Leviticus in America: The Politics of Sex Crimes 1

VER the past decade of theorizing sexuality it seems that two camps have 0 staked out the bulk of the critical territory. One group of thinkers and activists sees sexuality as attacked by scientific discourses, which, often through government institutions, exercise control in the form of “bio-power.” The other set of critics represents violence against sexuality as a matter of phallic prerogative gone wild, unrestrained by a passive, accommodating liberal state. To render the division more succinctly, one might say there are Michel Foucault and Catharine MacKinnon. Whereas Foucault’s central problem is “liberation,” MacKinnon’s is subordination. That is, Foucault does a genealogy of scientiu sextiulis’s false freedom of confession, while MacKinnon attempts to reveal the hidden, but real circumstances of women’s oppression. Foucault plays Nietzsche to MacKinnon’s Marx. Foucault says “The emperor is dead.” MacKinnon responds, “His sword still cuts, and I wish he would put some clothes on.” A betrayed or infinitely deferred “liberation” is not the same as subordination, and the response to false liberation must be fundamentally different from that to oppression. Indeed Foucault and MacKinnon are almost completely at odds, and have come to stand for deep divisions among those theorizing sexual politics. On the one hand, there are those who seek to escape the “power/knowledge” grip of sexual discourse by denying the significance of a sovereign legal authority, and by inviting us to play with patriarchy’s symbols in such a way as to denaturalize them and thus impede any kind of regulation of sexual practices. On the other hand, there are those who insist that radical groups, and then society as a whole, must overtly institutionalize a refusal of gender-based oppression, using the state