Catharine MacKinnon

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Catharine MacKinnon bigraphy, stories - American feminist and legal activist

Catharine MacKinnon : biography

07 October 1946 –

Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946) is an American feminist, scholar, lawyer, teacher and activist.

Criticisms

During the "Feminist Sex Wars" in the 1980s, feminists opposing anti-pornography stances, such as Ellen Willis and Carole Vance, began referring to themselves as "pro-sex" or "sex-positive feminists". Sex positive feminists and anti-pornography feminists have debated over the implicit and explicit meanings of these labels. Sex-positive feminists claimed that anti-pornography ordinances contrived by MacKinnon and Dworkin called for the removal, censorship, or control over sexually explicit material.Carol Vance, More Pleasure, More Danger: A Decade after the Barnard Sexuality Conference, in Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality (Carol Vance, ed., 1984). The "sex wars" resulted in the feminist movement being split into two opposing camps over questions about pornography, consent, sexual freedom, and the relationship of free speech to equality.

Anti-pornography ordinances authored by MacKinnon and Dworkin in the United States sought for harm against victims, in relation to pornography, to be made actionable. Soon afterwards, obscenity laws passed in Canada (1985), and books and materials that fell under the new definition of pornography were removed. The Canadian Supreme Court decision R. v. Butler (1992), which upheld these laws, drew heavily on MacKinnon’s arguments that pornography is a form of sex discrimination. MacKinnon has written in support of this trend in Canadian anti-pornography law, though at the same time, holding that Canada should abandon traditional obscenity law entirely in favor of a civil rights approach. She has also distanced herself from the selective enforcement of Canadian obscenity law against gays and lesbians, holding that anti-pornography laws should make no distinction between gay and heterosexual pornography.Catharine A. MacKinnon, In Harm’s Way (1997).Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, (1994).

Books

  • Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (1979) ISBN 0-300-02299-9
  • Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987) ISBN 0-674-29874-8
  • Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (1988) ISBN 0-9621849-0-X
  • Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) ISBN 0-674-89646-7
  • Only Words (1993) ISBN 0-674-63933-2
  • (co-editor) In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, edited by C. A. MacKinnon and A. Dworkin (1997) ISBN 0-674-44579-1
  • Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (2005) ISBN 0-674-01540-1
  • Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006 (currently a nominee for the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year.)

Biography

MacKinnon was born in Minnesota. Her mother is Elizabeth Valentine Davis; her father, George E. MacKinnon was a lawyer, congressman (1946 to 1949), and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1969 to 1995). She also has two younger brothers.

MacKinnon became the third generation of her family to attend her mother’s alma mater, Smith College. She graduated at the top 2% of her class at Smith and moved on to receive her J.D. and Ph.D. from Yale University. She was the recipient of a National Science Foundation fellowship while at Yale Law School.

MacKinnon was engaged to Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson for several years during the early 1990s, though the relationship subsequently ended. She has refused to discuss the relationship in later interviews. () by Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, April 12, 2006.

MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. In 2007, she served as the Roscoe Pound Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. 2007

MacKinnon is a highly cited legal scholar. 2005 Fellow of Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences She has frequently been a visiting professor at other universities and regularly appears in public speaking events. On February 10, 2005, MacKinnon attended the premiere of Inside Deep Throat (in which she is interviewed) and took part in a panel discussion after the film in order to criticize it. by Charles McGrath, 2005-02-09 by Tina Brown, 2005-02-10, On April 29, 2009, MacKinnon argued on the radio show Intelligence Squared U.S. for the proposition "it’s wrong to pay for sex." 2009-04-29