Catharine A. MacKinnon

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For the Canadian actress and singer, see Catherine McKinnon. For the comedic actress and former Saturday Night Live cast member, see Kate McKinnon.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
MacKinnon at the Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, 2006
Born
Catharine Alice MacKinnon

(1946-10-07) October 7, 1946 (age 77)
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Academic background
EducationSmith College (BA)
Yale University (MSL, JD, PhD)
InfluencesAndrea Dworkin, August Bebel, György Lukács, Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir
Academic work
DisciplineLegal scholar
InstitutionsUniversity of Michigan
York University
University of Minnesota
Main interestsRadical feminism, socialist feminism, feminist legal theory
InfluencedAndrea Dworkin, Martha Nussbaum

Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946) is an American feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.[1][2]

As an expert on international law, constitutional law, political and legal theory, and jurisprudence, MacKinnon focuses on women's rights and sexual abuse and exploitation, including sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, sex trafficking and pornography. She was among the first to argue that pornography is a civil rights violation, and that sexual harassment in education and employment constitutes sex discrimination.[1]

MacKinnon is the author of over a dozen books, including Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979);[3] Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989); Only Words (1993); a casebook, Sex Equality (2001 and 2007); Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005); and Butterfly Politics (2017).

Early life and education

MacKinnon was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the first of three children (a girl and two boys) to Elizabeth Valentine Davis and George E. MacKinnon; her father was a lawyer, congressman (1947–1949), and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1969–1995).[4]

She is the third generation of her family to attend her mother's

PhD in political science, also from Yale University, in 1987. While at Yale, she received a National Science Foundation fellowship.[6][1]

Career overview

MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School

Hebrew University, Columbia Law School, University of Chicago, University of Basel, Yale Law School, Osgoode Hall Law School, UCLA School of Law, and Stanford Law School
.

MacKinnon is an often-cited legal scholar[7][8] and regular public speaker. Her ideas can be divided into three overlapping areas: sexual harassment, pornography and prostitution, and international work. She has also written extensively on social and political theory and methodology.[9]

Research and legal work

Sexual harassment

In 1977, MacKinnon graduated from

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recognized that, under the civil rights statute Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, schools must have procedures to address sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination.[10]

In her book, MacKinnon argued that sexual harassment is sex discrimination because the act is a product of, and produces, the social inequality of women to men (see, for example, pp. 116–18, 174). She distinguishes between two types of sexual harassment (see pp. 32–42):

  1. "quid pro quo", meaning sexual harassment "in which sexual compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be exchanged, for an employment opportunity (p. 32)" and
  2. the type of harassment that "arises when sexual harassment is a persistent condition of work (p. 32)".

In 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission followed MacKinnon's framework in adopting guidelines prohibiting sexual harassment by prohibiting both quid pro quo harassment and hostile work environment harassment (see 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11 (a)). Courts also used the concepts.

In 1986, the

U.S. Supreme Court held in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson
that sexual harassment may violate laws against sex discrimination. MacKinnon was co-counsel for Mechelle Vinson, the plaintiff, and wrote the brief in the Supreme Court. In Meritor, the Court recognized the distinction between quid pro quo sexual harassment and hostile workplace harassment. In a 2002 article, MacKinnon wrote, quoting the Court:

"Without question," then-Justice Rehnquist wrote for a unanimous Court, "when a supervisor sexually harasses a subordinate because of the subordinate's sex, that supervisor 'discriminate[s]' on the basis of sex." The D.C. Circuit, and women, had won. A new common-law rule was established.[11]

Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, is the eighth most-cited American legal book published since 1978, according to a study published by Fred R. Shapiro in January 2000.[12]

Pornography

Position

Further information:
Anti-pornography movement

MacKinnon, along with fellow radical feminist writer and activist Andrea Dworkin, tried to change legal approaches to pornography by framing it as a civil rights violation in the form of sex discrimination, and as human trafficking. They defined pornography as:

the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words that also includes women dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; enjoying pain or humiliation or rape; being tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; reduced to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture; shown as filthy or inferior; bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.[13]

