intrinsic value implies that it is unnecessary

to state any justificatory basis for privacy sanctions: human privacy ought
to be promoted by individuals and government because it is irreducibly
worthy of respect.7 As evidenced by their accounts of the meaning and value of
privacy, theorists generally overlook the possibility of an intrinsic value
account of the value of privacy.8 Little harm is done my overlooking the
possibility of an intrinsic value account. It is implausible to suppose that all
conditions of privacy, regardless of time, place, circumstance, are either
useful or merit moral approval. It is equally implausible to suppose the
opposite: that conditions of privacy invariably lack utility and moral worth.
It is surely sometimes a good thing- the healthy, sensible, fair, virtuous, or
morally best thing- to seclude oneself, to have secrets, to remain
anonymous. By the same token, conditions of privacy are surely

sometimes pathological, foolish, unjust, despicable, or morally wrong. The

account one gives of the definition of privacy bears importantly on the
account one can give of privacys value. A definition might prescribe or
stipulate that privacy be applied only to morally praiseworthy
conditions of limited access. For example, were privacy defined in terms of
the degree of inaccessibility from others a person ought to have ought
relative to a system of moral norms- then the question whether privacy is
morally valuable thing would have been definitionally preempted. This
definition of privacy would entail that privacy means a morally good
thing. Something of an intrinsic value account of the value of privacy tied
to the value-laden definition of privacy can be seen in Carl D.
Schneiders definition of private affairs as those which ought to
protected by limited access.9 Schneiders definition preempts the Sissela Bok,
whose definition we evaluated in Chapter 1, defined privacy as the condition
of being protected from unwanted access by others.10 Boks definition
preempts the question of its moral value. Nonetheless, because liberal political
morality gives presumptive validity to each persons self-regarding
desires, a liberal embracing Boks definition would come closer to
preempting questions about the moral value of privacy than would a
liberal embracing either my purely neutral privacy-as-inaccessibility
account or similar limited access accounts offered by David OBrien and Ruth
Gavison. Where privacy is defined neutrally to denote conditions of
inaccessibility, the moral value of a specific condition of privacy will
depend upon its morally relevant implications or consequences of privacy
will depend, of course upon ones underlying moral theory.

Alt failsthe dialogue it emphasizes cannot replace the law.

Charlesworth, 99
Hilary Charlesworth, Professor and Director of the Centre for International and Public
Law, Faculty of Law, Australian National University, April, 1999, The American
Journal International Law 93 A.J.I.L. 379

[*379] I have mixed feelings about participating in this symposium as the feminist
voice. On the one hand, I want to support the symposium editors' attempt to
broaden the standard categories of international legal methodologies by
including feminism in this undertaking. On the other hand, I am conscious
of the limits of my analysis and its unrepresentativeness -- the
particularity of my nationality, race, class, sexuality, education and
profession shapes my outlook and ideas on international law. I clearly
cannot speak for all women participants in and observers of the international legal
system. I also hope that one day I will stop being positioned always as a feminist
and will qualify as a fully fledged international lawyer. My reservations are also more
general because presenting feminism as one of seven rival methodological

traditions may give a false sense of its nature. The symposium editors'
memorandum to the participants encouraged a certain competitiveness:
we were asked, "Why is your method better than others?" I cannot answer
this question. I do not see feminist methods as ready alternatives to any
of the other methods represented in this symposium. Feminist methods
emphasize conversations and dialogue rather than the production of a
single, triumphant truth. n1 They will not lead to neat "legal" answers
because they are challenging the very categories of "law" and "nonlaw."
Feminist methods seek to expose and question the limited bases of
international law's claim to objectivity and impartiality and insist on the
importance of gender relations as a category of analysis. The term
"gender" here refers to the social construction of differences between
women and men and ideas of "femininity" and "masculinity" -- the excess
cultural baggage associated with biological sex.

