Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins Shadowboxing: Representations of Black

Feminist Politics by Joy James Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by PatriciaHill Collins; Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics by Joy James Review by: Andrea Y. Simpson Signs, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer 2002), pp. 1183-1186 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339651 . Accessed: 07/04/2012 15:28
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Book Reviews

At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality. By Drucilla Cornell. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reections on the Postsocialist Condition. By Nancy Fraser. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.
Kathi Weeks, Faireld University

ne books advance very different kinds of arguments, they demonstrate a similar commitment to what Nancy Fraser defends as comprehensive, integrative, normative, programmatic thinking (4). Both are works of tremendous range that move between the abstract and the concrete, the utopian and the pragmatic, the deconstructive and the reconstructive. Each author demonstrates an admirable ability to shift from the level of raried philosophical discussion to that of specic policy debates, such that the utopian imagination is coupled with a decidedly practical orientation. And each insists on matching her critical analyses of the present with the proposition of alternatives. These are texts that advance strong arguments and that also take great pains to open them at every step for the reader to evaluate. Rather than attempt to solidify their conclusions on the basis of metaphysical ideals, foundationalist claims, or esssentialist categories, each author is careful to provide genealogies of her philosophical assumptions, explain her political claims, and lay out her normative criteria of evaluation. It is this willingness to advance substantial arguments, defend them clearly, and open them at every point to critical scrutiny that makes these books both courageous and rewarding. The feminist program that Drucilla Cornell proposes centers not around the demand for formal equality between men and women but, rather, around the demand for freedom. The guiding principle of the argument is, as Cornell explains it, that a persons freedom to pursue her own happiness in her own way is crucial for any persons ability to share in lifes
lthough these two

Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author(s).

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glories (18). Instead of conceiving womens freedom as subordinate to and dependent on our equality to men, Cornell urges us instead rst to privilege an ideal of freedom (grounded in a Kantian conception of the free person) and then to consider what kinds of equality it requires. Thus, rather than committing ourselves only to the freedom necessary to be equal, Cornell emphasizes instead the equality necessary to be free. The individual freedom Cornell envisions includes not only freedom from gender comparison but freedom from enforced identities and imposed sexual choices. She defends this freedom not in the name of privacy or by recourse to some ontology of individual autonomy. Instead she centers her argument around the ideal of the imaginary domaina space in which we can (re)imagine and (re)congure ourselves, in which we have room to evaluate and shape who we might be or become. The equal protection of the sanctuary of the imaginary domain includes the corresponding right to represent and exercise what she calls our sexuate being: the right not to be men or women according to some predened conception of those identities but, rather, to represent our own identities as sexual beings and to determine the course of our intimate lives. Women and men, equivalently evaluated as free persons with maximum equal liberty, must then be afforded access to opportunities, resources, and capabilities consistent with the recognition of their personhood. Using this framework, Cornell presents some fascinating discussions of a number of contested issues, including the regulation of prostitution, the rights of birth mothers and adopted children, family law reform, the fathers movement and the rights and obligations of parents, and the international human rights agenda and the prospects for universalizing her own ideal of the imaginary domain. For example, to make the regulations of kinship and sexuality consistent with the equal protection of the imaginary domain and each persons right to self-representation of her sexuate being, Cornell argues that we must reject the states promotion of the norm of heterosexual monogamous marriage and, toward this end, presents an innovative structure of family law reform that is consistent with her commitment to getting the state out of the business of giving form to our intimate lives (26). Although the framework she provides does not determine her position on these specic questions and debates (indeed, as she is well aware, one could take up very different positions than those she defends by recourse to the same ideals), it succeeds in reconceiving some of the familiar lines of debate and establishes new grounds for productive discussion of these issues. Frasers book consists of an introduction and ten independent essays that, unlike some such collections, t together into a coherent whole.

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Fraser attempts in these essays both to diagnose what she characterizes as the postsocialist condition and to contribute to the construction of a successor project to socialism, or an alternate postsocialism, one that, in the face of the current retreat from utopian thinking, dares to conceive alternatives and, in response to the present division between the cultural left and the social left in the United States, attempts to integrate in a consistent fashion the commitments to cultural difference and social equality. Whereas Cornell privileges freedom as guiding concept and primary value, Fraser tries, in an era marked by both growing inequalities across the globe and the ascendance of cultural over economic reform agendas, to reassert equality as a necessary component of our political visions of a just future. The rst chapter lays out a key theme that provides a center of gravity for the other chapters.1 In it Fraser argues that we need to connect what are now too often separated: demands for cultural recognition of group difference and demands for socioeconomic redistribution. The trick is to combine them in a coherent way, such that the proposed remedies for injustices of recognition do not exacerbate the injustices of distribution and vice versa. What Fraser does throughout the book, and it is a great achievement indeed, is to identify a series of unproductive divisionsbetween critical theory and poststructuralism, socioeconomic analysis and cultural analysis, the politics of distribution and the politics of recognition, equality and differenceand attempt to construct a more integrative approach, replacing what are so often presented as simple either/or choices with more complex both/and positions. While these threads run through the various chapters, her discussions also range more broadly in an effort to address other dimensions of the postsocialist condition. These include critical analyses and alternative visions of the postindustrial welfare state and critiques of actually existing liberal democracy and the liberal model of the public sphere. Along the way she engages critically with the work of Jurgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva, Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, and Carole Pateman. Both authors succeed in moving us beyond the old terms of the equality/difference debate in feminism, albeit in different directions. Each man-

1 The rst chapter has also been the subject of some interesting exchanges. See, e.g., Judith Butler, Merely Cultural, New Left Review 227 (1998): 3344; and Nancy Fraser, Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler, New Left Review 228 (1998): 14049. See also Iris Marion Young, Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Frasers Dual Systems Theory, New Left Review 222 (1997): 14760; and Nancy Fraser, A Rejoinder to Iris Young, New Left Review 223 (1997): 12629.

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ages to avoid either naturalizing or discounting sexual difference, refusing the terms of both essentialist and androcentric lines of argument. And they both undercut the old equality/difference debate even further: Cornell, by rejecting the standards of comparison that typically sustained it, and Fraser, by disabling the separation of the problematics of cultural difference and social equality that so often fortied it. Despite what I have described as a similar approach to or style of theory building, the arguments are of course very different. Whereas Cornell draws primarily from elements of the liberal tradition (Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin all provide important resources), Fraser crafts her arguments from a combination of poststructuralist sources and a broadly socialist or radical democratic tradition. Moreover, the two texts can also be read against each other. Evaluating Frasers text from the perspective of Cornells approach, for example, some might raise questions about Frasers willingness to advance normative judgments about the relative value of various kind of group differences according to their compatibility with her own vision of justice, insofar as it privileges the good over the right. On the other hand, judged by the logic of Frasers account, Cornell pays too little attention to the specic economic forces that now limit our freedom and the economic conditions that would be required to enable it. Regardless of whether one agrees with their conclusions, the process of working through their arguments is well worth the effort. One cannot but emerge from the experience very encouraged by the current state of feminist inquiry and debate. These are extraordinarily rich and provocative texts that have already generated great interest and that deserve to be read carefully and discussed widely for many years to come.

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Making Work, Making Trouble: Prostitution as a Social Problem. By Deborah R. Brock. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Prostitution, Power, and Freedom. By Julia OConnell Davidson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Sex Work and Sex Workers. Edited by Barry M. Dank and Roberto Renetti. Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction, 1998. Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry. Edited by Ronald Weitzer. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Jill Nagle, San Francisco

of sex work intersects with, and certainly interests the scholars of, a wide variety of disciplines. It proves to be, as Priscilla Alexander has noted, a difcult issue for feminists.1 These four volumes illuminate the discourses, dynamics, and conditions of sex work (and its solutions) over time and across cultures while only occasionally falling into the predictable traps I outline below. To the varying extents that they do fall into these dangerous traps, they also provide fodder for studying the study of sex work, which is as important to sex workers and allies of sex workers as studying sex work in the rst place. The rst trap is the failure to contextualize how the attack on nonreproductive white sexualities (such as prostitute) coincides with the religious rights targeting, in general, of perceived homosexuals, the white poor and working class, people of color, women who have abortions, and users of birth control. In other words, to fall into this trap is to ignore how sexist, heterosexist, antiabortion, and anti-sex-as-pleasure interests further a white supremacist agenda and thus indirectly to further that agenda.2 The second trap is lapsing into unnamed ontologies of sexthat is, building theories on insufciently examined axioms about what sex is or what it ought to consist of, particularly for women who sell sexual services. This second trap feeds and maintains the rst one. The third trap is framing nonacademician sex workers as inherently unique among other laborers, as objects of study and objects of outside
he study
1

Priscilla Alexander, Prostitution: Still a Difcult Issue for Feminists, in Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, ed. Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Cleis, 1998), 184230. 2 For a relevant discussion, see http://www.people.ku.edu/jyounger/SXL/gayrace.html, especially my entry from April 6, 1995.

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forces rather than as producers of knowledge and producers of countercultural meanings. This trap is enabled by having fallen into the second one; that is, if one treats sexual labor as uniquely problematic, oppressive, or able to rob its practitioners of selfhood, one may be more likely to treat sex workers themselves as less than full human subjects. The fourth trap is to fail (as do many inquiries into other social hierarchies) to examine the position of the inquirers (in this case, academics) who, by virtue of, among other things, their means to promulgate information about the inquired-on (in this case, sex workers), occupy a relatively more powerful social position. In roughly analogous dualisms, just as students of race have begun to theorize whiteness and students of gender to theorize maleness, so can students of sex work theorize the construction, interests, and social realities of the nonwhore, the nonclient, the nonsex worker academic (or the closeted sex worker/academic), and the abolitionist vis-a-vis the sex industry.3 As more light is shed on these ` hidden, privileged sides of this sex work inquiry dualism, it will produce a more complex, dynamic view of sex work in its myriad cultural contexts. In the meantime, with the exception of Barry M. Dank and Roberto Renettis Sex Work and Sex Workers, these texts more or less reproduce unexamined the standard us-them construct, with, as Carol Queen put it, whores being the bugs and scholars being the scientists.4 Though this dynamic is by no means unique to the study of sex work, its recent history and consequences affect current research. The number of academic, trade, and crossover books on sex work has grown substantially in the last two decades. Sociologists (and this includes Deborah R. Brock, author of Making Work, Making Trouble: Prostitution as a Social Problem, and Julia OConnell Davidson, author of Prostitution, Power, and Freedom) do most of the academic studies of sex work. Ronald Weitzer and Dank are also sociologists, as are the authors of ve of the seven main essays in Sex Work and Sex Workers and thirteen of nineteen contributors to Sex for Sale, which also has two essays by criminologists. Davidsons volume, Prostitution, Power, and Freedom, works best when viewed as two projects: one describing a wide range of global circumstances involving the exchange of sex for money, the other theorizing the meanings of the exchange. In the rst project, she offers windows into a variety of prostitution situations, from the oppressive genelev brothel system in Turkey to an independent call girl in Britain, as well as conditions
3 Those who advocate the end of the sex industry, e.g., Kathleen Barry, are often referred to as abolitionists. 4 Queen, personal communication.