In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, MacKinnon writes, "Pornography, in the feminist view, is a form of forced sex, a practice of sexual politics, and institution of gender inequality". As documented by extensive empirical studies, she writes, "Pornography contributes causally to attitudes and behaviors of violence and discrimination which define the treatment and status of half the population".[14]: 196  (It should be noted, however, that the evidence for this claim is not definitive; studies have also shown no relationship between pornography and discriminatory views nor violence against women, with some even suggesting pornography use could be correlated with more egalitarian views.[15][16][17][18])

Anti-pornography ordinances

Main article: Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance

In 1980,

Linda Boreman (who had appeared, under the name Linda Lovelace in the pornographic film Deep Throat) said her ex-husband Chuck Traynor had violently coerced her into making Deep Throat and other pornographic films. Boreman made her charges public for the press corps at a press conference, together with MacKinnon, members of Women Against Pornography, and feminist writer Andrea Dworkin offering statements in support. After the press conference, Dworkin, MacKinnon, Boreman, and Gloria Steinem began discussing the possibility of using federal civil rights law to seek damages from Traynor and the makers of Deep Throat. This was not possible for Boreman because the statute of limitations for a possible suit had passed.[19]

MacKinnon and Dworkin continued to discuss civil rights litigation, specifically sex discrimination, as a possible approach to combating pornography. MacKinnon opposed traditional arguments and laws against pornography based on the idea of morality or filth or sexual innocence, including the use of traditional criminal obscenity law to suppress pornography. Instead of condemning pornography for violating "community standards" of sexual decency or modesty, they characterized pornography as a form of sex discrimination and sought to give women the right to seek damages under civil rights law when they could prove they had been harmed. Their anti-pornography ordinances make actionable only sexually explicit material that can be proven to discriminate on the basis of sex.

In 1983, the

unconstitutional by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals
, a decision summarily affirmed (without opinion) by the U.S. Supreme Court.

MacKinnon wrote in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review in 1985:

And as you think about the assumption of consent that follows women into pornography, look closely some time for the skinned knees, the bruises, the welts from the whippings, the scratches, the gashes. Many of them are not simulated. One relatively soft core pornography model said, "I knew the pose was right when it hurt". It certainly seems important to the audiences that the events in the pornography be real. For this reason, pornography becomes a motive for murder, as in "snuff" films in which someone is tortured to death to make a sex film. They exist.[20]

MacKinnon represented Boreman from 1980 until Boreman's death in 2002. Civil libertarians frequently find MacKinnon's theories objectionable (see "Criticism" section), arguing there is no evidence that sexually explicit media encourages or promotes violence against women.[21] Max Waltman states that empirical evidence (based on changes to obscenity doctrine in Canada) suggests that civil rather than legal remedies may be more effective as a means of discouraging violence against women.[22]

Transgender sex equality

Further information: Feminist views on transgender topics

In a 2015 interview, MacKinnon cited

anti-trans feminism.[24]

Her lecture, called "A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights" was subsequently edited and published in the

Yale Journal of Law & Feminism in 2023.[25]
In this lecture, she addresses concerns from anti-trans feminists about the idea that the recognition of trans identities leads to sexism against women.

International work

In February 1992, the

a ruling against Manitoba pornography distributor Donald Butler. The Butler decision was controversial to some; it is sometimes implied that shipments of Dworkin's book Pornography: Men Possessing Women were seized by Canadian customs agents under this ruling, as well as books by Marguerite Duras and David Leavitt.[26][27]
In fact, MacKinnon's brief argued that seizure of materials for which no harm was shown was unconstitutional.

