Catharine A. MacKinnon

Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most ones own, yet most taken away. Marxist theory argues that society is fundamentally constructed of the relations people form as they do and make things needed to survive humanly. Work is the social process of shaping and transforming the material and social worlds, creating people as social beings as they create value. It is that activity by which people become who they are. Class is its structure, production its consequence, capital its congealed form, and control its issue.

Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence

Feminism has no theory of the state. It has a theory of power: sexuality is gendered as gender is sexualized. Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex and the distinctively feminist account of gender inequality.1 Sexual objectification, the central process within this

Sexual Harassment of Working Women

A perfluoroalkylene oxide dinitrile, an aromatic dinitrile N-oxide and an aromatic trinitrile are terpolymerized to obtain a poly(perfluoroalkylene oxide) oxadiazole containing pendent aromatic nitrile groups. The fluorinated polymer product can be cured with a polyfunctional nitrile N-oxide to provide elastomers that are particularly useful in aircraft applications involving use temperatures ranging from about -70 DEG F to about 400 DEG F. For example, the elastomers can be employed as fuel tank sealants, coatings, O-ring seals, diaphragms, and the like.

Intersectionality as Method: A Note

This brief note clarifies and expands upon the power and implications of intersectionality on the level of method, focusing upon its use in the hands of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, its originator and premier practitioner.

Unthinking ERA Thinking

As June 30, 1982, drew to a close and the Equal Rights Amendment expired unratified, American women did not riot in the streets. They did wipe the asses of children and put them to bed, lurk on streetcorners warily until a car circled and slowed and they got in, finish typing the last page of transcription for the following day, begin the night shift sewing plastic handbags or cleaning downtown offices, fight for their lives as fist met face and lay their lives down as penis sliced in and out and in and out, scurry across the street with their eyes down to avoid the man coming the other way, and give up on covering Junes bills. Not noticing as the shadows disappeared over TVs in mental hospitals and IVs in nursing homes, they removed their mascara, locked their doors if they had them, set their alarm clocks, and let the day go, largely unmarked. A few went to well-behaved demonstrations, largely unreported. In the noise and in the silence, some picked up pens and wrote. Why an explicit guarantee of womens equality was rejected as part of the constituting document of the United States is a good question, one it takes some courage to ask. The answers are bound to be as unnerving, challenging, even anguishing as they are crucial and urgent for law and politics. The ERA came to mean the equal-

A Sex Equality Approach to Sexual Assault

Abstract: Sexual assault is a practice of sex inequality. It is not generally addressed as such by law, including criminal law, and should be.

“The Case” Responds

MacKinnon responds that her theory, while not liberalism in denial or disguise, is engaged in dialogue with liberalism (as well as with other theoretical traditions).

Reply to Miller, Acker and Barry, Johnson, West, and Gardiner

the mediation of conflicts in society and through the balancing of societal pressures,20 then feminist theory cannot ignore any of the multivariate, interacting dynamics of class, race, and sexual oppression. Changing consciousness and analyzing sex/gender oppression as oppression of sexuality are extremely important, but how do these efforts in themselves provide a basis for a feminist theory of state or for a feminist jurisprudence? What is a practical, applicable feminist strategy for changing the state that we can agree on?

Dahl’s feminism?

This tribute to the life work of Robert A. Dahl briefly analyzes the place of women, and issues raised by the status and treatment of women, in the sweep of his iconic contributions to democratic theory. The article traces his inclusion of women from the beginning to the end of his writings on politics in democracies and, in a more critical vein, casts light on some central concepts in his work that the insights and information of feminist scholarship would deepen, modify, or question.

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

Preface Part One: Feminism and Marxism 1. The Problem of Marxism and Feminism 2. A Feminist Critique of Marx and Engels 3. A Marxist Critique of Feminism 4. Attempts at Synthesis Part Two: Method 5. Consciousness Raising 6. Method and Politics 7. Sexuality Part Three: The State 8. The Liberal State 9. Rape: On Coercion and Consent 10. Abortion: On Public and Private 11. Pornography: On Morality and Politics 12. Sex Equality: On Difference and Dominance 13. Toward Feminist Jurisprudence Notes Credits Index