Catharine MacKinnon

Catharine MacKinnon is an American legal scholar, lawyer and radical feminist theorist who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. Her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979) helped establish in US law that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination. In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) she argued that both liberal and Marxist theory overlook how sexuality organises gender inequality, and that law and the state embody a male point of view. Her campaigns against pornography with Andrea Dworkin made her both influential and controversial.

Key ideas

• Gender is a hierarchy of dominance, not merely a difference between the sexes.
• Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: the central place where inequality is made.
• The liberal state claims neutrality but in fact adopts the male point of view as 'objectivity'.
• Sexual harassment and pornography are practices of sex discrimination that law should remedy.

Major works

• Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)
• Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979)
• Feminism Unmodified (1987)
• Only Words (1993)
• Butterfly Politics (2017)

In the Book corner

• Toward a Feminist Theory of the State 1989 · Advanced
  A work of political and legal theory that gathers and extends arguments MacKinnon developed through the 1980s. Part One sets feminism against…

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