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in different parts of Asia and Latin America. She engages deeply with her interviewees, looks critically at abolitionist discourse, and takes great care in documenting divergent forms of prostitution. However, her assessment of prostitute-client encounters is fraught with leaps, assumptions, and more than one use of the word bizarre in assessing how anyone could enjoy sex with a prostitute, someone constructed as socially dead (134), making the client a social necrophiliac (209). She dreams of a day when people do not have to resort to prostitution (209; emphasis added). She refers throughout to the use of prostitutes and prostitute users, and she places the terms sex work and sex workers in quotation marks. This language denigrates self-dened sex workers who do not nd their work demeaning. Though her arguments supporting the trope of social necrophilia compel further discussion, they also limit the possibilities for a sex worker dened trope of prostitution. And though her research suggests many nuances to prostitute-client interactions, Davidson in the end posits only two possibilities: prostitution as social death and a reductio ad absurdum world in which commodied sex is the prevailing norm. This hardly exhausts the complexity of sex workerclient relationships. In Clients and Call Girls: Seeking Sex and Intimacy (in the Weitzer volume), Janet Lever and Deanne Dolnick directly contradict some of Davidsons ndings, discovering instances of reciprocity and authenticity in prostitute-client relationships. The ndings of her sociologist colleagues notwithstanding, might Davidson admit of at least the possibility of multiple meanings of paid sex, specically, those created by whores themselves? Though both Davidson and Weitzer ignore, or dismiss as celebratory, Shannon Bells Whore Carnival and other sex-industry-positive feminist writings, including my own, it is just such writing that both reects and creates a counterculture of alternate meanings in which feminist whores can trade sex for money, develop ongoing relationships with clients, and maintain their social aliveness and health.5 To deny the power of this whore countercultureand the power of the clients who literally and guratively buy into itis to implicitly deny the power of, for example, queer-, Afro-, and Judeocentric countercultures to generate self-love and healing and to fashion new meanings within oppressive circumstances. Academics correctly suspect sex worker intellectuals (for want of a better term) of speaking for a small minority of sex workers, but it is also academics, mostly sociologists, who have lumped all prostitution together, unifying it with an unexamined ontology of sex-as-a-special-case, with the
5

Shannon Bell, Whore Carnival (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1995).

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power to reveal a deep truth that all prostitutes have in common. As a counterexample, rarely if ever are the politics of fashion designers examined alongside sweatshops in developing countries with the idea that, because they are all making clothes, they have sufcient commonalities to address in the same book or article. By contrast, and in a wholly different enterprise, in Making Work, Making Trouble, Brock uses a Foucauldian approach to chronicle the power of public discourse to produce, frame, and regulate prostitution as a social problem. She traces the impact of two major Canadian legal documents, Pornography and Prostitution in Canada (known as the Fraser Report) and Sexual Offences against Children and Youth (known as the Badgley Report).6 Such documents function under a veneer of public serviceoriented democracy and objectivity that, she argues, actually serve hegemonic mandates that manufacture popular consent in order to wield state power. For example, the Badgley Report reframed youth prostitution as the sexual abuse of children (117), an incendiary phrase used for political manipulation. This effectively precluded young people from getting needed help in some cases; it also turned discussion away from the material (as opposed to psychological) reasons for young peoples turning to prostitution in the rst place. In a similar vein, Jo Doezemas review of Trafcking in Women, Forced Labour and Slavery-Like Practices in Marriage, Domestic Labour and Prostitution by Marjan Wijers and Lin Lap-Chew, in the volume by Dank and Renetti, unpacks and recontextualizes trafcking, another incendiary term.7 Brock situates the targeting of prostitution in the 1970s as a backlash against 1960s sexual permissiveness, among other things. I would like to have seen a parallel analysis of the history of recent race relations to round out this picture. Instructors might assign such a text alongside this one to help situate the regulation of prostitution as one example among many of the policing of nonreproductive white sexuality and disproportionate targeting of women of color. Brock does deal with race issues in this volume, including white slavery (another incendiary phrase), deconstructing the stereotype of the pimp of color who exploits young white women. Brocks text pairs well with Kari Lerums lead article in the Dank
6 Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution, Pornography and Prostitution in Canada (Ottawa: Ministry of Supply and Services, 1985); Special Committee on Sexual Offences against Children and Youths, Sexual Offences against Children and Youth (Ottawa: Ministry of Supply and Services, 1984). 7 Marjan Wijers and Lin Lap-Chew, Trafcking in Women, Forced Labour and SlaveryLike Practices in Marriage, Domestic Labour and Prostitution (Utrecht: Foundation against Trafcking in Women [STV], 1997).

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and Renetti volume, titled Twelve-Step Feminism Makes Sex Workers Sick, in which Lerum more crisply traces similar processes in the United States. As science displaced religion, Lerum argues, the language used to marginalize sex workers changed: they became diseased and in need of recovery rather than sinners in need of redemption, a charge reinforced by feminists and conservatives alike. Highlighted or implied throughout each of these volumes are the differing views of feminists on the sex industry. In Theorizing Prostitution: The Question of Agency in the Dank and Renetti collection, Melanie Simmons outlines points of contention and agreement between what she calls the Prostitutes Rights (PR) and the Feminists against Systems of Prostitution (FASP) movements, using two charts that cover thirteen issues. In the Product for Sale category, she characterizes the FASP viewpoint as holding that prostitution essentially commodies the whole person by reducing her to a sexual object, which damages the self, whereas the PR viewpoint sees a sexual service, not a vulnerable body, for sale. This one difference merits much greater exploration, for it reects, without elaborating, the different ontologies of sex, women, and sexual exchange deployed by each movement. In the introduction to Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry, Ronald Weitzer aims to provide a fuller understanding of sex work and the sex industry (3), and, for the most part, his volume succeeds. His chapter The Politics of Prostitution in America, along with Wendy Chapkiss article immediately following it and the Simmons article mentioned above, provides an excellent introduction to prostitution in the United States. However, in his introduction, Weitzer dismisses the sex wars as having generated more heat than light (3) and then goes on to synthesize and summarize many of the issues illuminated by said wars, most of which were put forth by women. Compared with the books overall contribution, though, this is a minor quibble. The rest of the book includes a chapter on vice squads in Britain; one on street prostitution variations by ethnicity, location, and substance use (for HIV prevention outreach); a comparative study of prostitution in Spain and England; a fascinating look into the history and present of the Nevada brothels; an analysis of the practices, language, and politics of a successful prostitute reform organization; and articles on phone sex, pornography, and more. While Sex Work and Sex Workers, with its sex workerfriendly tone, compelled me the most of the four volumes, the conditions of this texts existence ironically include reportedly disrespectful, even cruel, treatment of sex workers by the academic co-organizers of the 1998 International

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Conference on Prostitution (ICOP) from which many of these essays were taken. Having attended the conference, I witnessed some of this treatment directly. Some of the authors declined to have their work included in the volume Prostitution: On Whores, Hustlers, and Johns,8 the ofcial proceedings of the conference, because the nonsex worker academics broke agreements with the sex worker participants, many of whom took great risks in crossing national borders to attend the conference, only to nd themselves denied the protection, translations, reimbursements, and presentation time they were promised. So, after the promise to create a sex workerinclusive volume coedited by at least one sex worker was also broken, a good number of the sex worker and sex workerpositive academics wound up in this volume instead. Editor Barry M. Dank, whom I interviewed on the telephone, said he attended the conference and knew nothing of these circumstances. Furthermore, the other three volumes in this review (and also Prostitution: On Whores, Hustlers, and Johns) make use of sexually evocative images of women on the cover. Again, the bodies, images, and titillation of sex workers are used to sell academics work, while academics own personal fascinations (or repulsions) go unmentioned or grossly undertheorized. At the ICOP conference, the academic organizers prevented the art exhibitors of the International Sex Worker Foundation for Art, Culture, and Education from using the word whore in their exhibit. Now it graces the cover of the book of academic studies of sex work from which sex workers themselves were excluded. Even Brock, in Making Work, Making Trouble, wants to include the points of view of prostitutes within mainstream feminism, even as mainstream feminism seeks to position itself as a moral regulatory force to inuence state-imposed laws. Saying that sex-trade workers have sought out feminists as potential allies (23) assumes that no sex trade workers identify as feminists, that no feminists are sex trade workers, and that writing by sex trade workers themselves does not count in the broader body of literature considered to be feminist. This cleavage is revealed by looking at how nonsex worker feminists have excluded sex workers and their allies from discussions, conferences, and anthologies, even and sometimes especially when the topic is sex work itself. Such actions reproduce separations between feminist and sex worker identities, voices, and literature. The Sex Work and Sex Workers volume shines through in its candor, immediacy, and inclusion of sex workers themselves, including an auto8 James E. Elias, ed., Prostitution: On Whores, Hustlers, and Johns (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1998).

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biographical essay by a bride-cum-stripper (who uses her wedding garments as fetish wear onstage), a review (one of eleven!) of a book on relationship triads by longtime feminist porn star and health advocate Nina Hartley, and an article on female sex tourism in the Caribbean by the late Klaus de Albuquerque. The Simmons article in this volume, the one with the chart of the two camps, concludes by reiterating the common ground between the two camps, a mutual concern for the welfare of prostitutes and their vision of a changed state (146). Similarly, Wendy Chapkiss sex worker surveys from Power and Control in the Commercial Sex Trade in Sex for Sale suggest that all who are concerned with womens rights and well-being might unite around proposals to enhance womens power within the trade and to increase their options beyond it (201). I hope such collaborative visions inspire and guide sex workers and their allies in academia and beyond. Those compelled to study the sex industry should take more care to theorize their own positions, interrogate their ontologies of sex, and avoid the other traps so common to those outside the industry who must resort to sociology, ethnography, and statistics to make sense of whores.

