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The ideological re-mystification of the real is performed with a seductive sophistication in Drucilla Cornell's “ethical feminism” which is indebted not only to Lyotard's logic of the differend but especially to Derridean deconstruction and to Irigaray's “refiguring of sexual difference." In Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law, Cornell first textualizes “reality” then offers a textual politics to “subvert” it. She argues that “what is 'real' and what it means to be 'realistic,' to pay attention to the real, is always given to us in a text” and thus can be subverted by the play of differance, by the “trace of Otherness." “Differance," she claims, “undermines the legitimacy of the attempt to establish any particular context, including the masculine symbolic, as a kingdom which absolutely rules over us... The shutting in of context, the denial of new possibilities yet to be imagined, is exposed as political... as unethical and, ultimately unjust” (Cornell, 1991, 108-109).

By reducing the real to what “is always given to us in a text” (Cornell 1991, 108) Cornell's textual politics—like all forms of post-al politics—subsumes the non-discursive to the discursive and becomes yet another ludic rehearsal of idealism. She substitutes, in short, a discursive economy for a political economy. It is especially important to recall here that in their history of Anglo-American socialist feminism, Karen Hansen and Ilene Philipson proclaim Drucilla Cornell, along with Seyla Benhabib, as examples of “socialist feminists who have begun to push against the limitations of a Marxist outlook in an even more radical way than Gayle Rubin did in 'The Traffic in Women' "(Hansen and Philipson 1990, 24). They quote at some length from Cornell and Benhabib's earlier declaration that “the confrontation between twentieth-century Marxism and feminist thought requires nothing less than a paradigm shift of the former... the 'displacement of the paradigm of production'" (Benhabib and Cornell 1987, 1-2). Cornell's subsequent work is not only exemplary of this “displacement of the paradigm of production” and the turn away from historical materialism in socialist feminism, but also of the eclipse in feminism of an effective socialist politics. Her work clearly demonstrates that abandoning the production paradigm in feminism has severely marginalized and even suppressed any adequate understanding and intervention into the material conditions of the exploitation of women and other oppressed peoples.

In place of the revolutionary struggle for emancipation, Cornell argues for an “ethical feminism." However, instead of a concern with the radical transformation of the political economy of exploitation, Cornell attends to “the productive power of poetic signification that gives us the ethical significance of the feminine as a redemptive perspective... [which] gives significance to the 'discovery' of feminine specificity” (1991, 117). This “specificity," this “singularity” of differences, is the crucial issue in Cornell's ludic ethics and theory of (unattainable) justice. According to Cornell, “Justice remains, as beyond our description, as the call of the Other, which Derrida, quoting Levinas, only dares to evoke as 'the equitable honoring of faces.' Such honoring would demand the recognition of each one of us in her singularity” (1991, 113). Justice, in short, is the impossible “messianic” project of the recognition (representation) of the singularity of the Other—or, as Cornell quotes Derrida, it is the “unpresentable” “experience of absolute alterity” (1991, 112-113). But justice for historical materialists is not an impossible, “messianic” project. Instead it is the transformation of the social relations of production to meet the needs of all people and eliminate the injustices of class differences and the priority of private property and profit—that is, capital—which prevents the equitable distribution of products and resources. The privileging (and mystification) of the “other” is an alibi for placing class interests beyond the reach of change.

What is “unethical” and “unjust” in Cornell's textual politics—as in that of Derrida, Lyotard and other ludic theorists—is not the exploitation of the labor of the many by the few (an issue they entirely occlude) but rather the “foreclosure” of interpretation—of the plurality of meanings, textual possibilities and the play of differance—and the discursive denial of the “other." The “harm” that primarily concerns Cornell is a discursive “violence” that establishes a symbolic “context” that excludes the recognition (representation) of the singularity of the mystified “other." She substitutes a discursive economy of violence for a political economy of violence.

