MacKinnon "Sexuality" 2/3/2014

1. Business 

Sit with your group 

2. Dominance Feminism 

MacKinnon’s Theory of Sexuality

3. Evaluating MacKinnon and Cara’s Artifact

MacKinnon’s

She is a feminist legal theorist. Worked on equality cases in the 70’s and porn in the 80’s, since she has turned to international case (rape as a violation of human right). She is a kind of radical feminist (a little socialist feminist). Central to her argument is an account/theory of sexuality. 

The Issue

Male supremacy and dominance

Female subordination and oppression

Not simply discrimination or failure of the state

Analysis

unequal power

• men’s material deprivation of women
• feminism’s failure to see dominance and the adoption of misguided approaches/perspectives

eg. fems who ignore sexuality (“sameness”/ “difference” fems), fems who fail to see how sexuality itself is the dynamic of the inequality of the sexes, fems who adopt a freudian model of sexuality as repressed, fems who separate sex and violence

• laws and the states complicity in producing and maintaining male supremacy (often in ways that we don’t even notice): installs a male point of view in itself, calls it neutral, and judges women based on that
• men’s violence against women- harassment, battery, rape, porn
• sexual objectification of women, social construction of: 

  (hetero)Sexuality           ~           Gender

      as dominance/ submission        masculinity/femininity  

• The way this is constructed creates hierarchy

Why does she take issue with the construction of rape as violence not sex, non-consensual while sex is consensual?

- she says this is missing something, these two are actually a lot more alike (pg. 130, 149-150) they are missing the pervasive environment of dominance and submission, how can you really talk about “consent”.   

Vision

non-subordination

equal power

sexuality constructed otherwise

Strategies

CR

feminist legal work ect.

Analyze it to face it to change it

Questions and Evaluations

women’s autonomy?

consent as a goal?

• dangers of giving up the legal notion of consent
• is all heterosexual sex non-consensual

can women legitimately want heterosexual sex?

take for granted that someone would enjoy a submissive/dominate sexual relationship

Artifact

Don Jon - main character values pornography over sex with actual people