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. By Patricia Hill Collins. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics. By Joy James. New York: St. Martins Press, 1999.
Andrea Y. Simpson , University of Washington

lack feminist thought and legal-political scholarship that examine the lives of black women are gaining ground in the academy, largely due to the quality of works such as the ones reviewed here: the revised tenth anniversary edition of Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins and Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics by Joy James. These works offer glimpses into political futures that will place the struggle of black women, some of whose experiences illustrate the suffocating bind of multiple oppressions, at the center of social justice projects. Both books are intensely personal; both ground their work in the real-life experiences of black women. The latter work is a powerful contribution to the growing

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literature on the intersectionality of identities that was pioneered by critical race theorists. It perfectly complements the former as it forcefully moves us into the shadowed spaces of radical black women, where blackness and the feminine force meet the re of justice. First, I will highlight some of the newer material in Black Feminist Thought and then discuss how Jamess Shadowboxing offers a compatible but different vision of the future of black feminism. Black Feminist Thought has been pared down in some places and expanded in others. The frame and most of the substance of the original work remain. One strength of the new edition is Collinss reections and analyses of the present-day retooling of old stereotypes. She illustrates how the breeder woman stereotype of slavery days is the foundation for the welfare mother/queen stereotype of today. The Jezebel is the hoochie-mama of rap lyrics. These stereotypes are powerful and poisonous images that adapt to new social conditions. Collins tells us we must keep administering antidotes. Collins also conducts a courageous discussion of what seems to be an epidemic among black women: loneliness. The census bureau reports that 60 percent of black women 25 to 29 years of age have never been married, compared to 34 percent of white women. Nearly half of black women 30 to 34 years of age have never been married, compared to less than one-fth of white women.1 These data reect the gravity of this problem for African-American women, and Collins exposes the underlying reasons for this phenomenon. Other strengths lie in the call to enlarge the vision of black feminism to include struggles of women across the globe and women who, in their everyday activities, resist oppression. Women without resources in Africa, India, and other countries face multiple oppressions. In developing explanatory theories about the conditions of U.S. black women, scholars should try to explain as much as possible about the conditions of women everywhere who face similar challenges. This is, according to Collins, the utility of U.S. black feminist thought. In recounting the distinguishing features of black feminist thought, Collins reiterates the idea that there can be diverse responses to similar experiences. She acknowledges that resistance can take various formsfrom outright rejection of the dominant ideology to subtle but subversive shifts in consciousness. Yet, Collins does not address the political responses of black women in middle-class organizations such as 100 Black women or the growing visibility of conservative black women. How might we explain
1 Retrieved December 5, 2001, from the U.S. Census Bureau on the World Wide Web at www.census.gov.

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Ezola Foster, the 2000 vice-presidential running mate of Pat Buchanan? What made Vicky Wilcher, a former political operative for the Democratic Party, become the executive director for the GOP in Washington, D.C.? Are these women responding differently to similar experiences, or are they having different experiences and hence different responses? The existence of these conservative women speaks to the challenge of reconciling the objective commonalities in the black experience with signicant subjective differences in the interpretation of those experiences. Collins includes literature, blueswomen,domestic workers, and popular ction writers in her recitation of works and deeds that can empower black women. This tenth edition of Black Feminist Thought is well worth purchasing and reading. Those of us who study race, gender, and class need reminding of the intellectual traps that we set for ourselves when we work in rigidly proscribed disciplines. We need to read again about the women on the buses who are our source and our sustenance. Philosophers, social scientists, and cultural critics sometimes come in the guise of our fourth grade teacher or the older neighbor who cares for infants in her home. Collins reminds us to listen to them. In Shadowboxing, James brings to the forefront an analysis of the activities of women whose names we knowElla Baker, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakurand restores to them the status of righteous renegades. In the process we are made aware of what we have lost as popular culture gobbles up our histories and our heroes and reduces them to spectacle and sentiment. As a scholar of color, it is frustrating that one of the immense problems of the communityincarceration rates for men and womenis rarely examined with the insight of James. She rolls out the data on black folks in prison, which are devastating, but more important, she places this phenomenon in the context of state-corporate domination. There seems no escape from the prison of prot-motivated private industry and its effects on black communities. James sees a way outa black feminist project that would turn these institutions into communities of empowerment for the people inside. This radical concept of community on its face seems counterintuitive. If, however, one could establish a community inside of prison, it might be easier for communities to thrive outside of prison. For James, as well as Collins, black feminism must include community work and resistance to dominant cultural norms. James criticizes black feminist projects centered on personal hardships and abuse. She provides solid arguments that the activities of Baker, Wells, Davis, and Shakur were benecial not only to individual black women but essential in identifying the sources of oppression, which were not exclusively black men. Here James provides denitions of liberal feminists,

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radical feminists, and revolutionary feminists, denitions that help to explain why some black women respond to oppression by modifying the system, while others challenge capitalism and institutions as the source of oppression, and still others engage in political acts that directly defy the system. Jamess measured but rm confrontation of the ways in which black men and women have compromised the struggle for equality runs throughout Shadowboxing. In the chapter on sexual-racial stereotypes, James brilliantly deconstructs Bulworth, the political satire written and produced by Warren Beatty that is rife with black female characters who, true to stereotype, are deceptive, sexualized, and eager to seduce white men. James notes that Harvard professor and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates heartily endorses the lm but, in his endorsement, makes no mention of its troubling portrayals of black women. One of the strongest chapters in the book explores possible alliances between black feminists and black profeminist men. James discusses the work of Michael Awkward and Devon Carbado, among others, while simultaneously pointing out the ways in which other black male scholars may put on the feminist mantle in their roles as literary critics and allpurpose sages of blackness without fully committing to the empowerment of black women. There is strong stuff in this chapter, yet Jamess prose is without bitterness or rancor. Shadowboxing is a provocative, bold book whose title only hints at its intricacies. The shadow boxeris a lone pugilist advancing and retreating, moving and jabbing against unseen opponents. The shadow boxer practices for the real bout. Jamess radical and revolutionary women know that sometimes the enemy hides in the shadows, so they just keep punching.

Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America. Edited by Cynthia R. Daniels. New York: St. Martins, 1998. Emotional Rescue: The Theory and Practice of a Feminist Father. By Isaac D. Balbus. New York: Routledge, 1998.
David S. Gutterman, Willamette University

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1990s, there was a dramatic shift in U.S. social policy debates. Spurred by voices ranging from Dan Quayle to Louis Farrakhan to Promise Keepers, public attention began to focus on questions of fatherhood. Under the new Bush administration, this trend shows no sign of abating. Indeed, the Senate recently approved the appointment of Wade Horn, Bushs choice as assistant secretary for family support at the Department of Health and Human Services. Horn, the head of the Fatherhood Institute, has been a leading proponent of efforts to reentrench traditional notions of marriage and gender and now sits in a key position to shape family policy in the United States, including the reauthorization of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. While the politics of fatherhood has moved to the center of U.S. debates, the scholarship on fathers unfortunately has commonly been guided by predetermined moral ends. As a result, much conservative academic literature is plagued by crude conclusions purportedly drawn from social scientic data, rhapsodic proclamations about evolutionary biology, and wistful (and stereotypical) sentiments about the irreplaceable qualities of father love. Meanwhile, for feminist and other progressive scholars, issues of fathers and fatherlessness have too often been simply regured into the more familiar analysis of the structural and ideological obstacles faced by single mothers and other nontraditional families. In this milieu, the anthology Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America comes as a welcome introduction to the current political disputes. Cynthia Daniels has thoughtfully selected essays from advocates and academics on both the right and left. Lost Fathers offers ample evidence of what Daniels calls the deep and dramatic divisions that constitute the public debate (1) as well as an interdisciplinary sampling of the emerging scholarship on fatherhood. Although the essays collected in this volume frequently illustrate the problems I mention above, there are great lessons to be learned from such a collection about the way ideology shapes scholarship, the construction of public policy, and the difculty of creating conversation about such highly charged moral and political issues. Accordingly, despite the limitations of individual contributions, as a whole this anthology (which grew out of a 1996 conference sponsored by the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University) can serve as an excellent teaching tool for courses on public policy, gender and politics, and contemporary moral issues. Lost Fathers wisely begins with an essay by historian Robert C. Griswold that situates the debates about fatherhood in a broad social and political context. In surveying American fatherhood and families in America, Griswold challenges both those on the left who are sanguine about the
uring the late

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emergence of new family structures (12) and, especially, those on the right who see Americas most intractable problems (12) as caused by fatherlessness. The former blithely acknowledge societal changes in child rearing but rarely consider the impact of these changes within the wider web of social relations. As for the latter, Griswold tellingly illustrates how nostalgic conservative celebrations of fatherhood are based on both patriarchal fears of female autonomy and sociobiological concerns about barbaric male behavior detached from the civilizing bonds of wives and children. Such arguments are plainly evident in the work of David Popenoe, whose contribution to Lost Fathers begins with the assertion that: The decline of fatherhood is a major force behind many of the most disturbing problems that plague American society: crime and juvenile delinquency; premature sexuality and out-of-wedlock births to teenagers; deteriorating educational achievement; depression, substance abuse, and alienation among adolescents; and the growing number of women and children in poverty (33). In this short piece drawn from his inuential book Life without Father,1 Popenoe deploys an array of arguments that include claims about the universality of marriage and the nuclear family, biological and evolutionary arguments about parenthood and sexual difference, moralizing conclusions about the need for gender-differentiated parenting (and the perverse effects of challenging such stereotypical differences), and social scientic analysis of data on men, women, and children in the United States (36). Since Popenoe is a sociologist by training, I will focus on one of the more spurious conclusions he draws from this data. Citing 1993 Bureau of Justice statistics on crime, Popenoe writes, More than two-thirds of violence (assault, robbery, and rape) against women is committed by unrelated acquaintances or strangers. As the number of unattached males in the population goes up, so does the incidence of violence toward women (45). Accordingly, marriage tames men and leads to the reduction of violence against women. Among the issues begged by this analysis is that family members commit almost 33 percent of the reported crimes against women. Limiting divorce as Popenoe proposes would increasingly attach women to the violent men who already commit one-third of violent crimes against women. Indeed, if male family members commit 33 percent of the reported violent crimes against women, then perhaps womens capacity to
1 David Popenoe, Life without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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civilize men is suspect, and we should consider other cultural forces behind male behavior. Judith Stacey addresses such questions in her contribution to Lost Fathers. Beyond her acute criticism of Popenoe, David Blankenhorn, and crusaders against fatherlessness, Stacey frames the debates about the family in the political context of the contemporary United States. In the current conservative, antigovernment, antitax and spending climate (74), the focus on fatherlessness as a root cause of social ills serves to rationaliz[e] a sweeping privatization of resources (74) while blithely ignoring institutional and structural concerns. Indeed, Stacey would agree with fellow contributor Lisa Dodson, who argues that the theory of father-as-savior . . . avoids the essential structural challenge . . . that gives rise to the increasingly stratied family life in America (125). Nevertheless, the father-as-savior argument persists among many conservative scholars and advocates. Maggie Gallagher writes plaintively in Lost Fathers about the father hunger of children inevitably and irretrievably wounded by divorce and abandonment. Where Gallagher uses anecdotal evidence to make her emotional appeal for marriage [as] the ancient answer to the maintenance of the vital but fragile bond between father and child, sociologist Sara McLanahan makes a similar appeal on the basis of recent demographic data (180). McLanahan readily acknowledges the importance of economic stability to child rearing, but she adopts one of the most common but never adequately explained claims of traditional family advocatesthe crucial signicance of the biological connection between father and child. It is of course one thing to argue that two-parent families commonly (but not universally) offer more socioeconomic and psychological advantages than single-parent families; it is quite another to claim that the key variable in the composition of these two-parent families is the biological connection of father to child. (There is no comparative study of the relationship between fathers and adopted children, for example.) The mystery of biology is shrouded in evocative longing that fails to mask the moral agenda that accompanies a heartfelt concern for children in a tumultuous age when families in America are caught amidst powerful social and economic developments. In sharp contrast to the concerns of fatherlessness, Isaac Balbus explores the personal, political, and psychological effects of a very present father, namely, himself. In Emotional Rescue: The Theory and Practice of a Feminist Father, Balbus examines and develops his vision of feminist fatherhood and co-parentinga concept that in some ways stands as the apotheosis of the very type of new father Popenoe and his colleagues