Turnusing the methods of the dominant order, ie the law, is

key to change.
Charlesworth, 99
Hilary Charlesworth, Professor and Director of the Centre for International and Public
Law, Faculty of Law, Australian National University, April, 1999, The American
Journal International Law 93 A.J.I.L. 379

[*380] The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out that feminist theorizing
typically requires an unarticulated balance between two goals. Feminist
analysis is at once a reaction to the "overwhelming masculinity of
privileged and historically dominant knowledges, acting as a kind of
counterweight to the imbalances resulting from the male monopoly of the
production and reception of knowledges" and a response to the political
goals of feminist struggles. n2 The dual commitments of feminist methods
are in complex and uneasy coexistence. The first demands "intellectual
rigor," investigating the hidden gender of the traditional canon. The
second requires dedication to political change. The tension between the
two leads to criticism of feminist theorists both from the masculine
academy for lack of disinterested scholarship and objective analysis and
from feminist activists for co-option by patriarchal forces through
participation in male-structured debates. n3 Feminist methodologies
challenge many accepted scholarly traditions. For example, they may
clearly reflect a political agenda rather than strive to attain an objective
truth on a neutral basis and they may appear personal rather than
detached. For this reason, feminist methodologies are regularly seen as
unscholarly, disruptive or mad. They are the techniques of outsiders and strangers.
Just as nineteenth-century women writers used madness to symbolize escape from
limited and enclosed lives, n4 so twentieth-century feminist scholars have

developed dissonant methods to shake the complacent and bounded disciplines in

which they work. At the same time, most feminists are constrained by their
environment. If we want to achieve change, we must learn and use the
language and methods of the dominant order.

Privacy Extensions
Privacy is good for women- allows them to make their own
decisions about their bodies
Barnett 98 (Hilaire Barnett is Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary & Westfield
College, University of London. She is the author of several books and study guides
on Constitutional and Administrative Law and Feminist Jurisprudence. Introduction
to Feminist Jurisprudence) DOA 7.2.15 MAY

Each of the issues considered involves questions of a womans autonomy,

competing individual interests, the interests of the State, the status and
role of the medical profession, and most particularly in relation to
abortion, a clash of ideologies concerning individual womens rights and
the claimed rights of the unborn. What also becomes apparent from a
study of the differing aspects of women and medicine is the extent to
which different cultural, institutional, legal, political, religious and social
factors coalesce to produce a position of inferiority for women as
compared with men. This web of interacting factors represents subtle
control by the State, judiciary and the medical profession, a further
manifestation of the patriarchal ordering of, and hierarchical male power
in society. A persons body and his or her sexuality is par excellence a site
of autonomy and privacy. When autonomy and privacy are taken away or
delimited, individuality itself is harmed. For women, sexuality, conception
and contraception, pregnancy and childbirth are all central to female
identity. As will be seen below, the rise in medical professionalism in the
nineteenth century was accompanied by the increasing medicalization of
reproductive issues: that what was once natural and unregulated reproductive
capacity - became increasingly the subject of regulation by predominantly
male doctors and surgeons, to the exclusion of women medical
practitioners. Pathology entered the natural. Devoid of experience of womanness,
male theories about women and their conditions be it premenstrual tension,
pregnancy or the demand for abortion informed medical practice and law.

Privacy helps womendomestic violence proves

Electronic Privacy Information Center 2015
(EPIC is an independent non-profit research center in Washington, DC,
https://epic.org/privacy/dv/ accessed June 15)
Relationships are the domain of the intimate, the private. When
relationships are abusive, this privacy is abused. Domestic violence
victims have high needs for privacy, as they are already the target of an
abuser, and often need to keep data from them. This abuse can also

involve privacy violations such as surveillance, monitoring, or other

stalking. For a domestic violence victim, the need for privacy is a need for
physical safety. Many privacy problems, such as identity theft, are harms
experienced by the public from general criminal behavior. But domestic
violence victims are already being specifically singled out by a particular
aggressor. This aggressor is able to take advantage of the general lack of
protection for personal information in our society. Furthermore, this
aggressor is familiar with many of the intimate details of the victim's life.
An abuser can violate privacy by sharing these details, or by using them to
gain more information on a victim. Finally, domestic violence victims often
have much of their personal information -- including their relationship
history -- in government records. Turning to government aid agencies,
litigating custody, divorces and protection orders creates a trail of their
private lives in government records. The legal -- and actual -- protection
afforded to these records will vary throughout the country. Their accuracy
may also vary, and may impact how domestic violence survivors are able
to reconstruct and continue their lives.