Feminism Unmodified

by MacKinnon, Catharine A.

• ISBN13: 9780674298743
• ISBN10: 0674298748
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1988-04-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

Catharine A. MacKinnon, noted feminist and legal scholar, explores and develops her original theories and practical proposals on sexual politics and law. These discourses, originally delivered as speeches, have been brilliantly woven into a book that retains all the spontaneity and accessibility of a live presentation. MacKinnon offers a unique retrospective on the law of sexual harassment, which she designed and has worked for a decade to establish, and a prospectus on the law of pornography, which she proposes to change in the next ten years. Authentic in voice, sweeping in scope, startling in clarity, urgent, never compromised and often visionary, these discourses advance a new theory of sex inequality and imagine new possibilities for social change.Through these engaged works on issues such as rape, abortion, athletics, sexual harassment, and pornography, MacKinnon seeks feminism on its own terms, unconstrained by the limits of prior traditions. She argues that viewing gender as a matter of sameness and difference--as virtually all existing theory and law have done--covers up the reality of gender, which is a system of social hierarchy, an imposed inequality of power. She reveals a political system of male dominance and female subordination that sexualizes power for men and powerlessness for women. She analyzes the failure of organized feminism, particularly legal feminism, to alter this condition, exposing the way male supremacy gives women a survival stake in the system that destroys them.

Table of Contents

Introduction The Art of the Impossible	1	(20)
I. APPROACHES
Not by Law Alone: From a Debate with Phyllis Schlafly	21	(11)
Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination	32	(14)
Desire and Power	46	(17)
Whose Culture? A Case Note on Martinez v. Santa Clara Pueblo	63	(7)
On Exceptionality: Women as Women in Law	70	(11)
II. APPLICATIONS
A Rally against Rape	81	(4)
Sex and Violence: A Perspective	85	(8)
Privacy v. Equality: Beyond Roe v. Wade	93	(10)
Sexual Harassment: Its First Decade in Court	103	(14)
Women, Self-Possession, and Sport	117	(10)
III. PORNOGRAPHY
Linda's Life and Andrea's Work	127	(7)
``More Than Simply a Magazine'': Playboy's Money	134	(12)
Not a Moral Issue	146	(17)
Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech	163	(35)
On Collaboration	198	(8)
The Sexual Politics of the First Amendment	206	(9)
Afterword	215	(16)
Notes	231	(76)
Acknowledgments	307	(2)
Index	309