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deride. Emotional Rescue is an ambitious project. Endeavoring to bring closure to fourteen years of research and to synthesize two previous attempts to write a critical theory of Western child rearing, Balbus here seeks to examine the enormous impact of Benjamin Spock on families in the United States, analyze his own practice as a father, and answer the Marcusean question of what it means to be a radical intellectual by demonstrating the link between enlightenment and embodiment (7). Moreover, as he explains throughout this work, Balbus is committed to making good on the concluding promises of his previous (and widely applauded) book, Marxism and Domination.2 What emerges is a complex work that is part diary, part theory, part meditation, and part social history. Along the way, Balbus recalls his youth on the playgrounds of New York, glories in the birth and early years of his daughter, rehearses his emerging understanding of his dysfunctional relationship with his mother, chronicles his academic triumphs and failures, and psychoanalyzes his ex-wife as their marriage falls apart. This personal narrative serves as a background and case study for his effort to synthesize feminist mothering theory and narcissism theory (271). By making himself the case study for his own project, Balbus has taken a brave step in the effort to break down the walls between theory and practice. However, successfully taking this difcult step demands a memoirist of exceptional ability. Balbuss descriptions of himself and his family feel forced rather than uid or appealing. For example, Balbus takes great pains to demonstrate to his readers both his sensitive romanticism and his street-smart toughness. From his account of procreative sex on a rock overlooking the crystalline blue Aegean to the description of the dark circle in the little tube of piss (18) that gives evidence of fertilization, Balbus strives mightily to impress his readers with his great vitality. Furthermore, the awkward juxtaposition of his own therapy sessions with the development of his social and psychological theories of parenting are abrupt and unsatisfying. Having witnessed his psychoanalysis of his exwife, it is simply hard to trust Balbus as the judge, jury, defendant, and court reporter in his own case. And that is a shame because there are facets of this textparticularly his efforts to bring critical theory to bear on psychoanalytic accounts of parenthoodthat are illuminating far beyond the details of Balbuss own life. Both Daniels and Balbus offer their volumes with the hope to con2 Isaac D. Balbus, Marxism and Domination: A Neo-Hegelian, Feminist, Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual, Political, and Technological Liberation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982).

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tribute to the ongoing dialogue about social, political, and psychological theories of parenting. These two fascinating if problematic books clearly illustrate both the room and the need for scholarly voices from different elds to assess the role of men in this era of changing family dynamics in the United States. The politics of fatherhood in the United States will likely remain at the center of public debate in the coming years, and, as Lost Fathers amply illustrates, the stakes are extraordinarily high. Somewhere between the solipsistic, censorious, and sanguine, there is a striking need for critical scholarship to help illuminate public debate.

Loves Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. By Eva Feder Kittay. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self. Edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Joan C. Tronto, Hunter College, City University of New York

eminist philosophers are slowly moving beyond criticism of existing philosophical frameworks toward revised concepts. The two books under review take up the basic concepts of equality and autonomy and offer us glimpses of what future philosophy might be. Eva Feder Kittay tells us in Loves Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency that she began with the hope that she could formulate a new theory of equality that embraces dependency but discovered that there was too much work to be done in simply clearing the ground (xii). After a review of existing feminist critiques of equality, Kittay arrives at an alternative conception of equality by offering a new and transformative feminist critique of John Rawls, arguably the most important contemporary liberal political philosopher. Kittay starts from a simple question: What place exists in Rawlsian society for someone like her own intellectually disabled daughter (described in a moving portion of the text)? By Rawlss account, the requirement for free and equal people is that they be, as Kittay emphasizes, self-originating sources of valid claims and self-authenticating sources of valid claims (93). Kittay acknowledges that a Rawlsian just society would care for the disabled. The problem arises, though, because someone has to be a de-

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pendency worker in order for such a charge to be well cared for. Kittay then shows systematically how dependency workers, given the ways that their lives are bound up with the lives of their charges, cannot be selforiginating and self-authenticating in Rawlss senses. Instead, she argues, one must understand their interrelationship as creating a kind of connected equality. Kittays solution is to add care to the list of Rawlsian primary goods. To account for this primary good, one needs to add a third principle of justice, to accompany Rawlss famous two principles: the principle of the social responsibility for care (113). In addition to this careful philosophical critique of Rawls, Kittay provides feminist scholars with a clear account of the nature of dependency and of dependency work. Her more concrete cases of dependency work and care, in which she looks at welfare deform and at the care of her daughter, provide some of the empirical and concrete experiential justication for the position that she has taken. Kittay notes that dependency care work inherently cannot be reciprocal. What can be reciprocal, however, is an image of the reciprocal offering of such care to others throughout ones life and throughout society, a notion that she calls doulia. From such a perspective, Kittay rightly claims that understanding equality as the absence of dependency is an inappropriate way to think about equality; instead, we need a future theory of connected equality that will serve as the philosophical anchor for a future theory of equality. As Kittay has admitted, her project is not complete; the critique is more developed than the constructive alternative. Nevertheless, this book points to a much bolder philosophical project. Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar have edited a landmark collection of original papers in Relational Autonomy. This text does not provide a nal and agreed-on denition of relational autonomy. Instead, these essays show how a basic concept in philosophy is imbricated with many other concepts and the complexity of trying to change such a basic concept. One of the great strengths of the collection is that, at the same time that there is a conceptual coherence to the volume as a whole, there is no attempt to impose a single framework, point of view, or approach. Mackenzie and Stoljar begin by defending feminist uses of autonomy as a concept. They make this argument by providing ve grounds on which feminists usually object to autonomy and demonstrating that none of these arguments sufces to throw out the concept of autonomy, even if some conceptions of autonomy may be too limiting. From the feminist critiques, however, one issue emerges as central; as Stoljar writes, The question for all theories of autonomy is what kinds of socialization are incompatible with autonomy (97).

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The editors have included essays that offer various answers to this main issue. A rst answer is to offer a better account of procedural autonomy. One can determine that a person has acted autonomously through specifying a procedural conception of autonomy, for example, based on whether people have the requisite capacities for autonomy (so argues Diana Tietjens Meyers). A second answer is found in substantive autonomy. There may be some decisions that we could never count as autonomous, and so there has to be at least a minimal content to autonomy (so argue Paul Benson and, on different grounds, Stoljar, in the collection). A third solution is to try to devise a concept of relational autonomy. The coauthored essay by Carolyn McLeod and Susan Sherwin, drawing on the bioethics tradition, describes a concept of relational autonomy: Whereas traditional accounts concern themselves only with judging the ability of the individual to act autonomously in the situation at hand, relational autonomy asks us to take into account the impact of social and political structures, especially sexism and other forms of oppression, on the lives and opportunities of individuals. . . . In particular, a relational view of autonomy encourages us to understand that the best way of responding to oppressions restrictive inuence on an individuals ability to act autonomously is to change the oppressive conditions of her life, not to try to make her better adapt to (or simply to manage to overcome) those conditions privately. (260) On its face, relational autonomy does not seem to be something other than the existing notions of autonomy; it seems to be more an addition to the notion of autonomy. This conceptualization offers a step forward, according to Mackenzie and Stoljar, by claiming that such social relations are constitutive or causal of, and not merely strongly related to, the presence and absence of autonomy. Reading this text will provide the reader with a clear and pathbreaking account of how to think about questions of autonomy and the nature of the self. How do these two volumes advance feminist philosophy? They provide excellent critiques and hopeful glimpses into future theories. Both connected equality and relational autonomy suggest the same direction for feminist theorists: the old conceptual tools need to be refashioned so that they are more contextual in nature. Critics might object to Kittays work on the grounds that in valuing a kind of work traditionally associated with women in an oppressive social framework, she does not transform the oppressive social structures that make women into dependency workers. Defenders of traditional notions of autonomy will surely object that the re-

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lational autonomy tentatively suggested in Mackenzie and Stoljars collection confuses and imports into a notion of autonomy a number of other concepts, such as the injustice of oppression. In both cases, oppressive social conditions are implicated in the way basic, seemingly innocent, philosophical ideas are organized. This is not a bad place for feminist philosophers to begin to reconceptualize the world.

Female Sexuality: Contemporary Engagements. Edited by Donna Bassin. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1999. The Sexual Century. By Ethel Spector Person. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Sexuality, Society, and Feminism. Edited by Cheryl Brown Travis and Jacquelyn W. White. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2000.
Celia Kitzinger, University of York

has transformed peoples experience of sexuality. The rise of sexology, psychology, and psychoanalysis provided new kinds of disciplining and surveillance of the sexual subject; feminism and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements challenged conventional sexual mores; antibiotics, birth control, the legalization of abortion, the HIV epidemic, and changing social attitudes and values have all played a part. The three books reviewed here all explicitly address, and are a part of, these changes. Two of the three books draw on and develop psychoanalytic ideas about sexuality, bringing together and commenting on psychoanalytically oriented articles written across different decades of the twentieth century. Female Sexuality: Contemporary Engagements, edited by Donna Bassin, reprints nine classics originally published in the rst half of the twentieth century (by Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Karen Horney, Joan Riviere, Ernest Jones, and Melanie Klein) and ve contemporary classics published since 1976. Each reprint was selected by a contemporary analyst as having been central to his or her clinical practice with women or as having served as a theoretical forebear of their own work and writing; a commentary by the analyst who selected ita substantial essay in its own rightaccompanies each work. The Sexual Century is a collection of Ethel Spector Persons work on
he past century