Successful Butler prosecutions have been undertaken against the

sadomasochistic magazine Bad Attitude, as well as the owners of a gay and lesbian bookstore for selling it. Canadian authorities raided an art gallery and confiscated controversial paintings depicting child abuse. Many free speech and gay rights activists have alleged that the law is selectively enforced, targeting the LGBT community.[28][29]

MacKinnon represented Bosnian and Croatian women against Serbs accused of genocide since 1992, creating the legal claim for rape as an act of genocide in that conflict. She was co-counsel, representing named plaintiff S. Kadic, in Kadic v. Karadzic and won a jury verdict of $745 million in New York City on August 10, 2000. The lawsuit (under the United States' Alien Tort Statute) established forced prostitution and forced impregnation when based on ethnicity or religion in a genocidal context as legally actionable acts of genocide.[30] In 2001, MacKinnon was named co-director of the Lawyers Alliance for Women (LAW) Project, an initiative of Equality Now, an international non-governmental organization.[31]

MacKinnon and Dworkin proposed the law against prostitution in Sweden in 1990, which Sweden passed in 1998.[32] What became termed the Swedish Model, also known as the Nordic Model, the "Equality Model," or the "Restrictive Model", penalises buyers of sexual services as well as sellers, where sellers are characterised as pimps or sex traffickers, while putatively decriminalizing all those who are "bought and sold in prostitution."[33][34] The fundamental concept is that the requirement to exchange sexual services for survival is a product of sex inequality and a form of violence against women. This model has been accepted in Norway, Iceland, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Israel and France,[35][36][37] but was rejected in New Zealand.[38][39]

Some organisations and individuals, such as the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, International,[40] and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women[41] say that this legal model makes it harder for sex workers to find housing, make money to survive, screen clients to avoid violence, prevent their boyfriends from being arrested as "pimps", and avoid the interactions with police which account for the plurality of sexual violence against sex workers.

MacKinnon works actively with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and

Apne Aap
in India.

Political theory

MacKinnon argues that the inequality between women and men in most societies forms a hierarchy that institutionalizes male dominance, subordinating women, in an arrangement rationalised and often perceived as natural. She writes about the interrelations between theory and practice, recognizing that women's experiences have, for the most part, been ignored in both arenas. Furthermore, she uses

class division as a spontaneous event that occurred naturally. She understands epistemology as theories of knowing,[43] and politics as theories of power: "Having power means, among other things, that when someone says, 'this is how it is,' it is taken as being that way. ...Powerlessness means that when you say 'this is how it is,' it is not taken as being that way. This makes articulating silence, perceiving the presence of absence, believing those who have been socially stripped of credibility, critically contextualizing what passes for simple fact, necessary to the epistemology of a politics of the powerless."[44]

In 1996, Fred R. Shapiro calculated that "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence", 8 Signs 635 (1983), was the 96th most cited article in law reviews even though it was published in a non-legal journal.[45]

Criticism

During the "

sex-positive feminists". Sex-positive feminists and anti-pornography feminists have debated over the implicit and explicit meanings of these labels. Sex-positive feminists note that anti-pornography ordinances drafted by MacKinnon and Dworkin called for the removal, censorship, or control over sexually explicit material.[46]

In States of Injury (1995),

Wendy Brown contends that MacKinnon's attempt to ban prostitution and pornography does not primarily protect but re-inscribes the category of "woman" as an essentialized identity premised on injury.[47] In The Nation, Brown also characterized MacKinnon's Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) as a "profoundly static world view and undemocratic, perhaps even anti-democratic, political sensibility" as well as "flatly dated" and "developed at 'the dawn of feminism's second wave... framed by a political-intellectual context that no longer exists — a male Marxist monopoly on radical social discourse'".[citation needed
]

Judith Butler's 1994 article "Against Proper Objects," in a section titled "Against the anti-pornography paradigm," criticizes MacKinnon as having "totalizing" and "deterministic" positions on sexuality, specifically heterosexuality, as follows:

