Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, she won with co-counsel a damage award of $745 million in August 2000 in Kadic v. The Supreme Court of Canada has largely accepted her approaches to equality, pornography, and hate speech, which have been influential internationally as well. MacKinnon pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and, with Andrea Dworkin, created ordinances recognizing pornography as a civil rights violation and the Swedish model for abolishing prostitution. She holds a BA from Smith College, a JD from Yale Law School, and a PhD in political science from Yale, and specializes in sex equality issues under international and domestic (including comparative and constitutional) law. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (long-term).

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.Ĭatharine A. She reveals a political system of male dominance and female subordination that sexualizes power for men and powerlessness for women. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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, noted feminist and legal scholar, explores and develops her original theories and practical proposals on sexual politics and law.

Mackinnon feminism unmodified