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1 Yale J.L. & Feminism 101 (1989)
Love, Rage and Legal Theory

handle is hein.journals/yjfem1 and id is 111 raw text is: Love, Rage and Legal Theory Robin Westt Love and rage, I believe, motivate feminist work in law, both in advo- cacy and in the academy. Love and rage not only move us to action, but they also inform a feminist sense of justice and of morality. This emo- tional root alone of feminist work in law renders it threatening and alien to mainstream legal discourse. As a consequence, mainstream legal dis- course constitutes a tremendously powerful censor of feminist feeling, as well as substantive feminist views on law. The very presence, not to men- tion the dominance, of mainstream legal discourse and the disciplines it fosters oppress as they discipline the feelings that motivate and to some degree even define feminist legal practice and theory. The main purpose of this paper is simply to suggest that feminist law- yers, judges and legal theorists feel, live with, internalize, respond to, ac- cept, or rebel against the active oppression of these two feelings-love and rage-constantly. More specifically, what I want to identify in this paper are some of the ways that our developing feminist legal scholarship itself evidences the existence of oppressive and disciplining forces which have the effect and often the expressed intent of marginalizing the feelings that motivate feminist legal work. My claim is that feminist legal scholarship distinctively shows that we have unwittingly internalized as well as quite consciously rebelled against, the dominant legal culture's condemnation of the emotional root of our work. As I will show, both reactions are partial: the same piece of feminist scholarship-indeed the same paragraph-often evidences both internalization of the discipline and liberation from it at the same time. But both responses evidence the dominance of an essen- tially masculine view of the relation of affect to action, of emotion to rea- son, of particular to universal, of context to principle, of nature to culture, and of self to other, that is threatened to the core by the affective root and motives of feminist legal work and by its substantive content. The result- ing oppression and repression of feminist feeling can do a great deal of psychic damage. Perhaps naming and identifying that damage may to some degree militate against it. t Visiting Professor, University of Chicago Law School, 1989; Professor, University of Maryland. B.A., University of Maryland Baltimore Co.; J.D. University of Maryland; J.S.M. Stanford Law School. This paper was first presented on a panel at the 1987 annual meeting of the Philosophy and Literature Association. I would like to thank Judith Butler, Cass Sunstein, Richard Posner, Tom Grey and Leslie Marden (Yale, 1990) for critical comments on an earlier draft.

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