Feminist positions such as Catharine MacKinnon’s offer an analysis of sexual relations as structured by relations of coerced subordination, and argue that acts of sexual domination constitute the social meaning of being a “man,” as the condition of coerced subordination constitutes the social meaning of being a “woman.” Such a rigid determinism assimilates any account of sexuality to rigid and determining positions of domination and subordination, and assimilates those positions to the social gender of man and woman. But that deterministic account has come under continuous criticism from feminists not only for an untenable account of female sexuality as coerced subordination, but for the totalizing view of heterosexuality as well—one in which all power relations are reduced to relations of domination—and for the failure to distinguish the presence of coerced domination in sexuality from pleasurable and wanted dynamics of power.[48]

Personal life

In the early 1990s, MacKinnon had a relationship with author and animal-rights activist

Jeffrey Masson, and they were engaged to be married. Earlier, she had been married and divorced. MacKinnon has long been highly protective of details about her private life.[49]

Honors

Selected works

Books

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Catharine A. MacKinnon". Harvard Law School. Archived from the original on February 23, 2018. Retrieved October 22, 2018.
  2. ^ "MacKinnon, Catharine A." University of Michigan Law School. Archived from the original on October 10, 2018.
  3. ^ Bellafante, Gillia (March 19, 2018). "Before #MeToo, There Was Catharine A. MacKinnon and Her Book 'Sexual Harassment of Working Women'". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 19, 2018.
  4. ^ "Catharine A. MacKinnon biography". Biography.com. Archived from the original on September 11, 2017. Retrieved March 20, 2015.
  5. ^ Smith, Dinitia (March 22, 1993). "Love is Strange". New York Magazine. p. 43.
  6. ^ a b University of Michigan faculty biography Archived 2005-09-23 at the Wayback Machine; accessed February 10, 2015.
  7. ^ "Highly Cited Research 2011 - Name: "M"". Thomson Reuters Research Analytics. 2012-01-01. Archived from the original on January 1, 2012. Retrieved 2018-01-03.
  8. ^ "Catharine MacKinnon". Archived from the original on 2005-08-30. Retrieved 2006-02-22.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) 2005 Fellow of Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
  9. ^ MacKinnon, Catherine A. (2000). "Points Against Postmodernism", 75, Chi.-Kent L. Rev., pp. 687–688.
  10. ^ Alexander v. Yale Univ., 631 F.2d 178, 181 n.1 (2d Cir. 1980).
  11. ^ Catharine A. MacKinnon, "The Logic of Experience: Reflections on the Development of Sexual Harassment Law", 90 Geo. L.J. 813, 824 (2002).
  12. ISBN 9780300022995
    .
  13. ^ MacKinnon 1987, p. 176.
  14. ISBN 0674896467
    .
  15. S2CID 264265376
    .
  16. S2CID 23901098
    .
  17. ^ "Does Pornography Promote Sexism? | Psychology Today". www.psychologytoday.com. Retrieved 2023-11-25.
  18. ISBN 978-1-4051-9006-0
    .
  19. ISBN 9780385314862
    .
  20. ^ Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech", 20 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 1 (1985). As support for the existence of snuff films, MacKinnon wrote in footnote 61, "In the movies known as snuff films, victims sometimes are actually murdered."' 130 Cong. Rec. S13192 (daily ed. October 3, 1984; statement of Senator Arlen Specter introducing the Pornography Victims Protection Act). See People v. Douglas, Felony Complaint No. NF 8300382 (Municipal Court, Orange County, Cal. August 5, 1983); "'Slain Teens Needed Jobs, Tried Porn"' and "Two Accused of Murder in 'Snuff' Films", Oakland Tribune, August 6, 1983 (on file with Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review); L. Smith, The Chicken Hawks (1975)(unpublished manuscript; on file with Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review).
  21. New York Review of Books
     40, no. 17 (October 21, 1993): 299. "no reputable study has concluded that pornography is a significant cause of sexual crime: many of them conclude, on the contrary, that the causes of violent personality lie mainly in childhood"
