- Judith Allen, ‘Does Feminism Need a Theory of the State?’ in Sophie Watson (ed), Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990, 21 at 27. Allen makes this assessment though she also has profound criticisms to make.
- Ibid; Jane Flax, ‘The End of Innocence’ in Judith Butler and Joan Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge, 1992, 445 at 446; Jane Kenway, ‘Feminist Theories of the State: To Be or Not To Be?’ in Michael Muetzelfeldt (ed), Society, State and Politics in Australia, Leichardt: Pluto Press Australia, 1992, 108 at 133.
- See, for example, Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, 167; Allen, ‘Does Feminism Need a Theory of the State?’, above n1, 22; Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson, ‘“Women's Interests” and the Post-Structuralist State’ in Michéle Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds), Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, 52 at 52–54; Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson, ‘Fathers, Brothers, Mates: the Fraternal State in Australia’ in Sophie Watson (ed), Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990, 229 at 229.
- Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989, 120. For examples of such criticisms see: Angela Harris, ‘Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory’ (1990) 42 Stanford Law Review 581, 590–592; Brown, States of Injury, above n 3, 41; Carol Smart, ‘Law, Feminism and Sexuality: From Essence to Ethics?’ (1994) 9 Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15, 77, 167–170.
- Bell Hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, New York: Routledge, 1994, 197 and following discusses (and advocates) this particular naming of ‘the new world order’.
- For, example, Moington, ‘What Exactly is Wrong with the State as an Agent of Change?’ in V. Spike Peterson (ed), Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory, Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner, 1992, 65.
- Catharine A MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory’ (1982) 7 Signs 515; Catharine A MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’ (1983) 8 Signs 635.
- For example, Suzanne Franzway, Dianne Court and Bob Connell, Slaking A Claim: Feminism, Bureaucracy and the State. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989, 29–30; Kenway, ‘Feminist Theories of the Sute’, above n2, 109–110; Pringle and Watson, ‘Fathers, Brothers, Mates’, above n3, 237.
- Allen, ‘Does Feminism Need a Theory of the State?’, above n1, 27.
- MacKinnon, ‘An Agenda for Theory’, above n7; MacKinnon, ‘Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, above n7; Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989.
- MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory’, above n7, 517.
- 'As work is to Marxism, sexuality to feminism is socially constructed yet constructing, universal as activity yet historically specific, jointly comprised of matter and mind.’ MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory’, above n7, 516.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above n10, 3
- Ibid, 3–4.
- MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory’, above n7, 516.
- MacKinnon, ‘Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, above n7, 645, emphasis in original.
- Ibid, 644, footnote omitted.
- See, for example, Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking A Claim, above n8, 23–25.
- For example: Ellen DuBois, Mary Dunlap, Carol Gilligan, Catharine MacKinnon and Carrie Menkel-Meadow, ‘Feminist Discourse, Moral Values and the Law—A Conversation’ (1985) 34 Buffalo Law Review 11; Alexandra Dobrowolsky and Richard Devlin, ‘The Big Mac Attack: A Critical Affirmation of MacKinnon's Unmodified Theory of Patriarchal Power’ (1991) 36 McGill Law Journal 575; Lori Chamberlain, ‘Consent After Liberalism: A Review Essay of Catharine MacKinnon's Toward A Feminist Theory of the State and Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract' (1991) 11 Genders 111.
- MacKinnon, ‘Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, above n7, 638.
- Rhonda Sharp and Ray Broomhill, Short Changed: Women and Economic Policies, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989, 28–30; Mary McIntosh, ‘The State and the Oppression of Women’ in A. Kuhn and A. Wolpe (eds), Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, 254 at 281–284. A particularly interesting account is contained in Zillah Eisenstein, Feminism and Sexual Equality: Crisis in Liberal America, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984, chapter 4.
- Rhonda Sharp and Ray Broomhill, Short Changed, above n21,29.
- MacKinnon, Toward a FeministTheory of the State, above n10, 170, 158–159.
- Ibid, 167–168.
- Ibid, 170. This statement is interesting in itself, implying that there are different roles for the state in creating and maintaining differing official and unofficial stories.
- Brown, States of Injury, above, n3, 174; Franzway, Court and Connell, Staking A Claim, above, n8, 33; Bob Connell, ‘The State, Gender and Sexual Politics’ (1990) 19 Theory and Society 507, 509; Anna Yeatman, Bureaucrats, Technocrats, Femocrats: Essays on the Contemporary Australian State, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990, 170; Kenway, ‘Feminist Theories of the State’, above n2, 130; Pringle and Watson, “Women's Interests' and the Post-Structuralist State’, above n3, 63.
- Wendy Brown, ‘Review: Feminism Unmodified' (1989) 17 Political Theory 489, 492.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above n10, 160.
- Brown, Stales of Injury, above n 3, 170. Emphasis in original.
- ‘The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated… capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation.’ Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1 New York: International Publishers, 1967.
- MacKinnon, ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory’, above n7, 516.
- Varda Burstyn suggests that such an expropriation is impossible ‘[b]ecause of the non-economically centralised nature of masculine dominance and because of men's and women's mutual sexuality… ‘Varda Burstyn, ‘Masculine Dominance and the State’ (1983) Socialist Register 46, 80.
