Katherine Mckinnon Theory

"Katherine Mckinnon and Feminist Legal Theory, Emancipation or Oppression?”

The female question, or the feminist enterprise can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft and her suffragettes in the early 1900s. The movement has led to considerable leaps that have been made in the domain of policy, through the placement of a considerable influence on issues such as rape, harassment, prostitution, the Equal Rights Amendments etcetera. Regardless of such unprecedented and significant gains driven by the Feminist initiative, Feminist ideology seems to have discovered a new point of contention. This particular contention is in the province of jurisprudence. The feminist advent in jurisprudence has sought to challenge state based and individual

McKinnon’s engagement with the race and class question is quite superfluous. For her, these categories stand disposable in the search for a greater truth, the essentialism of a “woman” lying behind the veil of all these differences (Bartlett). This means that women who belong to different classes, races or even sexual orientations are collectivized and homogenized under a singular banner of womanhood. This brings about two distinct harms. Firstly, the sense of belonging that these women have to questions other than the “feminine” one is stripped away and appropriated to an entirely different discourse. (Resnik) The aspirations of femalehood, must necessarily always be prioritized over other identities that may be tribal, familial or even cross-cultural. The biggest criticism of this is that even when the aspiration of femalehood may be universalized, its expression must be a product of historical social circumstance. Such an expression would come about with a constant interaction between multiple identities, with the subject, the women, free to come to terms with her femalehood through the nuanced lens of historical and social context (Harris). McKinnon’s model of superimposing a unitary identity upon a subject handicaps her theory. This is so because her wishes in creating a grand narrative are inconsistent with

In actuality, her “dominance theory” is just one of the few strands that have and are still gaining currency in feminist academic circles. MacKinnon’s analysis is persuasive, with special reference to the manner in which a society divided along gendered lines preserves the status quo, to the benefit of the male, who has created reality in a way which allows him to apprehend it to the best of his interest. Yet, Mackinnon’s theorizing sees two critical flaws in how it’s larger end-goal of female emancipation is crippled by elements of “dominance” because of the essentialist traits in her theory. In addition, another problem arises with the manner in which that dominance is entrenched and often propagated by the glorification of certain tropes just as “whiteness”, “heterosexuality” etc. All in all, one can sense a sharp disconnect in the purpose for which the theory is created and how Mackinnon’s arguments can be discredited with reference to accomplishing those lofty goals. It may not just be post-modern criticism that might have undone her work. It may just be the scope of her