女性主义、马克思主义与女性判决（文章）

Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence Author(s): Catharine A. MacKinnon Source: Signs, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1983), pp. 635-658 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173687 Accessed: 22/03/2009 05:55 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs. http://www.jstor.org VIEWPOINT Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence Catharine A. MacKinnon Feminism has no theory of the state. It has a theory of power: sexuality is gendered as gender is sexualized. Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission. The man/woman dif- ference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex and the distinctively feminist account of gender inequality.1 Sexual objectification, the central process within this For A. D. and D. K. H. In addition to all those whose help is acknowledged in the first part of this article, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 515-44 (hereafter cited as part 1), my students and colleagues at Yale, Harvard, and Stanford contributed pro- foundly to the larger project of which both articles are parts. Among them, Sonia E. Alvarez, Jeanne M. Barkey, Paul Brest, Ruth Colker, Karen E. Davis, Sharon Dyer, Tom Emerson, Daniel Gunther, Patricia Kliendienst Joplin, Mark Kelman, Duncan Kennedy, John Kaplan, Lyn Lemaire, Mira Marshall, Rebecca Mark, Martha Minow, Helen M. A. Neally, Lisa Rofel, Sharon Silverstein, Dean Spencer, Laurence Tribe, and Mary Whisner stand out vividly in retrospect. None of it would have happened without Lu Ann Carter and David Rayson. And thank you, Meg Baldwin, Annie McCombs, and Janet Spector. Marxism appears in lower case, Black in upper case, for reasons explained in part 1. 1. Much has been made of the distinction between sex and gender. Sex is thought the more biological, gender the more social. The relation of each to sexuality varies. Since I believe sexuality is fundamental to gender and fundamentally social, and that biology is its social meaning in the system of sex inequality, which is a social and political system that does not rest independently on biological differences in any respect, the sex/gender dis- tinction looks like a nature/culture distinction. I use sex and gender relatively inter- changeably. [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1983, vol. 8, no. 4] ? 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/83/0804-0003$01.00 635 636 MacKinnon Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State dynamic, is at once epistemological and political.2 The feminist theory of knowledge is inextricable from the feminist critique of power because the male point of view forces itself upon the world as its way of ap- prehending it. The perspective from the male standpoint3 enforces woman's defi- nition, encircles her body, circumlocutes her speech, and describes her life. The male perspective is systemic and hegemonic. The content of the signification "woman" is the content of women's lives. Each sex has its role, but their stakes and power are not equal. If the sexes are unequal, and perspective participates in situation, there is no ungendered reality or ungendered perspective. And they are connected. In this context, objectivity-the nonsituated, universal standpoint, whether claimed or aspired to-is a denial of the existence or potency of sex inequality that tacitly participates in constructing reality from the dominant point of view. Objectivity, as the epistemological stance of which objectification is the social process, creates the reality it apprehends by defining as knowl- edge the reality it creates through its way of apprehending it. Sexual metaphors for knowing are no coincidence.4 The solipsism of this ap- 2. This analysis is developed in part 1. I assume here your acquaintance with the arguments there. 3. Male is a social and political concept, not a biological attribute. As I use it, it has nothing whatever to do with inherency, preexistence, nature, inevitability, or body as such. It is more epistemological than ontological, undercutting the distinction itself, given male power to conform being with perspective. (See part 1, pp. 538-39, n. 56.) The perspective from the male standpoint is not always each man's opinion, although most men adhere to it, nonconsciously and without considering it a point of view, as much because it makes sense of their experience (the male experience) as because it is in their interest. It is rational for them. A few men reject it; they pay. Because it is the dominant point of view and defines rationality, women are pushed to see reality in its terms, although this denies their vantage point as women in that it contradicts (at least some of) their lived experience. Women who adopt the male standpoint are passing, epistemologically speaking. This is not uncommon and is rewarded. The intractability of maleness as a form of dominance suggests that social constructs, although they flow from human agency, can be less plastic than nature has proven to be. If experience trying to do so is any guide, it may be easier to change biology than society. 4. In the Bible, to know a woman is to have sex with her. You acquire carnal knowl- edge. Many scholarly metaphors elaborate the theme of violating boundaries to appropri- ate from inside to carry off in usable form: "a penetrating observation," "an incisive analysis," "piercing the veil." Mary Ellman writes, "The male mind . . . is assumed to function primarily like a penis. Its fundamental character is seen to be aggression, and this quality is held essential to the highest or best working of the intellect" (Thinking about Women [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968], p. 23). Feminists are beginning to understand that to know has meant to fuck. See Evelyn Fox Keller, "Gender and Science," Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 1, no. 3 (1978): 409-33, esp. 413; and Helen Roberts, ed., Doing Feminist Research (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). The term "to fuck" uniquely captures my meaning because it refers to sexual