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.
Catharine A. MacKinnon is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law (Long-Term) at Harvard Law School.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Art of the Impossible
Part I: Approaches
1. Not by Law Alone: From a Debate with Phyllis Schlafly
2. Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination
3. Desire and Power
4. Whose Culture? A Case Note on Martinez v. Santa Clara Pueblo
5. On Exceptionality: Women as Women in Law
Part II: Applications
6. A Rally against Rape
7. Sex and Violence: A Perspective
8. Privacy v. Equality: Beyond Roe v. Wade
9. Sexual Harassment: Its First Decade in Court
10. Women, Self-Possession, and Sport
Part III: Pornography
11. Linda's Life and Andrea's Work
12. "More Than Simply a Magazine": Playboy's Money
13. Not a Moral Issue
14. Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech
15. On Collaboration
16. The Sexual Politics of the First Amendment
Afterword
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
What People are Saying About This
Miles Lord
It's a zinger. Ms. MacKinnon has made a difference before, and this book should further change society. — Miles Lord, former Chief Judge of the Federal Court for the District of Minnesota
Gerry Spence
I wish to celebrate this book by a peer, a book for reading by men should they wish to keep up with the human race. — Gerry Spence, author of Trial by Fire
Phyllis Chester
In this book MacKinnon enlarges our understanding of the nature of civil rights as applied to women. MacKinnon's radicalism is thrilling, her determination brilliant, her passion literal. With rigor and irony MacKinnon teaches us what feminism--unmodified by cowardice or by disassociation from other women-is, what it sounds like, and what its goals are. MacKinnon's identification with silenced women is precisely what defines feminism unmodified. — Phyllis Chester, Ph.D., author of Women and Madness
Derrick Bell
MacKinnon dispatches from her post on the front line of the sexual battlefield searing, sharp communiqués that voice a fierce, relentless, and finally persuasive analysis of how pornography, a perversion of free speech, perpetuates the powerlessness of women. — Derrick Bell, Harvard Law School
Peter Bogdanovich
Catharine MacKinnon's Feminism Unmodified is a remarkably penetrating, bracingly uncompromising view of what it means to be a woman in our society. Written with extraordinary incisiveness and an acid wit, this is an important book for anyone interested in freedom.
Burke Marshall
Catharine MacKinnon's discourses in Feminism Unmodified are final evidence, if any were needed, that hers is the most powerful mind and forceful voice now at work in this critical area of law. I commend her book most vigorously to many who question as well as those who accept her position. — Burke Marshall, Yale Law School
Diana E. H. Russell
Feminism Unmodified shows Catharine MacKinnon to be one of the most brilliant, original, thought--provoking, and uncompromising feminist theoreticians and strategists in the contemporary United States. — Diana E. H. Russell, Department of Sociology, Mills College, and author of Rape and Marriage
