Contradiction and Revision: Progressive Feminist Legal Scholars Respond to Mary Joe Frug (original) (raw)
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New England Law Review, 2001
Law School. I wish to thank Manthia Diawara, Deborah Post and Barbara Lewis for their helpful comments. I especially want to thank Liz Schneider for undertaking what has proven to be, for me, a most generous, stimulating and productive collaboration. *** Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. This article is a revised version of the opening plenary session at the conference, "Transgressing Borders: Women's Bodies, Identities and Families," held at New England Law School on March 31, 2001. Thanks to Regina Austin for a very special experience of stimulating dialogue, collaboration and friendship that carried on Mary Joe's legacy. Thanks also to Judi Greenberg, Nan Hunter, Sylvia Law and Martha Minow for helpful comments, to Linda Gordon and Elinor Langer for useful conversation and to Lisa Pepe for helpful research assistance. The Brooklyn Law School Faculty Research Fund generously supported my work on this article. I. Mary Joe Frug was a professor at New England School of Law from 1981 to 1991. On April 4, 1991, she was murdered on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from the home that she shared with her husband Jerry and their children Stephen and Emily. Though her death was tragic, we believe that how she lived her life is more important than how she died. 2. This conference was jointly planned by Professors Judi Greenberg, New 1 NEW ENGLAND LAW REVIEW opening plenary session. In preparation for the conference, we reread Mary Joe's work, particularly her posthumously published Harvard Law Review article, A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto, 3 and talked with each other about her and her ideas. We had some wonderful conversations generated by our memories of Mary Joe and her words. At the conference, we focused on our favorite quotes from the Manifesto (which we flashed on a screen for the audience to read) and offered our reactions and thoughts on them. Our conversations continued after the conference. We discussed a range of topics: anti-feminism, differences among feminists, style, sexuality, middle age, the material world, activism and law reform. Our musings about Mary Joe's Manifesto provoked reflections, improvisations against the backdrop of a common riff, on the contemporary state of feminism, which we share with you here. Regina: The conference was a homage to Mary Joe Frug's capacities as an academic impresario. She was instrumental in precipitating the breakaway moves of the FemCrits from the white male-dominated Conference on Critical Legal Studies, and in organizing FemCrit meetings both in Boston and around the country. Among the most pleasant memories I have of the year I spent in Cambridge as a visitor at Harvard Law School are of the dinners Mary Joe fed us and the conversations that erupted around her dining room table about everything under the feminist sun. Mary Joe is vivid in our memories because she had the capacity to focus on you, just you, and make you feel as if you were the most special person on earth at that particular moment. But as alive as she remains in our hearts as a leader, organizer, confidant, and girlfriend, Liz and I feared that our recollection of her as a thinker and intellectual nudge was fading. So we thought that we would return to what she said in her Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto, and thereby, in essence, give her the chance to set the agenda for our dialogue, to call us to account for ourselves and what we have been thinking and doing these past ten years, and to force us to consider what remains of the postmodern legal feminism she envisioned and the challenges that lie ahead. Liz and I came to the task from different places and arrive at somewhat different conclusions. Liz is an expert, activist, teacher, and theorist in the
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