- Connell, ‘The State, Gender and Sexual Polities’, above, n26, 538–539; and see Harrington, ‘What Exactly is Wrong with the State?’, above n4, who envisages a liberal, feminist political system which is, in effect, a form of feminist state.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above n10, 163.
- Ibid, 162, footnote omitted.
- Ibid, 162.
- MacKinnon, ‘Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, above n7, 636, footnote omitted.
- Ibid, 636.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above n10, 232.
- Ibid, 163–164.
- MacKinnon, ‘Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, above n7, 654.
- Ibid, 654, emphasis in original.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above n10, 163. See too MacKinnon's analysis of the decision in American Booksellers Association v Hudnut 771 F 2d 323 (7th Cir 1985), aff'd mem, 475 US 1001 (1986); Catharine MacKinnon, ‘Pornography as Defamation and Discrimination’ (1991) 71 Boston University Law Review 793, 812.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above n10, 162–163, footnote omitted.
- Sophie Watson, (ed), Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990.
- Author of works including Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, New York: E P Dutton, 1974; Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood, London: Women's Press, 1982; Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, London: Arrow Books, 1987; Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality, Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988; Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York: E P Dutton, 1989.
- The effect of MacKinnon and Dworkin's ideas about pornography has been felt well beyond the US and Canada, and continues. On a trip to Canberra, Australia, in late 1995 I picked up a leaflet which drew strongly and explicitly on the words and reasoning behind the Dworkin/MacKinnon Ordinance. Independent Women of Action Group, Pornography Persecutes!, Canberra: IWAG, n.d, circa 1995.
- Dworkin and MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights, above, n46, 99 and following sets out the full text of the Ordinance. The Indianapolis Ordinance was later struck down: Hudnut, above n43. The campaign surrounding the Ordinance is described in A Jacobs, ‘Rhetoric and the Creation of Rights: MacKinnon and the Civil Right to Freedom from Pornography’ (1994) 42 University of Kansas Law Review 785 and Paul Brest and Ann Vandenberg, ‘Politics, Feminism and the Anti-Pornography Movement in Minneapolis’ (1987) 39 Stanford Law Review 607. The rhetorical construction of the campaign is discussed in Carol Smart, ‘Unquestionably a Moral Issue: Rhetorical Devices and Regulatory Imperatives’ in Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh (eds). Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993, 184 and in chapter four, Brown, States of Injury, above n3.
- Dworkin and MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights, above n46, 138–141. This definition can be found in the Model Ordinance. Variations appear in the Minneapolis Ordinance, the Code of Indianapolis and Marion County Indiana and the City of Cambridge Ordinance reprinted as appendices to the book.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above, n10, 163.
- MacKinnon, ‘Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, above n7, 644.
- Ibid, 652.
- Ibid, 653. Emphasis in original.
- 771 F 2d 323 (7th Cir 1985), 324.
- Catharine MacKinnon interprets the judgment as occasionally acknowledging that pornography is a practice. I believe that the judges go no further than accepting that pornography sometimes gives rise to practices. MacKinnon, ‘Pornography as Defamation and Discrimination’, above n43, 812. It is clear that the court steadfastly holds pornography to be speech throughout the bulk of its judgment, see for example Hudnut, above n43, 324, 329.
- Ibid, 329, footnote omitted.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above n10, 167. This explanation of state action strikes me as closely allied to some of the arguments marshalled in favour of relative autonomy.
- Ibid, 160.
- MacKinnon, ‘Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, above n7, 643; similar points are made in MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above n8, 160.
- Dworkin and MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights, above, n46.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above, n10, 196.
- Ibid, 196. See discussion in Hudnut, above n43, 324. See too Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law, London: Routledge, 1989, 135.
- Harris, ‘Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory’, above n4, 583.
- Dworkin and MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights, above n43, 9.
- Hudnut, above n43, 329, footnote omitted.
- Nicola Lacey, ‘Theory into Practice? Pornography and the Public/Private Dichotomy’ (1993) 20 Journal of Law and Society 93, 107.
- See Australian Law Reform Commission, Equality Before the Law: Justice for Women Part 1. Sydney: Australian Law Reform Commission, 1994, 91 and following; and Susan Easton, The Problem of Pornography: Regulation and the Right to Free Speech, London: Routledge, 1994, 120.
- Carol Smart, ‘Law's Truth/Women's Experience’ in Regina Graycar (ed), Dissenting Opinions: Feminist Explorations in Law and Society, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990, 1 at 20.
- Ibid, 20.
- Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law, above n62, 135.
- Lacey, ‘Theory into Practice?’, above n66, 106.
- MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, above, n10, 643
- Ibid, 160.
- Bob Connell, ‘Socialism and Labor: An Australian Strategy’ (1982) Fabian Newsletter 2, 12. Connell is speaking in quite a different context, but I think the point can be maintained here. See also Zillah R Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, New York: Longman, 1981, 221–222.
Australian Feminist Law Journal
Volume 9, 1997 - Issue 1