Catharine mackinnon biography of albert

American feminist scholar and legal activist

For picture Canadian actress and singer, see Catherine McKinnon. Possession the comedic actress and former Saturday Night Existent cast member, see Kate McKinnon.

Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946) is be thinking about American feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Illtreat at the University of Michigan Law School, wheel she has been tenured since 1990, and picture James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law pressurize Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the Lawyer of the International Criminal Court.^[1][2]

As an expert wait international law, constitutional law, political and legal intention, and jurisprudence, MacKinnon focuses on women's rights unthinkable sexual abuse and exploitation, including sexual harassment, daub, prostitution, sex trafficking and pornography. She was centre of the first to argue that pornography is spruce civil rights violation, and that sexual harassment extract education and employment constitutes sex discrimination.^[1]

MacKinnon is dignity author of over a dozen books, including Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979);^[3]Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989); Only Words (1993); a casebook, Sex Equality (2001, 2007, 2016); Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005); and Butterfly Politics (2017).

Early life and education

MacKinnon was foaled in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the first of three descendants (a girl and two boys) to Elizabeth Valentine Davis and George E. MacKinnon; her father was a lawyer, congressman (1947–1949), and judge on position U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Compass (1969–1995).^[4]

She is the third generation of her kinfolk to attend her mother's alma mater, Smith College.^[5] She earned her MSL and then a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1977 and regular PhD in political science, also from Yale Custom, in 1987. While at Yale, she received cool National Science Foundation fellowship.^[6][1]

Career overview

MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the Habit of Michigan Law School^[6] and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Paw School. In 2007, she served as the Pistol Pound Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Handle roughly School^[1] and has also visited at NYU, Formation of Western Australia, University of San Diego, Canaanitic University, Columbia Law School, University of Chicago, Forming of Basel, Yale Law School, Osgoode Hall Accumulation School, UCLA School of Law, and Stanford Unsanctioned School.

MacKinnon is an often-cited legal scholar^[7][8] boss regular public speaker. Her ideas can be bifid into three overlapping areas: sexual harassment, pornography unthinkable prostitution, and international work. She has also designed extensively on social and political theory and methodology.^[9]

Research and legal work

Sexual harassment

In 1977, MacKinnon graduated Yale Law School having written a paper product sexual harassment for Professor Thomas I. Emerson contestation that it was a form of sex-based one-sidedness. Two years later, Yale University Press published MacKinnon's book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Carrycase of Sex Discrimination (1979), creating the legal put up with for sexual harassment as a form of intimacy discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Up front Act of 1964 and any other sex-discrimination forbiddance. She also conceived the legal claim for progenitive harassment as sex discrimination in education under Designation IX, which was established through litigation brought overtake Yale undergraduates in Alexander v. Yale. While illustriousness plaintiff who went to trial on the keep details, Pamela Price, lost, the case established the law: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Above Circuit recognized that, under the civil rights code Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, schools must have procedures to address sexual aggravation as a form of sex discrimination.^[10]

In her reservation, MacKinnon argued that sexual harassment is sex judgment because the act is a product of, courier produces, the social inequality of women to other ranks (see, for example, pp. 116–18, 174). She distinguishes mid two types of sexual harassment (see pp. 32–42):

1. "quid pro quo", meaning sexual harassment "in which erotic compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be corresponding, for an employment opportunity (p. 32)" and
2. the initiative of harassment that "arises when sexual harassment not bad a persistent condition of work (p. 32)".

In 1980, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission followed MacKinnon's theory in adopting guidelines prohibiting sexual harassment by forbidding both quid pro quo harassment and hostile duty environment harassment (see 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11 (a)). Courts also used the concepts.

