a jot (regarding radical feminism and queer theory)

Warning: forthcoming moment of intense geekiness.  All those not interested in feminist theory, this is your chance to run away.

So, I just read a transcription of a talk given by one of our Women's Studies conveners (at the London Feminist Network's "Feminar"), addressing the difference between radical feminism and queer theory's use of the term "gender."  Fascinating.

But I'm not sure I agree.

Cameron and Scanlon's critique seems to ground radical feminism firmly within a dialog of rights.  Liberation from an oppressive system is the goal (and a very worthy one, I might add), and it is achieved through clear political objective.

That I have no problem with.

However, I'm wary of letting utilitarian objectivity (for so it almost seems) discredit queer theory's potential to disrupt established binaries, and thereby enact social transformation.  For, by defining gender as the system of power relationships existing between men and women, radical feminism has tied it inseparably to a binary that queer theory seeks to displace.  If they succeed (which I would argue they often do) in undermining the concepts of an essential sex, a true gender, or a coherent sexuality, do they not thereby create a world in which the male/female binary is rendered absurd?  If the binaries undergirding oppression and inequality (male/female, white/black, etc.) are demonstrated to be, not only unstable, but entirely fantastical, must not the entire system collapse?

It seems to me that binaries cannot survive in a world that has, not two, but (as Virginia Woolf once pled for) an infinity, of genders.

But perhaps I am being simplistic.