Catharine MacKinnon

From Academic Kids

Dr Catharine A. MacKinnon (born 7 October 1946) is a radical American feminist and lawyer. She was educated at Smith College (B.A., 1968), Yale Law School (J.D., 1977) and Yale University Graduate School (Ph.D. in political science, 1987). As of 2004, she is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and is also a long-term Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago.

A proponent of "feminism unmodified," a form of radical feminism distanced from, for example, Marxist approaches, MacKinnon wrote Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, an attempt to understand the oppression of women and strategies to combat it in terms of states dominated by men.

MacKinnon, in the 1970s, was a pioneer in claiming that sexual harassment could be considered illegal discrimination and fall under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, this premise was not tested in court until the 1980s, in the Jenson v. Eveleth case.

In the 80s, in cooperation with Andrea Dworkin, she wrote ordinances for a law recognizing pornography as a violation of civil rights. The "Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinances" placed her at the center of a major controversy. Some favored the ordinances as a novel method of combating what they felt to be objectifying or violent depictions of women. Many others objected on free speech grounds, with some, such as the Friesian School going so far as to call her the epitome of "Stalinist feminists" and the Authoritarian left [1] (http://www.friesian.com/quiz.htm). Some who might have agreed with her opposition to pornography generally objected to her tactics out of concern that placing such control in the hands of male-dominated states could allow them to censor depictions of sex valuable to, e.g., lesbians or the BDSM community. That right-wing Christian organizations sided with MacKinnon did little to endear her to other feminists.

[edit]

War crimes

She became involved in the Bosnian War Crimes Tribunal in 1992, and has represented Bosnian women against Serbs accused of genocide and rape. She was co-counsel on Kadic v. Karadzic, which she won in 2000. It was the first case to recognize rape as an act of genocide. Her approach is notable in that she claims that traditional approaches to human rights gloss over abuses specific to women (e.g., sexual violence), both in wartime and peacetime.

She is co-director of the Lawyers Alliance for Women's Project of Equality Now, an NGO promoting international sex equality rights for women. Professor MacKinnon holds a , a , and . S She is one of the most widely-cited legal scholars in English.

She coined the term "throat rape" in a panel discussion on the film Deep Throat, referring to the part played by Linda Lovelace.

[edit]