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sexuality (much of it with various coauthors) previously published over a twenty-ve-year period, between the early 1970s and the end of the 1990s. Although nothing substantive has been changed in any of the papers, some footnotes have been added, and the collection as a whole has been framed up in the opening chapter. By contrast, Sexuality, Society, and Feminism, edited by Cheryl Brown Travis and Jacquelyn W. White, is a state-of-theart collection of contemporary North American psychological knowledge on sexuality. There is little engagement between academic psychology and psychoanalysis. Not one of Bassins fourteen reprinted classics is referenced in Sexuality, Society, and Feminism, and only one of their authors (Sigmund Freud) is indexedand he appears only in a half-page deconstruction of his views on incest. Nor is Persons work referenced or referred to. My own involvement in academic lesbian and feminist psychology means that I am far more familiar with the kind of work represented by the Travis and White volume than with either of the other two books. I did, however, enjoy Bassins collection, which does, as the preface promises, provide easy access to some of the most generative texts on women in psychoanalytic thought to date. It also offers many points of contact between interdisciplinary feminist scholarship and the specic preoccupations (largely, it has to be said, genital) of psychoanalysis. Margo Rivieras contemporary classic on multiple personality and Muriel Dimens intelligent and politically informed commentary dealing with the relationship between postmodernism and feminism are engaging reading, and Adrian Schwartz likewise does an excellent job of relating Rivieres work to queer theory. Reprints of classic articles on penis envy (Grossman and Stewart), the clitoris (Jones), the vagina (Horney), and female genital anxieties (Bernstein)each with its commentarymake fascinating and often challenging reading. For feminists, it is a contentious and provocative collection. For example, Lloyd Mayer makes the claim that womens repeated complaints that men are emotionally closed, unable to be receptive, without access to inner feelings, and so on derive from female castration anxiety (i.e., if he doesnt have a vulva with its opening and potential inside, then I could lose mine, so his lack of a vulva scares me [384]). Thus, what some feminist psychologists see as a legitimate female concern with male emotional unresponsiveness is metamorphosed into a desperate attempt by women to shore up a fragile sense of their own genital intactness. This volume is an excellent resource for students and professionals concerned with contemporary psychoanalytic engagements with female sexuality. One of the dilemmas Bassins book confronts head-on is how to engage with the writings of the past in a manner that is neither destructive of our intellectual ancestors nor passively accepting of received wisdom. This

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problem came to the fore in my reading of Persons book. The twenty (reprinted) chapters are organized not chronologically but by theme, and it was not until chapter 5 that I realized I had read her work before. I had stumbled on it in the late 1970s, shortly after having my rst sexual relationship with a woman at the age of sixteen, when I was desperately scouring libraries for something that would tell me that there were others like me somewherethat I wasnt evil, sick, or perverted. Very little was available on lesbianism, and I found myself reading books and articles on male homosexuality, including Person and Lionel Oveseys clinical reports (described as classic papers on the front cover blurb of this book), seven of which are reprinted here. Chapter 5, Gender Identity and Sexual Psychopathology in Men: A Psychodynamic Analysis of Homosexuality, Transsexualism, and Transvestism, was originally published in 1973, and heres how it introduces the topic of homosexuality: There are three major disorders of gender identity in which the gender disorder is overt: homosexuality, transsexualism, and transvestism. All three occur in association with sexual psychopathology. . . . In our opinion, they are best understood as neuroses (97). Other chapters coauthored with Ovesey (an intuitive and brilliant analyst . . . [an] original and rigorous thinker [v] to whom Person has dedicated her book) compound and elaborate the picture of pathology. Transvestites are obsessive-paranoid . . . irritable, hyperaggressive and hypercompetitive (199); homosexual transsexuals vary along a continuum from passive hysterical to hyperaggressive narcissistic (134). And the root cause of all this pathology lies (of course) with faulty mothering: mothers are symbiotic (attempts to cling to the child to ll her emptiness [132]), intrusive (overpowering and invasive . . . may be motivated by a special need to derogate maleness [133]), or she is hostile (physically and emotionally abrasive [133]). Even at the time they were published (between 1973 and 1985) these papers were at odds with developments in psychological (and some psychoanalytic) thinking. Evelyn Hookers pioneering work demonstrating gay mens mental health was well known; homosexuality had been removed as an ofcial diagnostic category from the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973; and, in 1975, the American Psychological Association urged mental health professionals to take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness that had long been associated with lesbian and gay identities.1 Today, these seven chapters read as re1 Evelyn Hooker, The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual, in W. R. Dynes and S. Donaldson, eds., Studies in Homosexuality: Homosexuality and Psychology, Psychiatry and Counseling (New York: Garland, 1992), 14255. On the American Psychological As-

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actionary anachronisms. It is not clear what purpose is served by reprinting them here. Work like this has been responsible for a great deal of misery among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people (and our mothers). Apology is more in order than celebration. In chapter 1, as part of a (rather shaky) discussion of the essentialist/ social constructionist controversy, Person comments that no branch of science can ultimately be value-free (23) and advocates that researchers should explore their personal biases as well as the biases inherent within their particular discipline (28). However, no such exploration is evident in relation to her own work. Although Person continues to maintain the pathology of cross-dressers, transvestites, and transsexuals (7), she tells us in a footnote (added in 1998), I no longer regard homosexuality as a sexual disorder (97). But nowhere does she explain why not, what happened to change her mind, or how it was that she got it wrong for so many years. No personal or disciplinary biases are discussed, and in contrast to the piling up of case studies documenting pathology, no evidence is offered for homosexual normalityno clinical studies documenting gay mens mental health with the same kind of loving detail she earlier lavished on describing their pathology. There may well be valuable insights and interesting discussions in other chapters of this book: for example, the discussion of male sexuality as the norm against which female sexuality has been evaluated (chap. 2), of patriarchal bias in the construction of female psychology (chap. 4), and of mens fantasies about the omni-available woman and lesbian sex (chap. 19). Other reviewers obviously loved the book: Catharine Stimpson is quoted as saying that it reafrms [Persons] stature as one of our greatest, wisest psychoanalysts, and Nancy Chodorow lauds it as an admirable record of research. As a lesbian, a feminist, and a psychologist, I am unable to share these glowing assessments. Anyone involved in either lesbian feminism or the queer movement is likely to be angered rather than enlightened by the unreexive reprinting of the essays in this book. Sexuality, Society, and Feminism, by contrast, is exactly the sort of book psychology (and feminism) needs, and it will be invaluable in teaching sexuality courses. The aim of the book is to transform our understanding of sexuality: how it is negotiated, developed, and evoked; and what it means in a contemporary social framework (4). This, then, is a volume with explicitly activist goals. The fteen chapters are divided into four sections covering Epistesociations statement regarding the stigma of mental illness, see Esther Rothblum and Lynne Bond, eds., Preventing Heterosexism and Homophobia (London: Sage, 1996).

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mology, Theory and Methods, Life Course Development, Meaning and Function, and Sexuality and the Social Orderalthough this is a somewhat arbitrary division as issues of (for example) meaning and social order recur throughout all the chapters. Throughout the book, the social context of sexuality is a key feature. Danny Moore and Cheryl Travis (in chap. 2) and Leonore Tiefer (in chap. 4) offer excellent analyses of the ways in which biological and sexological models of sexuality (respectively) have functioned not simply to describe sexual behavior but actively to construct it in ways that run counter to womens interests. In chapter 5, Deborah Welsh, Sharon Rostosky, and Myra Kawaguchi discuss the social factors underlying the emergence of girls sexuality as a psychological and social problem. Mary Crawford (chap. 9) offers an entertaining and engaging discussion of humor, which not only shows how (hetero)sexist reality is accomplished through jokes about sexuality but also analyzes the use of feminist humor in retaliation. The nal three chapters on sexual violence make a valuable contribution to outlining the context within which womens sexuality is constructed. In addition to a useful chapter on heterosexism by Laura Brown, an effort has been made to integrate discussions of heterosexism and lesbianism into the text and to avoid the hidden assumption of heterosexuality (vii) criticized by the editors in their introductory chapter. As might be expected in an edited book, however, the result is somewhat patchy; nothing relates to lesbian sexuality in (for example) either the chapter on sexuality during pregnancy and the year postpartum or the chapter on menopause. There are also occasional factual errorswhich seem to relate particularly to queer theory issues (e.g., the denition of transgenderists as men who present social identities as women [23]); and the text barely mentions queer theory and activism. Overall, however, this is a good reection of contemporary feminist psychological work on sexuality, and it is a collection I will be using in my own teaching. Of the three books reviewed here, this one offers the broadest range of possibilities for transforming sexuality in the twentyrst century.

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Mothers Taxi: Sport and Womens Labor. By Shona M. Thompson. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1999. Women of Steel: Female Bodybuilders and the Struggle for Self-Denition. By Maria R. Lowe. New York and London: New York University Press, 1998. Sport and Postmodern Times. Edited by Genevieve Rail. Albany, N.Y.: ` SUNY Press, 1998.
Ann Chisholm , California State University, Northridge

Women of Steel, and Sport and Postmodern Times all endeavor to fortify and to enhance the sociology of sport while engaging feminist discourses. Each of these texts, moreover, in some way seeks to connect sport studiesespecially the sociology of sportwith critical theory and with cultural studies. As a consequence, each of these works self-consciously contextualizes sport, albeit along different lines, in order to achieve a similar end: to interrogate and to illuminate the variegated relationships among gendered sporting practices, relations of power, resistant acts, and the (re)production of both sport and culture. Thus, while underscoring the import of womens relationships to capital resources (2), Mothers Taxi suggests that sport may hinge on an often overlooked and undervalued contextual elementthe labor of mothers and wives (7). For its part, Women of Steel assesses the fundamentally deterministic impact of more conspicuous macrolevel political, historical, and economic factors that have inuenced both professional and amateur womens bodybuilding (73). Sport and Postmodern Times is more ambitious still as it contextualizes both sport and sport scholarship in relation to postmodernity, postmodern representational styles and experiential structures, and postmodern theory. Concomitantly, all these works invite readers to ponder and to interrogate existing connections between social scientic research, particularly qualitative research in the form of semistructured interviews, and cultural studies. Through both their strengths and their weaknesses, these texts indicate that such research might converge quite productively with cultural studies commitments to investigating relations of power at local levels. Conversely, they also attest that the literatures of cultural studies, with their emphases on contextuality and articulation, might usefully inform social scientic research pertaining to gender conducted at a microlevel. Shona M. Thompsons Mothers Taxi: Sport and Womens Labor demonstrates its authors strong commitment to feminist studies while in-

others Taxi,

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vestigat[ing] how womens labor serviced and reproduced the institution of sport and what this meant to the women involved (6). More specifically, Thompson aims to identify and to examine gendered examples of inequitably distributed domestic labor that sustain sporting institutions and yet are rendered invisible in the process. Thompson predicates the bulk of her text on qualitative data derived from semistructured interviews with three groups of fteen or sixteen (predominantly married, heterosexual, Caucasian) women who were afliated as mothers, spouses, or players with volunteer-based Western Australian tennis clubs. The title of her book refers to its rst chapter, which delineates the ways that some of these women have supported their childrens sport, particularly in terms of providing necessary transportation to and from tennis-related events. In this chapter, and throughout Mothers Taxi, Thompson chronicles and interprets womens accounts of the labor they have expended in relation to their familial roles and to the demands of Western Australian tennis organizations. Thompsons data include a number of striking anecdotes: there were tennis coaches who seemed to punish the children of women who did not accede serenely to the codes that dene good Western Australian tennis mothers; there was one female player whose spouse attached a playpen to net poles as a strategy for facilitating her leisure time; there were many veteran women players who contributed gendered and devalued volunteer work to tennis clubs that consistently marginalized womens tennis per se. Thompson, in turn, effectively explains the ways that the women she interviewed structured their daily lives and their identities while negotiating their leisure time, their paid work, and the ideologies of family and maternity with the norms and practices of tennis institutions. At the same time, she thoughtfully acknowledges her respondents complicity in the politics of domestic labor and their resistant impulses as well. Regrettably, Thompsons sample is quite small, and her research is not as rigorous as it might have been. In one instance, the controls for class were, in Thompsons own words, less than reliable (259); in another, Thompson describes a portion of her parental support survey as a relatively crude measure (280). Furthermore, while Mothers Taxi considers issues pertaining to class and (hetero)sexuality, and while it does recognize that the impact of colonization has largely excluded Australias Aboriginal people from this aspect of social life [tennis] (78), Thompson bypasses any substantial examination of race. Concomitantly, and not coincidentally, she does not attend closely to the histories of tennis and tennis organizations in Western Australia that might have informed her study in these areas while also increasing its value in terms of local specicity. Essentially, then, al-

