I Know It When I See It, or what makes scholarship feminist: A Cautionary Tale.

• Author: Fisher, Linda E.
• Position: Why a Feminist Law Journal?

Before we can intelligently discuss the significance of feminist law journals, it is important, as a preliminary matter, to identify and define what makes scholarship feminist. (1) While we may have an intuitive sense of which writings are feminist and which are not (hence, the "I Know It When I See It" phrase in the title), it can be quite difficult in practice to identify the common features of a piece of writing that allow us to label it as feminist. I discovered this difficulty as I prepared this symposium paper and presentation and reluctantly concluded that I should append to the title the phrase "A Cautionary Tale."

My original intent in this piece was to take an empirical approach to the question, examining classics of the feminist legal literature of the past twenty years or so to discern common features. I planned, somewhat facetiously, to refer to the articles I reviewed as the "Top Forty Feminist Law Review Articles of All Time" or the "Greatest Hits of Feminist Scholarship." (2) Of course, I knew all along the impossibility of compiling the authoritative list or even an authoritative list, but I did not realize exactly how difficult the task was until I began. I was walking into a quagmire.

This is a rich literature with many outstanding scholars, making the task of creating a representative list quite complex. There are problems of inclusion and exclusion because those on the list are privileged over those rejected, implicitly creating a hierarchy of value. Moreover, there is insufficient agreement in any event on what scholarship is the best; our criteria for choice are not standardized.

The remainder of this essay will be the story--a narrative--of my quest for the optimal definition of feminist scholarship, why it was frustrated, and how we are still able to share a joint mission and provisionally define what makes scholarship feminist. In the end, I do not purport to provide a definitive list, but rather to identify some shared features with citations to representative articles. My experience reinforces basic feminist lessons I have known for years but could stand to be reminded of from time to time. The narrative framework of my essay is itself a conscious choice to use feminist method. I could derive the same points from a more traditional presentation, but it would not be as coherent.

In the interest of brevity, I will discuss only a few of the areas of feminist scholarship that I reviewed in my effort to create a "greatest hits" list, beginning in the late 1980s. The essay exemplifies both the difficulties of the task and a potential, partial resolution.

1. HOW I LEARNED ONCE AGAIN--THAT ONE PERSON'S FEMINISM IS ANOTHER'S GENDER ESSENTIALISM

   Some of the most influential feminist pieces of the 1980s were authored by cultural feminists, whose writings resonated with the experiences of many baby-boomers like myself. These writers exposed the gendered cognitive and affective gulf that existed between male legal culture and the experiences of most women. They also dignified the "caring" orientation of many women by demonstrating its internal rationality, equivalent to the rationality of the abstract, universalizing male culture. (3)

   I have always found Robin West's writings particularly cogent in this regard. (4) Her exposition of the "separation thesis"--that humans are defined by their autonomy and separation from others--as gendered and male is quite powerful. (5) Arguing that women are defined by their essential connectedness to others, primarily evidenced by the mother/child relationship, she demonstrated the falsity of the assertion that all humans are essentially separate entities. (6)

   But I later learned that these pieces appealed and spoke to me in part because of our similarities as middle-class, white women. A number of writers argued that many pieces in the same genre as West's essentialize...