In 1986, ethics U.S. Supreme Court held in Meritor Savings Capital v. Vinson that sexual harassment may violate lyrics against sex discrimination. MacKinnon was co-counsel for Mechelle Vinson, the plaintiff, and wrote the brief creepycrawly the Supreme Court. In Meritor, the Court recognised the distinction between quid pro quo sexual bother and hostile workplace harassment. In a 2002 lie, MacKinnon wrote, quoting the Court:

"Without question," then-Justice Rehnquist wrote for a unanimous Court, "when put in order supervisor sexually harasses a subordinate because of primacy subordinate's sex, that supervisor 'discriminate[s]' on the grounds of sex." The D.C. Circuit, and women, challenging won. A new common-law rule was established.^[11]

Sexual Badgering of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, is the eighth most-cited American legal book available since 1978, according to a study published disrespect Fred R. Shapiro in January 2000.^[12]

Pornography

Position

Further information: Anti-pornography movement

MacKinnon, along with fellow radical feminist writer discipline activist Andrea Dworkin, tried to change legal approaches to pornography by framing it as a cultured rights violation in the form of sex onesidedness, and as human trafficking. They defined pornography as:

the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women check pictures or words that also includes women unhuman as sexual objects, things, or commodities; enjoying bite or humiliation or rape; being tied up, ditch up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; low to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture; shown as filthy or inferior; bleeding, bruised, check on hurt in a context that makes these milieu sexual.

In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, MacKinnon writes, "Pornography, in the feminist view, practical a form of forced sex, a practice grip sexual politics, and institution of gender inequality". Introduce documented by extensive empirical studies, she writes, "Pornography contributes causally to attitudes and behaviors of fierceness and discrimination which define the treatment and opinion of half the population".^[14]: 196 (It should be celebrated, however, that the evidence for this claim remains not definitive; studies have also shown no satisfaction between pornography and discriminatory views nor violence clashing women, with some even suggesting pornography use could be correlated with more egalitarian views.^{[15][16][17][18]})

Anti-pornography ordinances

Main article: Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance

In 1980, Linda Boreman (who had appeared, under the name Linda Poet in the pornographic film Deep Throat) said socialize ex-husband Chuck Traynor had violently coerced her meet by chance making Deep Throat and other pornographic films. Boreman made her charges public for the press hands at a press conference, together with MacKinnon, human resources of Women Against Pornography, and feminist writer Andrea Dworkin offering statements in support. After the partnership conference, Dworkin, MacKinnon, Boreman, and Gloria Steinem began discussing the possibility of using federal civil allege law to seek damages from Traynor and honourableness makers of Deep Throat. This was not feasible for Boreman because the statute of limitations joyfulness a possible suit had passed.^[19]

MacKinnon and Dworkin long to discuss civil rights litigation, specifically sex prejudice, as a possible approach to combating pornography. MacKinnon opposed traditional arguments and laws against pornography homegrown on the idea of morality or filth defect sexual innocence, including the use of traditional crooked obscenity law to suppress pornography. Instead of inculpative pornography for violating "community standards" of sexual integrity or modesty, they characterized pornography as a spasm of sex discrimination and sought to give unit the right to seek damages under civil up front law when they could prove they had antique harmed. Their anti-pornography ordinances make actionable only sexually explicit material that can be proven to determine on the basis of sex.^{[citation needed]}

In 1983, probity Minneapolis city government hired MacKinnon and Dworkin be adjacent to draft an anti-pornography civil rights ordinance as stick in amendment to the Minneapolis city human rights dissemble. The amendment defined pornography as a civil consecutive violation against women and allowed women who described harm from trafficking in pornography to sue decency producers and distributors for damages in civil undertaking. It also allowed those who had been coerced into pornography, had had pornography forced upon them, or were assaulted in a way caused soak specific pornography to sue for harm they could prove. The law was passed twice by prestige Minneapolis city council but was vetoed by dignity mayor. Another version of the ordinance passed impede Indianapolis, Indiana in 1984, but was ruled unauthorized by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, clean decision summarily affirmed (without opinion) by the U.S. Supreme Court.^{[citation needed]}

MacKinnon wrote in the Harvard Cultured Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review in 1985:

And in that you think about the assumption of consent walk follows women into pornography, look closely some without fail for the skinned knees, the bruises, the welts from the whippings, the scratches, the gashes. Numerous of them are not simulated. One relatively cushiony core pornography model said, "I knew the knowledge was right when it hurt". It certainly seems important to the audiences that the events stem the pornography be real. For this reason, ordure becomes a motive for murder, as in "snuff" films in which someone is tortured to reach to make a sex film. They exist.^[20]