Cornell argues that women's "'reality' disappears within the legal system if it cannot be signified” and, to support her argument, draws on Lyotard's logic of the differend, which forms one of the cornerstones of her theory. In particular, she cites Lyotard's notion of the differend as what "'asks' to be put in phrases and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away” (Cornell 1991, 60-61). For Cornell, “the silencing of women, because of derelection"—a term she borrows from Irigaray to indicate the way “feminine difference cannot be expressed except as signified in the masculine imaginary or the masculine symbolic," (1991, 7)—"can be understood as the differend. The resultant harm to women either disappears, because it cannot be represented as a harm within the law, or it is translated in a way so as to be inadequate to our experience” (1991, 60). The issue of “harm," for Cornell, is a return to the problem of the (in)adequacy of the representation of specificity of “feminine difference”: the (textual) exclusion, silencing, and misrepresentation of feminine “otherness” by the dominant masculine symbolic. Cornell is not only foregrounding a textual harm but also textualizing harm itself: as both what is caused by the textual exclusion—silencing, misrepresentation—of feminine otherness and that which must be “named” (represented) in order to be known. We need to qualify the use of the term representation here, for while Cornell's ethics is indeed primarily concerned with the problem of the (in)adequacy of representation ("recognition"), she does not deal with it in terms of “reality”: the adequacy of representation's approximation to the “real." Instead, she is concerned with the representation of the unrepresentable: the imaginary and utopian feminine that “we are cut off" from by the “masculine symbolic” (1991, 103), that is, the “dream of a new choreography of sexual difference” beyond representation in the “current gender hierarchy” (1991, 96, 168).

Thus, the ethical-political act for Cornell is the subversion of this discursive violence and exclusion through “the affirmation of feminine difference," which following Irigaray she defines as an affirmation that “dreams and then refigures the feminine as the difference that undermines gender identity." The strategies of affirmation for Cornell are processes of rewriting adapted from Irigaray (particularly her notion of “mimesis"). Among these strategies, the most important is what Cornell calls “remetaphorization” and “restylization." Remetaphorization puts into “play” the feminine as both the difference-within gender hierarchy and the excessive, heterogeneous sexual differences beyond gender identity: “the infinite possibilities of"—the differences-within—"feminine jouissance” (1991, 17).

However, this privileging of discursive violence and textual subversions in Cornell's work becomes an alibi for suppressing the material reality of socio-economic violence and exploitation: the violence of appropriating people's labor and the violence of private property. It cuts off any understanding of the relationship between the representable/unrepresentable and the material relations of production; between symbolic constructions (exclusions) of sexual differences and the divisions of labor. Cornell's ethical feminism is aimed, in large part, at deconstructing the gender hierarchy in the legal system; she seeks a “messianic conception of justice, in which gender would no longer govern our rights” (1991, 116). But the “displacement of gender hierarchy” is not primarily a matter of the “affirmation of the feminine” through the play of tropes, a “refiguring the feminine," nor a rewriting of myths, as Cornell's nearly exclusive focus on “feminine affirmation” would suggest (1991, 13).

What Cornell “forgets” is what Evelyn Reed has so clearly argued, that the “abasement of women has been a permanent feature of all... class society.... So long as women led or participated in the productive work of the whole community, they commanded respect and esteem” (1969, 93). The central concept here is “productive work of the whole community," for once women were “dismembered," as Reed says, into separate “monogamous family life under the system of private property” they “were stripped of their economic self-dependence” (1969, 93-94). The issue is not that women's work within the home is not productive labor, but that the condition of women lives and their “rights” depend on whether their labor directly contributes to social production (to the “work of the whole community") without being mediated through (and often owned by) the patriarchal family and its male “head"—and second whether women have direct (unmediated) access to the products and value their labor produces. In patriarchal-capitalism this means specifically whether women earn a wage for their labor and whether they own property—in short whether they have “economic self-dependence."

