Splitting from halley: Doing justice to race, unwantedness, and testimony in campus sexual assault

This article takes the documentary film The Hunting Ground, and the controversy it provoked, as a starting point for interrogating approaches to the representation and regulation of sexual assault on campus. We focus on the work of critical legal theorist Janet Halley, who has been a leading and contentious figure in advocating against the film and for a reconsideration of how Title IX is implemented on university campuses. In 2015, nineteen Harvard law professors, for whom Halley was the spokesperson, issued a press release objecting to the Hunting Ground for misrepresenting the case of one of their students. The discourse surrounding the memo condenses and continues a long and fraught history in which gender and race have been pitted against each other in cases of sexual assault. We develop our analysis by reading the Harvard 19 memo and Halley�s recent writings on campus sexual assault in light of her earlier work, Split Decisions. We discuss her controversial analytic for defining feminism; her critique of �governance feminism�; her limited discussion of gender, race, and class; and her advocacy against regulating sex that is �merely unwanted.� We argue that while Halley invokes the language of intersectionality, she deviates from its core methodological concern�a focus on black women�and devalues women�s testimony. Thus, she practices intersectionality-without-intersectionality, or surface intersectionality. The gaps in her approach reveal that a theory of consent is needed that does not bracket off the question of unwantedness as �mere� and that engages with complex questions of power and positionality beyond surface intersectionality.