Work · Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.)
Toward 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.
Introduction
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State appeared with Harvard University Press in 1989 and brings together work begun in the 1970s, including her articles in Signs (1982, 1983). The first part compares Marxism and feminism and asks how a feminist method, consciousness raising, can produce knowledge of women’s situation. The second part analyses sexuality as the site of women’s subordination, and the third turns to the state and law: the liberal state, MacKinnon argues, is male because its standard of objectivity takes men’s point of view as neutral. The book is the most systematic statement of her “dominance” theory and has been criticised for treating women’s experience as uniform.
More works by Catharine A. MacKinnon
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