Catharine A. MacKinnon

Works

• 1979Sexual Harassment of Working Women

  Sexual harassment is not a private matter but discrimination because of sex – the argument that entered US employment law.

• 1989Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

  Marxism and feminism compared: sexuality as the site of women’s subordination, and the liberal state as male in its very objectivity.

Position

MacKinnon’s theory starts from a parallel with Marxism: “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away” (1982). Women’s inequality is not a question of difference but of dominance, and its central site is sexuality as men have defined it. Feminism’s method is consciousness raising, in which women’s shared experience becomes knowledge. Against the “difference” approach to equality law, which asks whether women are like men, she set a “dominance” approach that asks whether a practice keeps a group subordinate. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) argues that the liberal state is male in the feminist sense: its claimed objectivity sees and treats women as men see and treat them. Her claim that pornography is not merely speech but a practice of subordination (Only Words, 1993) met strong opposition. Civil libertarians, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce and feminists such as Gayle Rubin, Carole Vance and Ellen Willis argued that she cast women as victims, ignored their sexual agency and handed the state a censorship power that would hit sexual minorities first; the dispute became known as the feminist “sex wars”. Judith Butler criticised her view of pornography as an injurious speech act in Excitable Speech (1997), while Rae Langton defended it with Austin’s speech-act theory. On prostitution she supports laws that penalise buyers, not sellers, which critics say harm sex workers. Sally Haslanger’s definition of gender as social subordination draws on her work. In recent lectures she has argued that trans women belong within the protection of sex-equality law.

Life & context

Catharine Alice MacKinnon was born in Minneapolis on 7 October 1946. She graduated from Smith College, took her law degree at Yale in 1977 and a doctorate in political science there in 1987. Her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women appeared in 1979. She was co-counsel for Mechelle Vinson and wrote the brief in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986), in which the US Supreme Court held that sexual harassment can violate the ban on sex discrimination in employment. With Andrea Dworkin she drafted a civil-rights ordinance against pornography; Minneapolis passed it in 1983 and the mayor vetoed it, Indianapolis passed a version in 1984, which a federal appeals court struck down in 1985. For Bosnian women who survived sexual violence she won a jury verdict of 745 million dollars against Radovan Karadžić in New York in 2000. She has taught at the University of Michigan Law School since 1990, for many years also as a visiting professor at Harvard. From 2008 to 2012 she was the first Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

Further main works

• “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State” (Signs, 1982 and 1983)
• Feminism Unmodified (1987)
• Only Words (1993)
• Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (2006)
• Butterfly Politics (2017)

Appears in

• Debate ‘Free Speech and Its Limits’