  22. S2CID 154054641
    .
  23. ^ Williams, Cristan (7 April 2015). "Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: The TransAdvocate interviews Catharine A. MacKinnon". The TransAdvocate. Archived from the original on 24 December 2018. Retrieved 22 December 2018.
  24. ^ Catharine A. MacKinnon (November 28, 2022). "Exploring Transgender Law and Politics". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Retrieved 2023-07-18.
  25. hdl:20.500.13051/18252
    . Retrieved 18 July 2023.
  26. ^ Margulis, Zachary (1995). "Canada's Thought Police". Wired. Electronic Frontier Canada. Archived from the original on 2009-02-03. Retrieved 2005-11-02.
  27. ^ "Canadian Customs and Legal Approaches to Pornography". Retrieved 2007-07-27.
  28. The Canadian Bar Review
    . 91 (1): 2.
  29. ^ "Abstract Principle v. Contextual Conceptions of Harm: A Comment on R. v. Butler". McGill Law Journal. Retrieved 2023-11-20.
  30. ISBN 978-1-317-69727-5
    .
  31. ISBN 978-1-59884-304-0
    .
  32. ISSN 1052-2867
    .
  33. ^ "Nordic Model". Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia. Retrieved 2023-11-20.
  34. ^ Science, London School of Economics and Political (2022-12-09). "Policy-makers must not look to the "Nordic model" for sex trade legislation". London School of Economics and Political Science. Retrieved 2023-11-20.
  35. ^ Admin (2019-04-21). "The Nordic Model of Prostitution Legislation: Health, Violence and Spillover Effects • FREE NETWORK". FREE NETWORK. Retrieved 2023-11-20.
  36. ^ "Nordic Model in Northern Ireland a total failure: no decrease in sex work, but increases in violence and stigma". SWARM Collective. 2019-09-20. Retrieved 2023-11-20.
  37. ^ admin. "Analysis". Brothel Keepers. Retrieved 2023-11-20.
  38. ^ Prostitution Reform Bill 2002 (66-2) (select committee report) (N.Z.).
  39. ^ "Prostitution Reform Bill — Second Reading". New Zealand Parliament Pāremata Aotearoa. New Zealand Parliament. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
  40. ^ "Q&A: Policy to protect the human rights of sex workers". Amnesty International. 31 May 2016. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
  41. ^ "The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women". gaatw.org. 16 December 2013. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
  42. ^ MacKinnon 1987, pp. 15–16, 60, 118–120, 136–137.
  43. ^ MacKinnon 1987, p. 163.
  44. ^ MacKinnon 1987, pp. 163–164.
  45. ^ Fred R. Shapiro, "The Most-Cited Law Review Articles Revisited," 71 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 751 (1996)
  46. ^ Carole Vance. "More Pleasure, More Danger: A Decade after the Barnard Sexuality Conference", Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality (Carole Vance, ed., 1984).
  47. ISBN 9780691029894
    . Retrieved June 6, 2017.
  48. S2CID 248689533
    .
  49. ^ Smith, Dinitia (March 22, 1993). "Love is Strange". New York Magazine. pp. 36–43.
  50. ^ "Award of Merit". Alumni Weekend. Yale Law School. Retrieved 20 November 2022.

Bibliography

  • MacKinnon, Catherine (1979). "Sexual Harassment of Working Women". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
  • MacKinnon, Catherine A. (1987). "Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Retrieved 4 September 2021 – via Internet Archive.
  • MacKinnon, Catherine (1989). "Towards a Feminist Theory of the State". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
  • MacKinnon, Catherine (1993). "Only Words". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
  • MacKinnon, Catherine (2017). "ButterflyPolitics". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Further reading

  • "Catharine MacKinnon, 'Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality'". University of Chicago Law School. 14 November 2011. Retrieved 4 September 2021.
  • Waltman, Max (28 June 2017). "Appraising the Impact of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State: Consciousness-Raising, Hierarchy Theory, and Substantive Equality Laws". Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice. 35 (2). Social Science Research Network.
    SSRN 2992921
    .

External links

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