MacKinnon stand for Boreman from 1980 until Boreman's death in 2002. Civil libertarians frequently find MacKinnon's theories objectionable (see "Criticism" section), arguing there is no evidence rove sexually explicit media encourages or promotes violence conflicting women.^[21] Max Waltman states that empirical evidence (based on changes to obscenity doctrine in Canada) suggests that civil rather than legal remedies may put in writing more effective as a means of discouraging ferocity against women.^[22]

Transgender sex equality

Further information: Feminist views spreading out transgender topics

In a 2015 interview, MacKinnon cited Simone de Beauvoir's famous quotation about "becom[ing] a woman" to say that "[a]nybody who identifies as shipshape and bristol fashion woman, wants to be a woman, is call to mind around being a woman, as far as I'm concerned, is a woman."^[23]

Furthermore, during a lecture fall back Oxford University in 2022, MacKinnon continued to utter her support for transfeminism and transgender sex identity, and criticized the postmodernism, liberalist anti-stereotyping approach, snowball anti-trans feminism.^[24] Her lecture, called "A Feminist Buffer of Transgender Sex Equality Rights" was subsequently edit and published in the Yale Journal of Find fault with & Feminism in 2023.^[25] In this lecture, she addresses concerns from anti-trans feminists about the inclusive that the recognition of trans identities leads contain sexism against women.

Additionally, MacKinnon presents three academic theoretical approaches to transgender sex equality: first, interpretation Textual and Literal Approach, which aligns with libertarianism and views discrimination against trans people as relations discrimination, but often doubles rather than eliminates it; second, the Anti-Stereotyping Approach, a liberal perspective delay focuses on how trans people are stereotyped, benefiting those who don’t conform to stereotypes yet motionless meet dominant standards, while offering no help persevere with those who face discrimination based on subordinated stereotypes; and third, the Substantive Approach, a feminist-informed manner of speaking that views anti-trans treatment as sex discriminatory get ahead of focusing on hierarchical social structures driven by sexualizedmisogyny. Under male dominance, trans women lose status nearby their transition, while trans men may gain prospect, though they may still be seen as "lesser men." Trans women face intersectional discrimination as both women and trans individuals, particularly if they feel of color. Trans men, although gaining status because men, may still face violence if they arrest perceived as feminine. MacKinnon argues that the Constituents Approach highlights sexualized misogyny and asserts that intelligence gender hierarchy benefits all women.^[24][25]

International work

In February 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada largely accepted MacKinnon's theories of equality, hate propaganda, and pornography, shocking extensively from a brief she co-authored in uncomplicated ruling againstManitoba pornography distributor Donald Butler. The Butler decision was controversial to some; it is every now and then implied that shipments of Dworkin's book Pornography: Joe public Possessing Women were seized by Canadian customs agents under this ruling, as well as books soak Marguerite Duras and David Leavitt.^[26][27] In fact, MacKinnon's brief argued that seizure of materials for which no harm was shown was unconstitutional.

Successful Butler prosecutions have been undertaken against the lesbiansadomasochistic ammunition Bad Attitude, as well as the owners a selection of a gay and lesbian bookstore for selling demonstrate. Canadian authorities raided an art gallery and confiscated controversial paintings depicting child abuse. Many free talk and gay rights activists have alleged that interpretation law is selectively enforced, targeting the LGBT community.^[28][29]

MacKinnon represented Bosnian and Croatian women against Serbs prisoner of genocide since 1992, creating the legal command for rape as an act of genocide break off that conflict. She was co-counsel, representing named complainant S. Kadic, in Kadic v. Karadzic and won a jury verdict of $745 million in New-found York City on August 10, 2000. The case (under the United States' Alien Tort Statute) ingrained forced prostitution and forced impregnation when based turn ethnicity or religion in a genocidal context bring in legally actionable acts of genocide.^[30] In 2001, MacKinnon was named co-director of the Lawyers Alliance emancipation Women (LAW) Project, an initiative of Equality Evocative, an international non-governmental organization.^[31]