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though there is much to admire in the content of Thompsons analyses, a few readers may be left wishing that she had rened her research design. Maria R. Lowes Women of Steel: Female Bodybuilders and the Struggle for Self-Denition pursues two primary lines of inquiry, which she encapsulates as follows: Is the image of female bodybuilders actually radicalizing, or has the image been reappropriated in order to t within dominant notions of femininity? (9); and How is the dilemma of having such strong, powerful, and possibly radicalizing images of women within a largely maledominated organization resolved? (9). Lowe anchors her study both in ethnographic observation conducted at bodybuilding competitions and in qualitative data culled from semistructured interviews with thirty-four respondents roughly divided into three groups: participants, female ofcials and judges, and male ofcials and judges. Thus, portions of her book document the often fascinating behind-the-scenes experiences of female bodybuilders. Lowe also identies important historical moments of conjuncture between womens bodybuilding and beauty pageants. In doing so, Women of Steel convincingly explains the ways that womens bodybuilding has become enmeshed with idealized and compensatory cultural performances of femininity, specically those encouraged by the tness industry and enacted in tness competitions (such as Miss Fitness America). The light Lowe throws on these relationships shines brightest when she details the overdetermined administrative and marketing structures that dictate the terms and conditions of womens bodybuilding today. Most notably, she proles the ubiquitous inuence of brothers Joe and Ben Weider, whose commercial empire encompasses two major national and international bodybuilding associations as well as the Weider Health and Fitness Corporation (which merchandises tness magazines for men and for women, womens tness competitions, aerobics videotapes for women, nutritional supplements, and other items). Lowe also discusses gendered competition rules (e.g., points may be deducted when womens bodies exhibit signs of either cellulite or stretch marks, women must walk gracefully, and male pectoral implants are disallowed whereas female breast implants are not). Consequently, Lowe furnishes a useful and informative backdrop that throws into bold relief her inquiry regarding the increasing ambiguity of judging standards for womens bodybuilding competitions. Nevertheless, although Lowe meaningfully contextualizes the incisive interpretations of her data, she gathered a rather small sample using the snowball method, which she admits has very low external validity (169). Additionally, notwithstanding the fact that 30 percent of the subjects Lowe surveyed identied themselves as either African American or

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Latina, her research does not focus signicantly on the possibility that race was constitutive of those womens experiences (nor does it investigate what appears to be a shared presumption of heterosexuality among the network of bodybuilders she interviewed). Lowe also supplements her qualitative research by briey reviewing basic literatures drawn from a number of elds, including cultural studies and gender studies. Had Lowe further developed this interdisciplinary theoretical framework, she might have claried and enhanced the contributions her book has made to the study of womens bodybuilding. Genevieve Rails Sport and Postmodern Times surveys the interdisciplinary ` topography of postmodern sports studies. As editor, Rail offers the following description of this collection: Using the new concepts and methods of postmodernism, post-structuralism, radical feminism, and cultural studies, these contributors not only offer their understanding of sport and the cultural space it re/produces in our postmodern societies, they also focus attention on political relations of power, domination, oppression, resistance, and struggle, particularly as these intersect with issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and locality (x). Sport and Postmodern Times, in turn, consists of seventeen essays that address a wide array of topics ranging from the implications postmodern theories might have for social scientic writing about sport, to Foucauldian analyses, to a critical geography of sports bars, to a rearticulation of structural-conjuncturalist theories in cultural studies that incorporates not only affect and ideology but also the hyperreal and the material as well. The strongest chapters are those that examine sport and corporeality from postmodern and poststructural vantage points. In her essay entitled Seismography of the Postmodern Condition, for instance, Rail astutely considers the implosion of bodies, sport, and images in postmodernity. Likewise, Cheryl L. Coles Addiction, Exercise, and Cyborgs relies on the work of Jacques Derrida and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as it maps the disposition of exercise and addiction, the emergence of the exercise addict as a deviant subject, and the implications of doping for conceptions of bodies as natural entities. Many of the chapters that scrutinize gender, race, and sport in relation to post-Fordism and post-Reaganism are notable as well. Representing Black Masculinity and Urban Possibilities, also written by Cole and Samantha King, asserts that, within the United States, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. journalism and lms, along with the NBA and Nike, commodied black male bodies while also constituting the binary basketball/gangs. Concurrently, Cole and King argue, the black, male, urban basketball player, particularly as represented in the lm Hoop Dreams, emerged as a gure of somatic territorialization that foreclosed oppositional

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knowledges and enabled white, middle-class spectators to position themselves as compassionate, ethical subjects. Melisse R. Lafrances Colonizing the Feminine, in turn, takes a page from Robert Goldmans analysis of advertising and commodity feminism.1 Her essay provides an extended exegesis of Nikes 1990 advertising campaign. The Nike campaign, Lafrance concludes, exploited and redeployed pervasive postfeminist, neoconservative, nostalgic liberal sentiments, not only in the service of consumption but also at the expense of feminism, the history of black struggle, and thirdworld women. Given that evolving practices of sport and contemporaneous contextual transformations have intensied, complicated, and, at times, subverted received notions of sport in relation to sex, gender, race, and nationalisms, the goals of Sport and Postmodern Times are important ones. To a certain extent, this collection accomplishes its objectives. Yet the liabilities of the anthology format are ever-present as well: the essays vary in quality, and many of the compelling questions raised explicitly and implicitly either in individual or in multiple chapters (including the introduction) get lost in the fray. Sport and Postmodern Times, therefore, would have beneted from the addition of a concluding chapter that critically explored the various ways that its contributors asked and answered those questions, many of which are crucial to sports studies: If sport was a project of modernity, in what ways might we say that sport has or has not changed? How precisely might we begin to plot and assess the highly charged and complex relationships among postmodernism, feminism, and corporeality in relation to sport? How can we identify signicant examples of resistance to sport and of resistant sport in postmodern contexts? For these reasons, and because much of the volume is devoted to summarizing and to reviewing germinal postmodern texts, the best readers for Sport and Postmodern Times are indeed those who constitute the intended readershippractitioners working either in the sociology of sport specically or in sports studies generally who are unfamiliar with the literatures of postmodernism. Overall, in their own ways, each of the three texts reviewed here conrms not only the enduring signicance of sport sociology for sports studies but also the value and import of interdisciplinary sports scholarship. Considered as a group, they undoubtedly will spark among scholars from various disciplines a number of discussions that are quite germane to scholarship in sports studies, and, in particular, to subsequent research concerning gender and sport.
1 Robert Goldman, Commodity Feminism, in his Reading Ads Socially, 13054 (New York: Routledge, 1992).

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Book Review

The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France. By Carolyn J. Dean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Prousts Lesbianism. By Elisabeth Ladenson. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Elaine Marks, University of WisconsinMadison

under review are remarkably similar and remarkably different. They share an ideological direction in their understanding of how homosexuality and particularly lesbianism have been rendered invisible and miswritten, and each book is condent about setting the record straight. The authors differ in disciplinary bias: Carolyn Dean is a historian; Elisabeth Ladenson is a literary critic. They differ in methodology: Dean is a historicist/constructionist dealing with a vast array of texts and documents within a particular historical period and trying to read together the effects of World War I and the rhetorical reading of writings on pornography and homosexuality; Ladenson is a sophisticated close reader and interpreter of literary texts ` dealing primarily with Marcel Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu (In search of time lost) and the accumulated commentary on this novel as it relates to homosexuality and lesbianism. Each book elicits different pleasures and suspicions on my part. Because my own disciplinary training is closer to Ladensons, my pleasures derive from her ability to illuminate Prousts text in new ways, and my suspicions are uniquely related to some of her interpretations. When these suspicions are aroused I can always return to Prousts text as a point of reference and rethink Ladensons interpretations and my reactions to them. With Dean, on the other hand, because the nature of her project is more complex and more dependent on a methodology that purports to be able to read together the social and the sexual, my suspicions are aroused more frequently, my pleasures are fewer, and it is almost impossible to return to a particular point of reference for verication or corroboration. Each of the two books presents in its introductory chapter questions to be answered. Ladenson raises a few central questions: In Prousts Lesbianism, I address the question of how the already thorny issue of male
he two books

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representation of female homosexuality becomes further complicated in the context of a work written by a gay man (4). Instead of questioning what Gomorrah reveals about Sodom, I have set out to understand what it means for a gay male author to have accorded such importance to his heterosexual male narrators obsession with lesbianism (6). One question that has seldom been addressed is why he [Proust] felt the need to split the maternal gure in two (8). Why then has this aspect of his work [Prousts depiction of and preoccupation with Gomorrah] received so little critical attention? (9). These clearly formulated questions are accompanied by statements of the authors aims and helpful indications concerning her theoretical and methodological biases. Furthermore, Ladenson succeeds in the course of her ve chapters in providing always provocative, often convincing responses to her questions. Dean, on the other hand, raises questions and announces, all the way through her study, when and how she will answer them. How has this narrative about the inviolable body sustained its rhetorical forcefulness in spite of its unmet promises and contradictions? (2). Why is the symbolism of the integral body so powerful that it constitutes different images of the social world? (23). How are shifts in the historical meaning of sexuality related to shifts in the [fantasmatic] concept of bodily integrity? (3). How, then, are discussions about sexual behavior and representations constitutive of the integral body? (3). These questions and announcements, such as this book analyzes (3), this book is focused on France (7), this book describes (13), this book addresses (16), this book uses (17), and this book seeks to interpret those fantasms (23), become tiresome, and the reader may well feel that both writer and reader are treading water. Although the questions and the announcements multiply, there is little sense of a progression. Only occasionally did I feel that this plethora of questions and announcements was leading toward a rening of Deans project. In order to make some of these differences more explicit, I will focus the remainder of this review on Ladensons chapter 5, Mothers and Daughters: The Origins of Gomorrah, and on Deans chapter 5, The Making of Lesbian Sexuality. In her chapter 5, Ladenson comes to the core of her study and to its most original thesis: It is, as I will argue, in the relation between grandmother and mother, articulated through citations of the letters written by Mme de Sevigne to her daughter, that the origins of Prousts depictions of Gomorrah can be found (111). Ladenson then proceeds to produce textual evidence to support her thesis that the love between the narrators mother and grandmother sets the stage for his subsequent obsession with sexual relations between women (115). This evidence includes the mirroring of the relations between Mme