The determination of women's “rights” and the conditions of their lives by their place in the relations of production and division of property is dramatically demonstrated in Amartya Sen's global study of the ratios of women to men in which he argued, as his title suggests, that “More than 100 Million Women Are Missing” (1990). Sen contends that “the numbers of 'missing women' in relation to the numbers that could be expected [to be living] if men and women received similar care in health, medicine, and nutrition, are remarkably large. A great many more than a hundred million women are simply not there because women are neglected compared with men"—in short, their fundamental material needs are neglected (1990, 66). The reasons cannot be attributed simply to lack of economic development since, as Sen points out, “many poor countries do not, in fact, have deficits of women... sub-Saharan Africa, poor and undeveloped as it is, has a substantial excess of women” (1990, 62). Economic development, in itself, does not improve women's mortality; instead it is, as Sen notes, quite often accompanied by a relative worsening in the rate of survival of women” (1990, 62). Nor is this repudiation of women primarily a matter of cultural factors—of the masculine symbolic (the focus of Cornell's ethical feminism). Rather the fundamental element in women's survival is her place in the relations of production. According to Sen, “women's 'gainful' employment"—her “working outside the home for a wage, or in such 'productive' occupations as farming"—and her “owning assets... can greatly influence what are implicitly accepted as women's 'entitlements'" (1990, 63). For example, “Punjab, the richest Indian state has the lowest ratio of women to men (0.86) in India; it also has the lowest ratio of women in 'gainful' employment compared to men” (1990, 64), while in the much poorer Indian state of Kerala, “the ratio of women to men of more than 1.03 is closer to that of Europe (1.05)" and is owing to women's gainful employment as well as to their increased "education and economic rights—including property rights” (1990, 66).[1]

Missing women, however, is not simply a “Third World problem." As another social scientist, Neera Kuckreja Sohoni, stresses, “this crisis is truly global in scope." It is “far more severe among girls (defined as age 19 and under) than among adult women” and somewhat worse in developed countries. She writes that “according to United Nations estimates... in 1990, in the 'developing' world, there were just 954 girls age 19 and under for every 1,000 boys. The 'developed' world is actually missing more—there are only 952 girls per 1,000 boys” (1994, 96). For all its preoccupation to “dream beyond the boundaries” of the masculine symbolic (as in Cornell); to play with cyborgian boundary breaking (as in Haraway), or to perform gender permutations (as in Butler), ludic feminist theory, is largely incapable of critically looking beyond the boundaries of middle class economic security to even begin to try to understand and explain what is imperiling the very survival of women and girls globally. The answer requires feminism to reclaim theories of production and return to the political economy of emancipation—to build a Red Feminism. Instead, Cornell substitutes an ethics of indeterminate justice for a politics of emancipation.

Justice is not indeterminate nor a utopian “beyond”: it is not, as Cornell asserts, “the possibility/impossibility of deconstruction and, therefore, of the beyond to what 'is' law” (1991 116 [sic.]). It is not even primarily a question of the “law” and its limits. Justice is, first and foremost, an issue of women's place in the relations of production and the division of property.

Cornell is very concerned that her deconstructive ethics and textual politics not be seen as “undermining the actual experience of suffering” of women (1991, 35). She contends that “The material suffering of women is not being denied in the name of a process of writing that continually transforms the representation of the feminine as if the rewriting itself could put an end to patriarchy” (1991, 2). But the issue is not whether ludic feminism denies “the material suffering of women” (how could it?); indeed many like Cornell recognize the “actual experience of suffering” of women. However, it is not enough, as Cornell argues, to “see” and “hear," that is, to name and represent women's suffering or to deconstruct the “tyranny” of established discourses that prevent suffering from being recognized. Rather the issue is how do we understand the condition of women and act to change the material reality of women's exploitation. Red Feminism and transformative politics are not simply a matter of recognizing or feeling the pain of the other. Instead they are committed to the necessity of eliminating the pain and suffering of people; of transforming the real material conditions—the divisions of labor and property—producing exploitation.