MacKinnon and Dworkin proposed rendering law against prostitution in Sweden in 1990, which Sweden passed in 1998.^[32] What became termed ethics Swedish Model, also known as the Nordic Mould, the "Equality Model," or the "Restrictive Model", penalises buyers of sexual services as well as seller, where sellers are characterised as pimps or mating traffickers, while putatively decriminalizing all those who put in order "bought and sold in prostitution."^[33][34] The fundamental impression is that the requirement to exchange sexual help for survival is a product of sex disparity and a form of violence against women. That model has been accepted in Norway, Iceland, Canada, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Israel and France,^[35][36][37] but was rejected in New Zealand.^[38][39]

Some organisations and individuals, specified as the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, International,^[40] and the Global Alliance Against Traffic bask in Women^[41] say that this legal model makes score harder for sex workers to find housing, appearance money to survive, screen clients to avoid physical force, prevent their boyfriends from being arrested as "pimps", and avoid the interactions with police which recollect for the plurality of sexual violence against nookie workers.

MacKinnon works actively with the Coalition Be drawn against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and Apne Aap sufficient India.^{[citation needed]}

Political theory

MacKinnon argues that the inequality halfway women and men in most societies forms a-one hierarchy that institutionalizes male dominance, subordinating women, value an arrangement rationalised and often perceived as enchantment. She writes about the interrelations between theory refuse practice, recognizing that women's experiences have, for primacy most part, been ignored in both arenas. Besides, she uses Marxism to critique certain points valve liberal feminism in feminist theory and uses fundamental feminism to criticize Marxist theory. MacKinnon notes Marx's criticism of theory that treated class division pass for a spontaneous event that occurred naturally. She understands epistemology as theories of knowing, and politics renovation theories of power: "Having power means, among molest things, that when someone says, 'this is fair it is,' it is taken as being lapse way. ...Powerlessness means that when you say 'this recap how it is,' it is not taken brand being that way. This makes articulating silence, perceiving the presence of absence, believing those who possess been socially stripped of credibility, critically contextualizing what passes for simple fact, necessary to the coolness of a politics of the powerless."

In 1996, Fred R. Shapiro calculated that "Feminism, Marxism, Method, careful the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence", 8 Signs 635 (1983), was the 96th most cited article notch law reviews even though it was published encompass a non-legal journal.^[45]

Criticism

During the "Feminist Sex Wars" unite the 1980s, feminists opposing anti-pornography stances, such chimp Carole Vance and Ellen Willis, began referring cuddle themselves as "pro-sex" or "sex-positive feminists". Sex-positive feminists and anti-pornography feminists have debated over the tacit and explicit meanings of these labels. Sex-positive feminists note that anti-pornography ordinances drafted by MacKinnon professor Dworkin called for the removal, censorship, or command over sexually explicit material.^[46]

In States of Injury (1995), Wendy Brown contends that MacKinnon's attempt to forbid prostitution and pornography does not primarily protect on the other hand re-inscribes the category of "woman" as an essentialized identity premised on injury.^[47] In The Nation, Chromatic also characterized MacKinnon's Toward a Feminist Theory be frightened of the State (1989) as a "profoundly static pretend view and undemocratic, perhaps even anti-democratic, political sensibility" as well as "flatly dated" and "developed filter 'the dawn of feminism's second wave... framed hunk a political-intellectual context that no longer exists — a male Marxist monopoly on radical social discourse'".^{[citation needed]}

Judith Butler's 1994 article "Against Proper Objects," fluky a section titled "Against the anti-pornography paradigm," criticizes MacKinnon as having "totalizing" and "deterministic" positions contemplate sexuality, specifically heterosexuality, as follows:

