feminist ptx is a subverting of sexual straitjacketing – women are fighting for the freedom to be fully human – state institutions are key to destroying anti-fem constructs

So how could feminism in general and legal feminism in particular deal with this hemorrhaging reality? My answer is one that requires feminism to rediscover its social justice roots by promoting substantive human rights for all by becoming a feminist method-based discipline. In the 1980s, Eagleton wrote about the virtues of a class discourse, whether it was the Marxist discourse of socio-economic classes or the feminist discourse of gender and sexual politics. 120 Its virtues rest on the call for action it implied: it assumed that the impoverished social classes spread social alienation to their members and deprived them of their individuality. 121 However, Eagleton reminded us, 122 the way to cure that alienation is not to deny its existence, 123 which is what the academe has been doing for the last few decades. The only way to undo that alienation is to assume that unattractive position (alienation) and reverse it. 124

"The goal of a feminist politics would therefore be," Eagleton stated ten years ago, "not an affirmation of some "female identity,' but a troubling and subverting of all such sexual straitjacketing." 125

Women are not so much fighting for the freedom to be women … as for the freedom to be fully human; but that inevitably abstract humanity can be articulated in the here and now only through their womanhood, since this is the place where their humanity is wounded and refused. Sexual politics, like class or nationalist struggle, will thus necessarily be caught up in the very metaphysical categories it hopes finally to abolish; and any such movement  [*136]  will demand a difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible double optic, at once fighting on a terrain already mapped out by its antagonists and seeking even now to prefigure within that mundane strategy styles of being and identity for which we have as yet no proper names. 126

Today Eagleton reaffirms Marx's wish for a "society in which the full development of each is the condition of the full development of all." 127 Building on this approach, legal feminism might want to stand for a larger promise: protecting women's human rights by enabling the disempowered to live a dignified life, and to feel "fully human."

A human rights critique which emphasizes socio-economic rights and exposes the limits of a formal human rights discourse is long due. A feminist critique of equality would do just that, as it would promote that the ethics of care and social solidarity are the legitimate successful enterprise. Such a critique would militate for a social-liberal state, because only a strong socio-liberal state has been able to provide basic social services and can be meaningfully held accountable by feminist activists for its failures.

Globalization is on its way to successfully replacing both big modern theories and postmodern thought with a new theoretical hybrid that attacks the traditional institutional relationship between a state and its citizens (see the new cosmopolitanism movement), and thus mollifies social action and discourages social coalitions as unnecessary. While postmodern thought encouraged ridiculing essentialist Marxist theories, currently it miniaturizes communities' requests by offering successes to well-identified group levels, which are perceived as outside any power structure. Such an individualized approach to poverty makes postmodern oppositional politics outdated, too. The current human rights discourse discredits states and relies instead on private charities and nongovernmental organizations supported by private business and well-off individuals. Such a game is tragic in its silliness. Business has always been accountable only to its shareholders, and recently the trend is to remove that barrier, too. 128

Postmodernism has produced theories to assuage the elites' quest for meaning, but none of them can successfully promote the cause of the ignored Other: they are too many and much too hungry and ill to be happy with one supper or one band-aid or one pill to cure their many diseases. They do not need unreliable charity; they need social services that can be provided daily and relied upon daily. So far such services have only been  [*137]  provided consistently by state institutions. Where such state institutions have been denied, religious ones - such as those subsidized by Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood or our own faith-based initiatives - have taken over with their own theoretical attitudes.

Postmodernism has been unable to offer any theoretical framework with which those in need can identify and use in order to propel their own progress. Postmodernism failed them and left them as easy prey for the pre-enlightenment theories that are circulated by the only ones who seem to care. Interestingly, though, the West is unwilling to believe that its neo-liberal policies utterly failed the powerless Other, the disempowered. It seems more willing to empty its philosophical and political identifiers of all identity, as it still uses the term of democracy to define current theocracies. 129 Even our current system where either the U.S. Supreme Court or twenty-nine percent of the electorate elects the president can hardly constitute the norm.

The time has come to create a discourse that promotes social change perhaps more than a quest for conversation. Feminism, as a method theory has the power to do just that. Feminism may have to take a stance against the over-inclusive Other and point out that women's discrimination is a complex reality and that its economic disparagement is the issue that has been constantly ignored by the state to devastating results. It is perhaps the most serious challenge to reaching social justice because it requires the most investment. Thus, perhaps it requires the most, not least, attention.