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de Sevigne, her daughter, and her son Charles, and the narrators grand mother, mother, and the narrator, Marcel, as we discover them in the correspondence of Mme de Sevigne and in In Search of Time Lost; the fact that the grandmothers death in the novel is framed by the narrators discoveries that Charlus is a homosexual and Albertine a lesbian; the fact that the narrator feels responsible for the death of his grandmother and of Albertine; the fact that the grandmother and Charlus are both drawn to the letters of Mme de Sevigne; the fact that Charluss nickname is Meme, a name used frequently in France for grandmothers; and perhaps most important, Charluss claim that what Mme de Sevigne felt for her daughter in her letters is both erotic and maternal. This weight of textual evidence illuminates Prousts text in unexpected ways and also proposes other places in which to look for lesbianism to make it visible. Dean, in The Making of Lesbian Sexuality, is primarily concerned with how lesbians have been constructed rhetorically as both invisible and dangerous. Building on previous chapters in which she discussed discourses on feminism at the end of the nineteenth century in France, discourses that insisted on the dangers for France of low birth rate and depopulation, her thesis in this fth chapter is that, in the interwar narratives about lesbian invisibility, lesbians are less and less distinct from other women. . . . Thus, lesbian invisibility was not just a symptom of cultural negligence but the product of a cultural obsession with female sexuality expressed dramatically in interwar French cultural commentary (17677). According to Dean, both those critics opposed to lesbians as dangerous as well as self-identied lesbians espoused a similar fantasy about the secretive, impenetrable, elusive nature of the lesbian. Her analysis of how the Anglo-American poet, Renee Vivien, living in France, became the central gure for self-identied lesbians and her discussion of how, paradoxically, their discourse replicated in positive terms the cultural fantasy of an intrinsically volatile, elusive, annihilating sexuality (201) are among the most interesting pages of this chapter. Using some of the insights of Michel Foucault, Dean insists on the gap between the intentions of writers and the often contrary effects produced by discourses. She concludes convincingly and on a pessimistic note: In other words, the limits intrinsic in this particular construction of lesbian desires opacity reveal the limits intrinsic in marginalized groups ability to mobilize dominant rhetoric in their own interests (212). When Dean is difcult (for me) to read, it is because of her tendency, and the tendency of her methodology, to proceed in an abstract manner and to attempt to make too many connections between disparate elements. At their best, Ladenson and Dean open hitherto unexplored domains

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in the study of (homo)sexuality as it gures in Prousts In Search of Time Lost and in other texts written primarily during the rst quarter of the twentieth century in France. It is interesting to note that, if we compare the conclusions of the two books, Proust, according to Ladenson, wrote more originally and less conventionally about lesbianism than any French female and lesbian writer (according to Dean) of the same period.

No Place like Home: Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men. By Christopher Carrington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood. Edited by Matthew Rottnek. New York and London: New York University Press, 1999. The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation. By Edward Stein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gilbert Zicklin, Montclair State University

under review examine central issues on the political and intellectual agendas of the queer community. Each, respectively, gives a close reading to problems of domestic life, to paradoxes of gender, and to the concept of sexual orientation itself. Christopher Carringtons No Place like Home: Relationships and Family Life among Lesbians and Gay Men is an elegantly written analysis of interviews he carried out with fty-two same-sex couples and of a weeklong period of time he spent in the households of eight of these couples. He examines aspects of domestic life that have been underappreciated in the literature on couples and families and, in the process, nds a division of labor that other sociologists of family have suggested would not exist in same-sex households. Sissies and Tomboys, edited by Matthew Rottnek, is a collection of papers presented at a 1995 conference on Gender Identity Disorder (GID) sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of the City University of New York. It also contains reections on gender ambiguity and how it is sorted out in the lives of a group of invited contributors. The papers range from those that treat gender-deviant identity as a psychodynamic issue to others that read gender rebels as semiheroic popular culture ghe three books

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ures. Together they constitute a provocative inquiry into marginalized gender as it is lived. Edward Steins Mismeasure of Desire is a philosophically grounded examination of the concept of sexual orientation. Using philosophical analysis and addressing recent scientic research, Stein explores such questions as whether sexual orientations are merely arbitrary groupings, or [whether] . . . they refer to something deep about human nature (71). If sexual orientations do exist as natural human kinds, categories that cut to the underlying structure of nature (78), are they determined, voluntary, or nondetermined? His answers turn out to be anything but simple. A central concern of Carringtons No Place like Home is whether domestic labor will be divided differently by same-sex couples as compared to heterosexual ones. In light of Carringtons nding that only one-quarter of his sample of fty-two lesbigay (his term) couples approach . . . rough parity (184), Carrington argues that scholars and those in the gay community who equated the absence of gender difference with an egalitarian division of labor were overstating the case.1 Carrington provides a functional explanation for this unequal division of paid work and household labor, observing that couples strategically encourage the family member with the greatest economic opportunity to pursue paid work vigorously (188). This strategy leaves the economically less marketable partner with the lions share of the domestic work. Carrington is careful not to devalue domestic work, instead treating it as a desirable opportunity. He sees family members attempting to maximize the quality of their household lives both through providing income and through providing domesticity (188), seeming to equate the two. In case we are in any doubt about his evaluation of the worth of domesticity, he states his view quite clearly: My analysis does not conceive of domesticity as a great unpleasantness that the person with more resources (e.g., income, prestige, and education) forces on the person with fewer. Such a view reduces domesticity to its unpleasant aspects and conceals its attractive ones, therein leaving us with no convincing explanation of why some people prefer, and orient themselves toward, domesticity (188). Carrington appears anxious to rehabilitate domesticity, and that may be a worthy goal, but his own study nds that few individuals actually choose . . . to become more involved in family and domestic affairs (193). Simply put, whether
I question the accuracy of Carringtons assessment since the way he broke down his sample into egalitarian and nonegalitarian groups (18488) is rather confusing.
1

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domesticity is seen as unpleasant or attractive to an individual depends a great deal on how it is valued in the larger society. It would be hard for Carrington to ignore a quarter century of feminist critique of female domesticity in marriage, and, of course, he doesnt. He refuses to accept interviewees efforts to downplay the inequality in the division of labor. He is more likely to see such a move as a spurious attempt to neutralize the social and psychological consequences of inequality. In fact, the tenor of the book would be quite different if Carrington consistently accepted the equivalence of career and housework, for much of the studys impact derives from his nding that the same injustice that characterizes heterosexual households applies to same-sex ones. Carrington adduces material factors to explain the specialization pattern (187), where one partner is doing more of the domestic work. He cites more demanding jobs, more promising careers, greater earning power, more exible work schedules, and spending more time at home as factors accounting for the disparity in domestic responsibility. Interestingly, he neglects the possibility that an underlying gender difference may also be in play. It may seem contradictory to speak of gender difference when describing same-gender households, but evidence for this position comes in Carringtons own words: Many of the women and men in these specialized families are employed within traditional female-identied occupations (189). It is they who take on a disproportionate share of domesticity, especially when they are in relationships with individuals in professional, managerial, or executive positions (189). This sounds suspiciously like the gendering of housework. When the couple is in a more female-identied occupationthat is, when both partners have renounced butch claims to highly competitive, high-paying, high-status occupationsthey are more likely to share the housework.2 But when one partner is in a male-identied occupation and the other is in a traditionally female-identied one, the relationship is far more likely to be one-sided with respect to who does the domestic work. Carrington chooses not to look past the demands of ones job or career to the genderassociated character traits of those who strive for executive, professional, and managerial positions. Could it be that the comfort of such persons with competitiveness, achievement orientation, sense of mastery, acquisitiveness, and similar traits is what fuels their choice of, and success in,
I thank David Schwartz for the phrase butch claims, as well as for discussing many of the ideas in this essay with me.
2

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careers and, in the process, reduces the possibility of their sharing domesticity with a less butch partner? If their concern was for the more (feminine) relational qualities of mutuality and afliation, why didnt they opt for less time- and energy-consuming career paths or change careers once they saw the alienating consequences on their partner of the career they did choose? Gender is also implicated in the way the domestically specialized partners cope with their grievances. Housewives in a heterosexual couple who feel exploited have the option of identifying with all other women whose exploitation is linked to gender and not seeing this simply as a personal problem. In the case of lesbians the exploited party may identify with other exploited women, but since the oppressor is another woman, the grounds for collective protest are weakened. If a partner in a gay male relationship feels exploited, he has no collective entity available with which to identify and to oppose his oppressor. There may be self-help groups for lesbians and gay males in physically abusive relationships, but I havent heard of any for exploited househusbands. Associated with an unequal division of household labor are the twin dangers of resentment and self-reproach. Carrington claims that those on the short end of the division of labor do the ideological work that allows the couple to think of their domestic lives as egalitarian and to present an egalitarian front to others.3 Such ideological work also safeguards each ones sense of appropriate gender identity. For lesbian couples, the woman committed to the world of work outside the home must be given the cover of some femininity, while the woman doing the bulk of the housework must be protected from feelings of inadequacy with respect to paid work and career. No Place like Home has a claim on our interest beyond its treatment of the division of labor in same-sex households. Carringtons thoroughgoing examination of the various components of family domesticityfeeding work (which includes paying attention to ingredients present or lacking, shopping for what is needed, planning and executing meals, cleaning up), housework, kin work, consumption work (the work of acquiring services and material goods)extends our perception of the range and depth of activities linked to family maintenance. By uncovering the often-concealed costs of time and energy involved in the monitoring, planning, and accomplishing of everyday activities, Carrington gives us a much clearer picture of just how much labor goes into homemaking.
3 Compare Arlie Hochschild (with Anne Machung), The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 1989).

