What it means to "challenge language" is unclear to me, but the suggestion that such a challenge can be mounted effectively through the deliberate use of incorrect grammar is ridiculous. (Such an argument might imply that Dubya's malapropisms and moron-speak could be regarded as somehow subversive in a politically progressive sense). You can't challenge language, only the uses to which language is put by the agents (typically human, but not always) who deploy it.
To flesh out her vague claim, which is probably best understood as a claim that a new vocabulary can pave the ground for new forms of political awareness, Lee proposes that we understand "the simple act of replacing the pronoun 'he' to 'she' in a sentence" to be a political act of consciousness raising that exposes "the hidden agendas of language." Please. Such a claim is hardly a theoretical insight, and how can language have an agenda anyway? This is an example of poststructuralist claims about the 'prison house of language' etc. being misunderstood. What Lee's statement does is displace the traditional autonomous liberal subject from a human being to language itself, which is an all-too-frequent way of understanding poststructuralist thoughts on how the symbolic order functions, but a mistake nonetheless.
I appreciate the "therapist/the-rapist" pun, but would hardly hold it up as a devastating critique of the psychoanalytic establishment. For the record, I'm pretty sure that Humbert Humbert, the loquacious pedophile who narrates Nabokov's Lolita used the term before Mary Daly, and we wouldn't want to hold him up as a pioneer of feminist thinking, would we?
But these are specific quibbles. My larger concern is Lee's account of what feminist thinkers (she specifically discuses Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Sandra Harding, Catherine MacKinnon, and Dorthy Roberts) have contributed politically via their theoretical writings. "These women," Lee tells us, "provide a much-needed service by unleashing a radical imagination." I cringed when I read this.
I suppose what Lee meant by this statement was something to the effect that these theorists have contributed significant ideas about gender that impact the way we approach social issues and problems which impact women's lives. However, as I read it anyway, Lee's rhetoric trivializes these women's intellectual contributions by describing their ideas in a way that reduces them into another genre of self-help writing. In other words, her account of why theory matters turns it into a form of cheerleading. Theory, according to Lee, imaginatively inspires, but I'm left wondering how this differs from, say, getting pumped up by listening to a feminist anthem (crank the Helen Ready, grrrrls). In short, this account fails to acknowledge that theory, if it is truly that, works by presenting an argument that provides reasons which may or may not convince readers that a particular position is right or wrong. That might not sound so sexy, but let's not confuse thinking with copulation.
To her credit, Lee does provide brief accounts of some of the ideas that these thinkers have advanced, but her synopses are too short to do justice to the debates in which the ideas emerged. What concerns me, ultimately, is that someone unfamiliar with these thinkers might be turned off and decide not to read their books or articles based on statements like "The useful concept of performativity has gone beyond how we think about gender to help us understand oppressive forms of identity such as nationality." It's worth noting that Butler's (the theorist to whom Lee is referring) commitment to the deconstructionist notion of the 'iterability of the mark' prevents her from making such reductive judgments (nationalism = always bad). Indeed, one of the fundamental lessons we might take away from Butler's corpus is that concepts like nationalism or identity can signify radically different things in different contexts.
In short, while I admire Lee's motive for writing this essay, i.e., to turn politically minded feminists onto theory, I think the way she 'defends' theory is fundamentally misguided. Theory is not a discourse produced to unleash imaginations; it is written to advance convincing arguments about concepts that have long and complex histories. Before one can comment on the consequences theory may or may not have in the political arena, it is first necessary that these theoretical arguments be understood. This requires time and a great deal of effort. Indeed, it necessitates that the thinker move at a pace which, to an outside observer, particularly an activist accustomed to the rapid-fire pace of the contemporary political arena, probably appears to be unduly plodding. Personally, I think that despite the incoming e-mails, the ringing phones, and the urgent faxes that there's time enough in our all to brief lives for some slowing down. Indeed, certain activities, (e.g., thinking and theorizing, cooking and dining, and foreplay and fucking) to be done right require it.
But I digress...Here's hoping that Lee gets another opportunity to write about theory for a nonacademic audience and that this time she spends more time doing unpacking one theorist's arguments in some depth and making explicit the reasons she believes her position to be true or false. Such an exercise might or might not suggest how a particular idea relates to the world of political activism, but at least it wouldn't be an exercise that reduces theoretical thought into a propangandistic slogan to be consumed. Yes, that would be useful.
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