Abstract
Frenemies are made through a “movement interaction that entails unexpected, unlikely, partial, and fraught collaboration between otherwise opposed actors. It captures the complex nature of their antagonistic work toward similar but distinct ends” (p. 3). Whittier’s study traces three cases where feminists and conservatives, the ultimate frenemies, advanced overlapping agendas: pornography, child sexual abuse, and the Violence against Women Act (VAWA). Despite conventional wisdom that these were instances of coalition, Whittier parses these cases for their distinct characteristics and their levels of success for institutionalizing feminist aims. In so doing she traces how new laws and norms come to be, how issues are remembered and constructed in the public imagination, and how the larger contexts of technological change, partisan politics, and social movement flux affected the outcomes.
Frenemies is based on an extensive study of more than 30 years (1980-2013) of news reports, movement publications, organizational documents, memoirs, archival materials, secondary sources, interviews, witness testimony, amicus briefs for applicable Supreme Court Cases and documents from governmental agencies like the Department of Justice. Whittier leaves few stones unturned as she analyzes both quantitative and qualitative shifts in the “causal forces that shape [the] direction and outcomes” (p. 19) of the three cases. From this data, Whittier identifies three distinct types of frenemy relationships: collaborative adversarial relationship, narrow neutrality, and ambivalent alliance.
Efforts to criminalize pornography exemplifies a collaborative adversarial relationship. This uneasy relationship between anti-porn feminists and conservatives was less a coalition—the feminists saw pornography as oppressive to women, violating their rights, and condoning rape, while conservatives feared its corrosive effects on morality, purity, and the institution of the family—than a marriage of convenience. That porn was obscene was more important to conservatives than that porn depicted women obscenely. The fact that both abhorred pornography was in many cases the most they had in common. The incongruence of their motives failed to matter, however, as the rise of the Internet and increasing social acceptance of sex and nudity overwhelmed dissenting feminist and conservative arguments. Legislative victories were reversed, and the issue’s political momentum withered.
Contrast the highly divisive and tense approach to pornography with the “narrow neutrality” of child sexual abuse. Although feminists and conservatives had different diagnoses of the problem they could agree upon a narrow framing of the issue as “beyond politics,” foregrounding the unquestionable necessity to protect children from molestation. Thus, conservatives suspended their traditional concerns with pathologizing poor or racialized communities (not least because child sexual abuse occurs at similar rates across all groups) and feminists downplayed their commitments to intersectional justice. This framing was effective at elevating the issue and tapping into emotional narratives of abuse and rehabilitation of victims. Unlike the collaborative adversarial relationship, narrow neutrality posed few reputational concerns for feminists and conservatives, but it did yoke the movement to carceral punishment rather than rehabilitation for offenders. Whittier notes, “ironically, it is the strength and form of the narrow and neutral construction of child sexual abuse that makes it virtually impossible to challenge these laws” (140), even though they have proven less effective than treatment approaches.
The Violence against Women Act (VAWA) followed yet another path, that of ambivalent alliance. While conservatives wanted to reduce violence against women to preserve the integrity of the family and to contain crime with punishment, feminists lobbied to have women’s experience of violence taken seriously and to highlight these crimes as a form of women’s oppression. The timing of VAWA’s early drafts dovetailed with a punitive trend in government that included the VAWA within the Crime Act of 1994. As with child sexual abuse, aspects of feminist arguments that could be easily incorporated into prevailing crime models were more successful. Protecting women and preventing their abuse was deemed legitimate, a win for the feminist movement, but strategies to reduce violence other than imprisonment became untenable in the discourse of the era. Furthermore, crime frames were not amenable to intersectional interpretations that could reflect the experiences of violence among immigrants, Native Americans, and the LGBT community.
In a moment of stark political divisions and movements like #MeToo reinvigorating feminists against sexual violence, new frenemy relationships are on the horizon. Whittier’s fine-grained analysis chronicles processual shifts and reversals in the process of creating new sexual violence law that can show readers, be they academics, strategists, or activists, which strategies and suggestions succeeded, and which were left on the court room floor. Her typology provides an improved tool for predicting and assessing political interactions as they unfold, one that gives nuance beyond the blanket label of coalition. Readers can also take up the mantle where progress is still needed, incorporating intersectionality and fighting for alternatives to carceral punishment.