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As for what makes a family, Carrington departs from the structural view that focuses on roles, instead making relationships the key. As he puts it, I understand family as consisting of people who love and care for one another. This makes a couple a family (5). This is not just an academic matter, for if love makes a family then state-recognized marriage is not the only ticket to family status. Needless to say, there is vocal opposition to Carringtons view, even linking it to a perceived decline in American family life. He could have argued more effectively for his conception of family by showing that society is better served when family is dened in terms of loving and caring activities than by marriage contracts and the language of rights and obligations.4 If Carrington can be accused of underplaying the role of gender in the domestic life of same-sex couples, no such charge can be leveled against Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood, edited by Matthew Rottnek. This stimulating and, in places, boundaryextending volume includes theoretical papers from a conference on gender nonconformity and homosexuality as well as personal narratives on coping with gender deviance. Two useful papers begin the volume, Diagnosis and Treatment of Gender Identity Disorder in Children by Shannon Minter and Ethical Issues in Diagnosing and Treating Gender-Dysphoric Children and Adolescents by Richard R. Pleak. These papers concentrate on the diagnostic category GID, dening it, charting its introduction into psychiatric use, assessing its problematic character, and, ultimately, suggesting that it does more harm than good. Another set of more theoretically oriented papers examines the border between gender deviance and gender pathology. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Ken Corbetts Homosexual Boyhood: Notes on Girlyboys argues for the need to reconceive effeminacy as a normal element in what he calls homosexual boyhood as long as the cross-gender identication does not imply signicant ego damage, which it does for GID boys. The latter are characterized by the insistent assertion by the boy child that he is a girl or prefers to be a girl and should be thought of and treated as a girl. Accordingly, there exists a femme continuum (114) along which gender identity disorder is distinguished from gender nonconformity. It is not just a matter of a girlyboys (Corbetts felicitous term for a gender

Denitions aside, it is ironic that gay couples have met such opposition in their quest for the right to marry since, as the descriptions in No Place like Home make abundantly clear, they already live as married. Of course, not having a marriage license can be economically, socially, and psychically costly to those couples, since so many benets pertain only to married couples.

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nonconforming but essentially mentally healthy child) interest in accessorizing Barbie or redesigning a clubhouse but of their extreme discomfort with the role of a boy. The difference, claims Corbett, is that so-called nonconforming boys can be just as feminine as GID boys, but the femininity is contained within a more stable psychic structure (114). It is easy to accept Corbetts desire to square a certain style and degree of boyhood effeminacy with a healthy psychic structure, to push outward the boundary of the pathological so that the girlyboy stands within safe territory. But (consistent with his psychoanalytic view) he is not comfortable with a high degree of cross-gender identication (i.e., GID) because to him it indicates a damaged psychic structure and weak ego integration. However, this seems to beg the question since, within our gender system, any boy or girl exhibiting a high degree of dis-identication might be expected to face a great deal of anxiety, even open hostility, on the part of the family and the larger society. This, by itself, could cause psychic disequilibrium, and worse. If so, then why pathologize the child? To be fair, Corbett recognizes problems with the GID category: I feel all such classicatory practices should be rigorously questioned and challenged for the manner in which they are constructed (116). Nevertheless, he is unwilling to throw the GID baby out with its bathwater. But Lee Zevy, in Sexing the Tomboy, is not unwilling. For Zevy, GID is a dangerous diagnosis because it labels as pathological what might be normal behavior for lesbian tomboys who are in the process of forming an identity which will t their future self-identication and object choice (189). The tomboy who identies with masculinity uses that identication to solidify her identity, self-esteem, and feelings of power and agency (192). Zevy, like Corbett, sees a certain kind of nonconforming child as prehomosexual, but she, the extreme dis-identierin this case the maleidentied tomboy and not the boylygirlneeds protective understanding. As we saw, for Corbett, the problem with the GID diagnostic category is not that it is dangerous to the highly gender-deviant child or adolescent but that it may be falsely applied to homosexual boyhoods, to those girlyboys who merely display feminine traits. Corbett would prune the gender bush to allow boys to be girlish; Zevy wants to graft new stock with branches for the girl-as-boy and, presumably, for the boy-as-girl. Neither seems willing to pull the plant out by its roots. In her essay, Oh Bondage Up Yours, Judith Halberstam, a cultural critic rather than a psychoanalyst, recognizes the threat to the masculineidentied tomboy as she is represented in lm and in gender science. Even the few lms in the rebellious period of the 1960s through 1980s that featured a masculine female usually counterbalanced this very male-iden-

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tied girl hero, whom Halberstam calls the punk tomboy (15455), with a tomboy who still had ties to culturally approved femininity. For the latter, tomboyism was a form of temporary rebellion before the capitulation to compulsory heterosexuality. Similarly, the tomboy served gender science as a lever that could shift the polarized gender system to a more androgynous midpoint. The tomboy would move the feminine toward the middle as the more sensitive, emotional male would relocate traditional masculinity. But Halberstam is out to save the masculine-identied girl from the fate of cultural and psychological deletion. To do this, the gender system must be released from embodiment, literally meant. Why should masculinity as a cultural trope be limited to those with male bodies? Why not keep the binary identities denoted by masculinity and femininity but free them from the rule of the body so that the binary becomes a four-fold table: masculine and feminine girls, feminine and masculine boys. While Halberstams solution allows a certain freedom of gender expression, the cultural characteristics that constitute the masculine and feminine remain unchallenged. Again, a grafted bush. Two other contributions to Sissies and Tomboys challenge the binary gender system head-on. For Anne Fausto-Sterling (Is Gender Essential?), gender is distinct and separate from biological sex and is culturally produced (though not necessarily free from biological inuence). This permits us to think of gender as a continuous variable rather than as a binary. Fausto-Sterling even questions whether it is a requirement of all cultures that there be genders at the cultural level (55), but in this short contribution she leaves the question unanswered. Naomi Schemans essay, Queering the Center by Centering the Queer, is the most complexly woven and, for me, the most illuminating of the essays in this volume. Scheman takes as her subject the problem that heteronormativity creates for all of us, but particularly for those on the margins of sex and gender, and even more particularly for those who have crossed sex/gender lines. Since the archetypal heteronormative individual is the heterosexual male, women and gays are marginalized, but transsexuals even more so. Male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals pose to born women the problem of the queer outsider, just as, in an analogy that is widely used in the essay, converted Jews do to born Jews. Scheman uses these analogies to decenter, or queer, the natural and apparently unproblematic identity of woman. To queer the category of woman (and of Jew) is to recognize that there is no essential womanhood (Jewishness) to protect and, therefore, no need of policing the gender boundary against false women (Jews).

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Those MTF transsexuals who wish to convert to womanhood and to stand in solidarity with feminist politics should be recognized as women, not by birth, but by choice, as naturalized citizens are recognized as citizens, or as Ruth took Naomis people as her people. To queer an identity category, then, is to denaturalize it and render its arbitrariness and inconsistency patent. Scheman is most interested in queering the central category of heteronormativity, that of the privileged heterosexual (white, Christian) male. To some extent this has been done in sociology by unmasking the claim that the superiority of this type is either natural or the reward of virtue. Instead, social science has shown this to be a cultural trope, belied by all the social structural contrivances (racism, sexism, heterosexism, the privileges wealth can provide) that lead the paradigmatic ones to the top. But by what means can we delegitimize the cultural ascendancy of mainstream heterosexual men whose lives are so strongly afrmed in heteronormative societies? Scheman has shown how an identity category might fragment under queer scrutiny, but her examples are marginal subjects, woman and Jew. With Scheman, we can envision the queering of the center: a world in which it would be safe to be non-, ambiguously, or multiply gendered (69). But in our own world, heteronormativity still rules. We must play the identity cards we haveplay strategically, problematizing the privileged center where we can, avoiding essentializing practices, and working to reduce the harm caused to those on the margins of gender. Margins are the focus of the last section of Sissies and Tomboys, which contains seven personal narratives about growing up queerly. Each is a gem, offering adult reection on the childs experience of compulsory heterosexuality and its discontents. Three are exceptional: Sara Cytrons Butch in a Tutu, Michael Lassels Boys Dont Do That, and Paul Russells The Golden Book of the Civil War. These condensed autobiographies tell of the confusion and suffering of the ambiguously gendered, but also of the clever subterfuges, the awakening of possibility, the victory of a self that refused to be pinned down. In The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation, Edward Stein, too, wants to queer a current category of human self-understanding. Here, queering sexual orientation means demonstrating the problematic epistemological and scientic status of this construct, a task in which he surely succeeds (though not without testing the readers ability to follow an all-too-closely reasoned argument). But this approach to sexual orientation brings with it a more telling problem, that of assuming that once one has exposed how poorly a complex concept

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is understood and how erroneously it is used, one has also shown the underlying phenomenon to be incoherent and of less importance. While philosophical analysis can show how little we understand the actual complexity of a concept we use, it may not diminish by one whit the concepts active social life. In fact, sexual orientations dance card is quite full, and to deal with that reality requires different disciplinary perspectivesthose of sociology, political economy, and history. Stein muses about the relative signicance of sexual orientation as opposed to other aspects of sexual desire. Because sexual orientation is not a natural kind and tells us little about human nature, its signicance ought to be on a par with other aspects of sexual desire, such as a preference for certain sexual practices or physical characteristics in a partner. However laudable Steins goalto diminish the cultural and psychological signicance of the gender of ones sexual partnerit cannot be accomplished by simply analyzing the concept of sexual orientation. Commonly held ideas associated with the concept of sexual orientation, however unproved or self-contradictory, play a critical sociocultural role in the policing and stabilizing of gender and reproduction that a semantic and epistemological critique alone cannot alter; the powerful partisans of sexual orientation will not buy it. Steins training as a philosopher may account also for his choice of method to repair the positivist approach to the etiology of homosexuality. He has reviewed the striking limitations of the emerging scientic research program into the causes of homosexualitysampling problems, faulty assumptions, inconclusive ndings, competing explanationsand in the concluding section of the book raises ethical concerns about the possibility that science will allow for selecting and changing the sexual orientation of children. In this regard, he says, it is important to weed out cultural presumptions about sexual orientation, especially those that inltrate scientic research. . . . Once we have done so, the character and shape of scientic research . . . and our general thinking about sexual orientation will be dramatically changed for the better (348; emphasis added). Here, the consequences of keeping culture and politics out of the discussion become most vivid. Stein is aware that science, like other major social institutions, is shot through with cultural presumptions without which the National Institute of Health, for example, could hardly dispense a penny for research. Since presumptions about sexual orientation are woven into the fabric of our culture, how is it possible to remove such cultural presumptions from the research process short of requiring extensive cultural renovation, that is, building a movement for social change? If the research that Stein cites is ethically harmful in the ways he sug-

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Book Reviews

gests, why not simply call a halt? As an academic, he might prefer to address the problem with the right logic or method (e.g., moral, legal, scientic)one apparently above politics. But can any effort to remedy a social problem, even an intellectual one, be above politics? Stein believes he has queered the metaphysical, scientic, and ethical approaches to sexual orientation (348) by locating and weeding out cultural presumptions associated with the concept. This is impossible given how densely this concept is woven into our culture. Better to argue for jettisoning the concept altogether and to publicize the moral bankruptcy of research into the etiology of homosexuality.