MacKinnon Catharine A. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

Harvard University Press, 1989. — 330 p.MacKinnon argues that feminism had "no account of male power as an ordered yet deranged whole"; that is, a systematic account of the structural organization whereby male dominance is instantiated and enforced. Although earlier writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Simone de Beauvoir, had offered "a rich description of the variables and locales of sexism," they had not produced a general theory of structural exploitation based on sex-based hierarchy.MacKinnon proposes Toward a Feminist Theory of the State as an answer to this perceived problem. MacKinnon takes Marxism as the theory's point of departure, arguing that unlike liberal theories, Marxism "confronts organized social dominance, analyzes it in dynamic rather than static terms, identifies social forces that systematically shape social imperatives, and seeks to explain social freedom both within and against history." She elaborates:Marxism and feminism provide accounts of the way social arrangements of patterned and cumulative disparity can be internally rational and systematic yet unjust. Both are theories of power, its social derivations and its maldistribution. Both are theories of social inequality. In unequal societies, gender and with it sexual desire and kinship structures, like value and with it acquisitiveness and the forms of property ownership, are considered presocial, part of the natural world, primordial or magical or aboriginal. As Marxism exposes value as social creation, feminism exposes desire as socially relational, internally necessary to unequal social orders but historically contingent.MacKinnon rejects social reform that proceeds through pluralistic models of liberalism: "To proliferate 'feminisms' in the face of women's diversity is the latest attempt of liberal pluralism to evade the challenge women's reality poses to theory, simply because the theoretical forms those realities demand have yet to be created." According to MacKinnon, "Abortion opponents and proponents share a tacit assumption that women significantly control sex", that sexual intercourse is "coequally determined", without taking into account the overall context of non-consent, subordination, and violence within which intercourse commonly occurs. Rape, according to MacKinnon, "is adjudicated not according to the power or the force that a man yields, but according to indices of intimacy between the parties."