activity without distinguishing rape from intercourse. At least since Plato's cave, visual metaphors for knowing have been central to Western theories of knowledge, the visual sense prioritized as a mode of verifica- tion. The relationship between visual appropriation and objectification is now only begin- Summer 1983 637 proach does not undercut its sincerity, but it is interest that precedes method. Feminism criticizes this male totality without an account of our ca- pacity to do so or to imagine or realize a more whole truth. Feminism affirms women's point of view by revealing, criticizing, and explaining its impossibility. This is not a dialectical paradox. It is a methodological expression of women's situation, in which the struggle for consciousness is a struggle for world: for a sexuality, a history, a culture, a community, a form of power, an experience of the sacred. If women had conscious- ness or world, sex inequality would be harmless, or all women would be feminist. Yet we have something of both, or there would be no such thing as feminism. Why can women know that this-life as we have known it-is not all, not enough, not ours, not just? Now, why don't all women?5 ning to be explored. "The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be ... a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom, as the act of taking pictures is a sem- blance of wisdom, a semblance of rape. The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, com- prehensible in photographs is what constitutes their attraction and provocativeness" (Susan Sontag, On Photography [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980], p. 24). See part 1, pp. 539-40, n. 59. 5. Feminism aspires to represent the experience of all women as women see it, yet criticizes antifeminism and misogyny, including when it appears in female form. This tension is compressed in the epistemic term of art "the standpoint of all women." We are barely beginning to unpack it. Not all women agree with the feminist account of women's situation, nor do all feminists agree with any single rendition of feminism. Authority of interpretation-the claim to speak as a woman-thus becomes methodologically complex and politically crucial for the same reasons. Consider the accounts of their own experience given by right-wing women and lesbian sadomasochists. How can patriarchy be diminishing to women when women embrace and defend their place in it? How can dominance and submission be violating to women when women eroticize it? Now what is the point of view of the experience of all women? Most responses in the name of feminism, stated in terms of method, either (1) simply regard some women's views as "false consciousness," or (2) embrace any version of women's experience that a biological female claims as her own. The first approach treats some women's views as unconscious conditioned reflections of their oppression, complicitous in it. Just as science devalues experience in the process of uncovering its roots, this approach criticizes the substance of a view because it can be accounted for by its determinants. But if both feminism and antifeminism are responses to the condition of women, how is feminism exempt from devalidation by the same account? That feminism is critical, and antifeminism is not, is not enough, because the question is the basis on which we know something is one or the other when women, all of whom share the condition of women, disagree. The false consciousness approach begs this question by taking women's self-reflections as evidence of their stake in their own oppression, when the women whose self-reflections are at issue question whether their condition is oppressed at all. The second response proceeds as if women are free. Or, at least, as if we have consider- able latitude to make, or to choose, the meanings if not the determinants of our situation. Or, that the least feminism can do, since it claims to see the world through women's eyes, is to validate the interpretations women choose. Both responses arise because of the un- willingness, central to feminism, to dismiss some women as simply deluded while granting other women the ability to see the truth. These two resolutions echo the object/subject split: Signs 638 MacKinnon Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State The practice of a politics of all women in the face of its theoretical impossibility is creating a new process of theorizing and a new form of theory. Although feminism emerges from women's particular experi- ence, it is not subjective or partial, for no interior ground and few if any aspects of life are free of male power. Nor is feminism objective, abstract, or universal.6 It claims no external ground or unsexed sphere of gener- alization or abstraction beyond male power, nor transcendence of the specificity of each of its manifestations. How is it possible to have an engaged truth that does not simply reiterate its determinations? Dis- engaged truth only reiterates its determinations. Choice of method is choice of determinants-a choice which, for women as such, has been unavailable because of the subordination of women. Feminism does not begin with the premise that it is unpremised. It does not aspire to per- suade an unpremised audience because there is no such audience. Its project is to uncover and claim as valid the experience of women, the major content of which is the devalidation of women's experience. This defines our task not only because male dominance is perhaps the most pervasive and tenacious system of power in history, but because it is metaphysically nearly perfect.7 Its point of view is the standard for objectivity (my consciousness is true, yours false, never mind why) or subjectivity (I know I am right because it feels right to me, never mind why). Thus is determinism answered with transcendence, traditional marxism with traditional liberalism, dogmatism with tolerance. The first approach claims authoriity on the basis of its lack of involvement, asserting its view independent of whether the described concurs-sometimes because it does not. It also has no account, other