Reading Notes--mostly précis and summary!
Adam Kissel

Feminist storytellers must respond to an ambivalent and mistrustful audience. Feminist narrative is very similar, but not identical, to "opposition narrative." It relies on experiences that have been left out of consideration in legal scholarship. It calls for a new "multivalent seeing" in legal and cultural matters.

"Scholars claim that they do not see how narratives contribute to the formulation of a legal response" (978). They also challenge narratives as potentially untrue, skewed toward the observer, and unrepresentative or misrepresentative. In response, feminists for various reasons have remained mostly silent. This paper hopes to voice a response and provide a way to evaluate stories.

Susan Estrich wrote one of the earlier narratives and included extensive analysis. Narrative scholarship, however, need not include any analysis (but see Farber and Sherry). Martha Mahoney's analysis in her work itself carries "an experiential tone"; the analysis cannot be divorced from the experience. Mahoney effectively uses real-life examples to punctuate her argument, valuing but not privileging the narrative mode. She seeks (in her words) "to change law and culture simultaneously" (992).

Patricia Williams abandons analysis almost completely, more or less "depicting a human condition" (1002) rather than making a clear point. Williams is rather writing a "good piece of literature" than a legal argument (1003). Her argument is that we need a new way of legal seeing.

Marie Ashe writes almost entirely in storytelling. "Ashe's narratives are the substance, create the structure of her argument" (1006); her analysis is "brief and cryptic." She rejects abstraction (1011) and "calls for a new 'deconstructive and reconstructive feminist critique,' a new form of discourse about women's lives" (1006).

Abrams argues that women's stories need to be "fully heard" in a context such as a legal journal because they tend to be undervalued in legal discussion; stories make known "the unapprehended harm inflicted by a practice or rule" (1021). Furthermore, stories can yield fresh insight "in the fact of a legal impasse" when traditional scholarship has gotten logjammed (1034-35).

The implicit judgments in stories, nevertheless, require explicit analysis (1017), but not of the usual type, for Abrams claims to work from an idea that objectivity has been discredited (via Kuhn, Rorty, Feyerabend, etc.--she spells Feyerabend's name wrong twice--did she really read it?). She claims that a perspective without (or in addition to?) objectivity does not produce do-what-you-like scholarship, but then goes on to show that narrative practices and ideas are themselves hopelessly tangled, that truth itself is hopelessly multiple.

Abrams claims that narrative is specially suited to yield important responses to "hard" questions, while she represents objectivity as a "regime" of "determinative answers." She incorrectly divorces experience from objectivity (1027). (It seems unclear, however, if she needs to do so--or to define truth as she does--in order to claim all of her points.)

Storytelling can "provide a metaphor for an abstract concept .... it gives tangible, accessible meaning to a difficult abstract point" (1026). Ideally the story passes through any need for representativeness and works directly on the concept; when this happens, prescriptive partiality gets no foothold. Resulting prescriptions must "respond, in some degree, to multiple perspectives" (1029).

How is narrative connected to normative prescription? There is a greater than usual burden on the reader to discern a connection, and we can judge a story's value partly by the ease in which the reader can discern the connection (though this is almost as much to judge the story's literariness as its scholarship--AK). In general, successful departures from conventional style in themselves argue for "multivalent seeing" (1039) instead of the "burdens" of abstraction (1043). Abrams sees that such argument is no longer extensive enough in itself, but should include analysis in some way of how current legal practice might incorporate (or transform into) "multivalent seeing." The argument must eventually move on to even more specificity, what Abrams calls "normative elaboration" (1047).