Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
![handle is hein.journals/worts12 and id is 215 raw text is: BOOK REVIEW
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
by CATHARINE MACKINNON (Harvard University Press 1989)
Reviewed by DEBORAH SCHWENK*
I. INTRODUCTION
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State',
Catharine MacKinnon's latest book, is a compel-
ling attempt to create a feminist theory of male
dominance and sexual hierarchy. The great value
of the book lies in MacKinnon's ability to reveal
the sexual politics underlying the everyday and
unquestioned conceptions, decisions and exper-
iences of civic and social life. Yet the character of
her approach-a rigid insistence that her theory
is the only true feminist theory, and her cursory
dismissal of other feminist views on freedom,
power and sex-undercuts the power and appeal
of her message.
In thirteen chapters on topics ranging from
Marxism to rape, abortion, and pornography,
MacKinnon lays out her analysis of the crucial
place sex occupies in the social inequality between
men and women. She calls for feminists to ac-
count for, understand, and confront the gendered
hierarchy in which we live-a hierarchy based
upon sexuality as a form of power.
This posture requires a broad definition of
sexuality and MacKinnon readily provides one.
Sexuality, according to MacKinnon, is primarily
culturally and not biologically determined. She
sees sexuality not as an inherent force, feeling, or
behavior, but as a cultural construct determined
by the social relations of power in the world.2 She
asserts that those with power shape that con-
struct. According to MacKinnon, we live in a so-
cial hierarchy based on male power so pervasive
that men have not only constructed what sexual-
ity as such means, but have also institutionalized
that distribution of power through the state and
its laws. The sexual basis of women's social and
civil inequality underlies MacKinnon's analyses
of the state and its laws on rape, pornography,
and abortion. An understanding that women's
lives, including women's sexuality, are deter-
mined by male interests is the core of her theory
of women's subordination.
MacKinnon asserts that in male dominant
societies men eroticize male power and domi-
nance and female powerlessness and submission.
She finds evidence for this in many of the dis-
tinctive features of women's status as second-
class-the restriction and constraint and contor-
tion, the servility and the display, the self-mutila-
tion and requisite presentation of self as a beauti-
ful thing, the enforced passivity, [and] the
humiliation....3 The practices of rape, battery,
sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children, pros-
titution, and pornography-the sexual use and
abuse of women by men-further illustrate,
MacKinnon argues, that male domination and vi-
olation of women is sexualized at some level. For
MacKinnon, these practices also reveal that force,
power's expression,4 is sex because it is what
turns a man on-and what turns a man on consti-
tutes the content of sex in our culture.
Male dominant societies, MacKinnon pro-
*Suffolk University Law School, J.D., 1989. Ms. Schwenk
was a Graduate Fellow at the Rutgers Environmental Law
Clinic, 1989-1990. She is presently an Assistant Regional
Counsel for the United States Environmental Protection
Agency.
1. C. MACKINNON, TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE
STATE (1989).
2. Id. at 128.
3. Id. at 130.
4. Id. at 136.
[Women's Rights Law Reporter, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 1990]
© 1990 by Women's Rights Law Reporter, Rutgers--The State University
0085-8269/80/0908](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/worts12&div=24&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
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