than its alleged lack of involvement, of its own ability to provide such an account. How can some women see the truth and other women not? The second approach claims authority on the basis of its involvement. It has no account for different inter- pretations of the same experience or any way of choosing among conflicting ones, includ- ing those between women and men. It tends to assume that women, as we are, have power and are free in exactly the wsays feminism, substantively, has found we are not. Thus, the first approach is one-sidedly outside xwhen there is no outside, the second one-sidedly inside when someone (probably a woman) is inside everything, including every facet of sexism, racism, and so on. So our problem is this: the false consciousness approach cannot explain experience as it is experienced by those who experience it. The alternative can only reiterate the terms of that experience. This is only one way in which the object/subject split is fatal to the feminist enterprise. 6. To stress: the feminist criticism is not that the objective stance fails to be truly objective because it has social content, all the better to exorcise that content in the pursuit of the more truly point-of-viewless viewpoint. The criticism is that objectivity is largely accurate to its/the/a wvorld, which wor-ld is criticized; and that it becomes more accurate as the power it represents and extends becomes more total. Analogous criticisms have arisen in the natural sciences, without being seen as threatening to the "science of society" project, or calling into question that project's tacit equation between natural and social objects of knowledge. What if we extend Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to social theory? (Welrner Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930], pp. 4, 20, 62-65). What of the axiomatic method after G6del's proof? (See Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gidel'.s Proof [New York: NewT York University Press, 1958].) 7. Andrea Dworkin helped me express this. Summer 1983 639 point-of-viewlessness, its particularity the meaning of universality. Its force is exercised as consent, its authority as participation, its supremacy as the paradigm of order, its control as the definition of legitimacy. Feminism claims the voice of women's silence, the sexuality of our eroticized desexualization, the fullness of "lack," the centrality of our marginality and exclusion, the public nature of privacy, the presence of our absence. This approach is more complex than transgression, more transformative than transvaluation, deeper than mirror-imaged resis- tance, more affirmative than the negation of our negativity. It is neither materialist nor idealist; it is feminist. Neither the transcendence of liberalism nor the determination of materialism works for us. Idealism is too unreal; women's inequality is enforced, so it cannot simply be thought out of existence, certainly not by us. Materialism is too real; women's inequality has never not existed, so women's equality never has. That is, the equality of women to men will not be scientifically provable until it is no longer necessary to do so. Women's situation offers no outside to stand on or gaze at, no inside to escape to, too much urgency to wait, no place else to go, and nothing to use but the twisted tools that have been shoved down our throats. If feminism is revolutionary, this is why. Feminism has been widely thought to contain tendencies of liberal feminism, radical feminism, and socialist feminism. But just as socialist feminism has often amounted to marxism applied to women, liberal feminism has often amounted to liberalism applied to women. Radical feminism is feminism. Radical feminisnm-after this, feminism unmodified-is methodologically post-marxist.8 It moves to resolve the 8. I mean to imply that contemporary feminism that is not methodologically post- marxist is not radical, hence not feminist on this level. For example, to the extent Mary Daly's GynlEcology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978) is idealist in method-meaning that the subordination of women is an idea such that to think it differently is to change it-it is formally liberal no matter how extreme or insightful. To the extent Shulamith Firestone's analysis (The Dialectic of Sex: The Casefor Feminist Revolution [New York: William Morrows & Co., 1972]) rests on a naturalist definition of gender, holding that women are oppressed by our bodies rather than their social meaning, her radicalism, hence her feminism, is qualified. Susan Griffin's Pornography and Silence: Cul- ture's Revolt against Nature (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982) is classically liberal in all formal respects including, for instance, the treatment of pornography and eros as a distinction that is fundamentally psychological rather than interested, more deeply a matter of good and bad (rnorality) than of power and powerlessness (politics). Andrea Dworkin's work, esp. Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Perigee Books, 1981), and Adrienne Rich's poetry and essays, exemplify feminism as a methodological de- parture. This feminism seeks to define and pursue women's interest as the fate of all women bound together. It seeks to extract the truth of women's commonalities out of the lie that all women are the same. If whatever a given society defines as sexual defines gender, and if gender means the subordination of women to men, "woman" means-is not qualified or undercut by-the uniqueness of each woman and the specificity of race, class, time, and place. In this sense, lesbian feminism, the feminism of women of color, and socialist feminism are converging in a feminist politics of sexuality, race, and class, with a left to right spectrum of its own. This politics is stlruggling for a practice of unity that does Signs Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State marxist-feminist problematic on the level of method. Because its method emerges from the concrete conditions of all women as a sex, it dissolves the individualist, naturalist, idealist, moralis