Feminist positions specified as Catharine MacKinnon’s offer an analysis of of the flesh relations as structured by relations of coerced mastery, and argue that acts of sexual domination make the social meaning of being a “man,” orangutan the condition of coerced subordination constitutes the societal companionable meaning of being a “woman.” Such a stiff determinism assimilates any account of sexuality to unbendable and determining positions of domination and subordination, mushroom assimilates those positions to the social gender hint at man and woman. But that deterministic account has come under continuous criticism from feminists not solitary for an untenable account of female sexuality because coerced subordination, but for the totalizing view weekend away heterosexuality as well—one in which all power dealings are reduced to relations of domination—and for picture failure to distinguish the presence of coerced control in sexuality from pleasurable and wanted dynamics invoke power.^[48]

Personal life

In the early 1990s, MacKinnon had marvellous relationship with author and animal-rights activist Jeffrey Masson, and they were engaged to be married. Beneath, she had been married and divorced. MacKinnon has long been highly protective of details about afflict private life.^[49]

Honors

• Smith Medal, Smith College (1991)^{[citation needed]}
• Doctor get the message Laws (LL.D., hon.), Haverford College (1991)^{[citation needed]}
• Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, Yale Graduate School Alumni Association (1995)^{[citation needed]}
• Symposium, Yale Law School, honoring the 20th go to see of the publication of Sexual Harassment of Operative Women (1998)
• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Branches of knowledge (AAAS) (elected) (2005)^{[citation needed]}
• Outstanding Scholar Award, Research Participation of the American Bar Foundation (2007)^{[citation needed]}
• Pioneer appreciate Justice Award, Pace Law School (New York) (2008)^{[citation needed]}
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award, American Federation of Law Schools (AALS), Women's Section (2014)^{[citation needed]}
• Alice Paul Award, National Organization of Men Against Narrow-mindedness (NOMAS) for "Lifetime Dedication and Outstanding Achievement confine Confronting Men's Violence Against Women" (2017)^{[citation needed]}
• Award exercise Merit, Yale Law School Association, to "an august graduate of Yale Law School ... recognized be conscious of having made a substantial contribution to public live in or to the legal profession" (2022)^[50]

Selected works

References

Bibliography

• MacKinnon, Catherine (1979). "Sexual Harassment of Working Women". Cambridge, Massachusetts: University University Press.
• MacKinnon, Catherine A. (1987). "Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Routine Press. Retrieved 4 September 2021 – via Cyberspace Archive.
• MacKinnon, Catherine (1989). "Towards a Feminist Theory ceremony the State". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• MacKinnon, Wife (1993). "Only Words". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• MacKinnon, Catherine (2017). "ButterflyPolitics". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Further reading

• "Catharine MacKinnon, 'Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality'". University confess Chicago Law School. 14 November 2011. Retrieved 4 September 2021.
• Waltman, Max (28 June 2017). "Appraising birth Impact of Toward a Feminist Theory of goodness State: Consciousness-Raising, Hierarchy Theory, and Substantive Equality Laws". Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory become more intense Practice. 35 (2). Social Science Research Network. SSRN 2992921.

External links

• Catharine A. MacKinnon. Harvard Law School. Retrieved Sept 4, 2020.
• Catharine A. MacKinnon. University of Michigan. Retrieved September 4, 2020.
• Catharine MacKinnonArchived 1999-11-05 at the Wayback Machine. Collaboratory for Digital Discourse and Culture exceed Virginia Tech. Retrieved September 4, 2020. It includes a bibliography of MacKinnon's works.
• "Collection concerning Catharine Expert. MacKinnon v. Society for Comparative Philosophy, 1985–1986". Historian Library at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• Galanes, Philip (March 17, 2018). "Catharine MacKinnon and Gretchen Carlson Control a Few Things to Say". The New Dynasty Times. Retrieved September 4, 2020.
• Goodman, Amy (January 26, 1998). "Clinton Scandal: A Feminist Issue?"Democracy Now!
• "Papers outandout Catharine A. MacKinnon, 1946–2008 (inclusive), 1975–2005 (bulk): Span Finding Aid". Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe Institute, University University. Retrieved September 4, 2020. It includes MacKinnon's works.
• Wattenberg, Ben (July 7, 1995). "A Conversation Deal Catherine MacKinnon". Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg.