Previous articleNext article FreeAsk a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Catharine A. MacKinnon about Power, Politics, and Political ScienceInterviewer: Robyn Marasco and Interviewer: Alyson ColeInterviewer: Robyn Marasco Search for more articles by this author and Interviewer: Alyson Cole Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRobyn Marasco and Alyson Cole:Your work over several decades has developed a distinctive concept and analysis of politics. Can you say more about how you understand this term, in itself and in relation to law, society, culture, and the many other fields you have addressed?Catharine A. MacKinnon:Politics is about power, its definition, distribution, and structural social organization. That makes inequality—organized hierarchy of power—its quintessential form and problem. What some political philosophy sees as a competing concept of the political, “the good life,” is not really competing but derivative. Equality—that is, equal power in all its forms—means the good life can be defined and secured free of systemic barriers.My distinctive concept and analysis arise from the reality of women’s situation of less power than men, specifically of male/masculine dominance and female/feminine subordination as centrally enacted in sexual abuse, including the sexualization of race, age, and class/poverty. The specifics and forms of this hierarchical system of power vary across cultures and historical time, but the unequal sex/gender relation is almost always there.RM & AC:You have argued that theory does not provide a blueprint for practice. Instead, you have said that theory is a reflection on practice and that feminist theory is an effort to make sense of women’s practices. Might you elaborate on this idea of theory? What are the practices today to which theory might attend?CAM:Theory worth theorizing emerges from practical engagement, derives from practice, whether from personal experience contextualized, organizing for change, grappling with policy work, etc. You have to come up against the realities you are theorizing, preferably confronting necessary change in hierarchies of power, in order to understand how things actually work. Feminist theory doesn’t, I think, come from making sense of women’s practices per se. Its knowledge comes from resisting male dominance over all feminized beings, driven by sexualized misogyny, toward substantive change in that system. It is what you learn when you push against it.Sexual abuse remains the core practice of masculine dominance over women in all our diversity, children, and some men. The theories of it that we have inherited come, actually, from men’s practice of it. Resisting sexual abuse, including exposing it and producing accountability for it in practice, rather than denying or excusing or eroticizing it, is where the theory of the liberation of women has to begin. Women’s physical bodies are its pretext, its alleged justification and provocation, not its cause. A tremendous amount of energy, including force, goes into deflecting and punishing any attempt to reveal or call out sexual violation and exploitation, attempting to make it into anything other than what it is. Sexual abuse is hidden, silenced, protected, commodified, defended. Rich rewards, treasure of all kinds, are on offer to those who gaslight its survivors.RM & AC:You were trained as a political scientist and as a lawyer at Yale University. How did your work in political science shape your work in law, and beyond? To what extent does your wide-ranging body of scholarship, across many academic fields and debates, aim at a contribution to political science in particular?CAM:I was also trained in the women’s movement and by survivors of sexual abuse, from sexual abuse in childhood to sexual harassment and rape to prostitution and pornography. Everything I have done academically, philosophically, as well as legally has contributed to political science in that it has engaged politics and closely studied and theorized the political. Political science has generally failed to understand this contribution but many other fields—especially philosophy, law, and women’s/gender studies—have grasped it.RM & AC:One of the striking aspects of your work is its simultaneous attention to women’s oppression and women’s agency. Do you conceive of any tension between theorizing women’s oppression in its structural dimensions and affirming women’s agency in fighting that oppression? How do you integrate these perspectives?CAM:Thank you for seeing both dimensions in my work. “Agency,” as a term given its current meaning in the 1980s by women defending pornography, including rape pornography, is not one I generally use, although it is a big favorite and has leaped its original boundaries. It is typically deployed as a synonym for resistance, claiming a self against stereotypes, self-action or freedom of action, self-expression, choice, and a lot of other concepts never specified or theorized or given specified meaning. Interestingly, in law, an “agent” is someone acting at the direction of a principal, someone whose strings are being controlled from above.“Agency’s” supposed tension with oppression is an invention of people who have never actually worked to change anything in the real world. Anyone who has worked with sexually abused women, for example, or reflected seriously on being one, realizes that the tension as such is mush. Most women in prostitution, for instance, were sexually abused as children. The supposed oppression/agency distinction makes no sense of this. They were subordinated, violated, often for years; they tried to resist and succeeded or didn’t; they were further abused in prostitution that they later term serial rape, often figuring their abuse was inevitable, they had few other options, so they might as well be paid for it; they would get out if/when they could; they would act toward accountability if there was a serious chance it could matter, and they often do, even though every deck is stacked against them. I don’t believe in free will-determinism regresses, if that was the question.That women haven’t won yet does not mean we are not fighting back or even that we don’t win sometimes in ways that add up. The #MeToo movement, the first global movement against sexual abuse in the history of the world, is a major example of women by the millions acting against our oppression. It is what resistance, real agency, looks like. One day the public conversation around the place of power in sexuality will include exited prostituted women, including trans women, who are organizing and speaking out more effectively against sexual abuse every day. Of course, the whole point of understanding women’s oppression is to help make effective action against it possible.RM & AC:Would you elaborate on what you intended by a feminist theory of the state? Did you mean to offer a feminist critique of the state, the outlines a feminist state, or both? How do you see that project, several decades later, in relation to what some have recently criticized as “carceral feminism”? How do you respond to those who claim that feminism has been complicit in the policing and prison crisis?CAM:My 1989 book clearly presents a critique of the state as male: of the state as seeing and treating women as men see and treat women, epistemically and legally.1 Actually, Foucault and I came up with essentially the same theory centered on sexuality about the relation between knowledge and power at around the same time, without any contact with each other, except he was for it and I’m against it, and I theorized gender and he didn’t.Toward a Feminist Theory of the State is not a theory of a feminist state. It is a ground-clearing operation as well as a full-scale analysis of women’s condition as political. The critique of obscenity law later became the civil rights ordinance against pornography. The critique of rape law later became the legal claim for sexual harassment and my international work against rape as a gender crime, a crime of inequality. The critique of sex discrimination soon after became the theory of substantive equality, embraced in a number of legal jurisdictions. The critique of abortion law based on analysis of the public/private line later became a sex equality theory of the abortion right that I have taught for forty years, given in some speeches mainly in Latin America, but never written. None of these affirmative interventions are in that book.The “carceral” slur, as currently encountered, is an ignorant form of defamatory stigmatization designed, as slurs from the same group have been previously, to make trendy a guarantee that no one will take opposition to sexual abuse seriously. It is essentially pro-rape. It is typically applied to my work for civil remedies, which is an outright contradiction in terms. This cabal, fingers ever in the wind, has been fairly quiet since the beginning of #MeToo. They have yet to explain why the victims of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, or Bill Cosby should sit in healing circles with them. Which is not to say that the rightly notorious racist incarceration of American men of color (for what was largely drug crimes) should not end. What the critique has come to focus on instead, however, is rape and battering—that is, men’s violence against women, which is usually intraracial. This has typically meant that women of color have been abandoned by law enforcement even more than they were before, with the support of these supposed radicals. This abdication, orchestrated by criminal defense lawyers, is then regarded as woke rather than sexist racism.It is difficult to grasp how a movement can be complicit in something it has not done. However, whatever can be blamed on women’s opposition to male dominance, regardless of facts, will be. Our long-term position that all women are entitled to safety without racism—imagine equal protection of the laws, even—has yet to be realized. It has barely even been tried.RM & AC:Pornography is more ubiquitous and profitable than ever before. Many of our digital technologies appear as principally founded in and fueled by the seemingly insatiable desire for pornography. How might the anti-pornography campaign have been differently waged? How might we regroup? What are some of the successes from this campaign that we ought to bear in mind? Might we see the “sex wars” as having been productive for feminism, as opposed to corrosive and destructive?CAM:Under capitalism, resistance to massive profit-making industries founded on the abuse of the most powerless people in society for the conditioned, essentially addictive, pleasure of the powerful is likely to encounter headwinds. Political economy makes this evident. Digital pornography is one arm of the sex trade. What you call insatiable is the well-documented desensitization to violence that requires more and more violative sexual aggression for arousal. The research on the harms it does has only become more conclusive over time.2 Even purported democracies have proven no match for this juggernaut.The critique of unequal power in normative sexuality in male-dominant culture that was at the core of the discussion begun in the l980s, resisted by its apologists, has, however, grown in recognition and support. The revolt by students against campus sexual assault and the #MeToo movement have applied and expanded it. For another instance, when we first organized against pornography, there were almost no organizations of exited survivors telling the truth about prostitution. Today, survivors of prostitution organize against the sex industry all over the world. The Nordic/Equality Model has been passed in many countries with this valiant survivor support, decriminalizing the bought and sold and penalizing buyers and sellers of people for sexual use, based on essentially the same equality theory that drives the antipornography work.3Reflection on the time and persistence needed for change that is fundamental, as well as the strategies of punishment and reward that power employs to keep itself in place and its challengers in line, including in academia and journalism, might help address this question, despite the well-founded impatience it surfaces.RM & AC:Your pioneering work in Sexual Harassment of Working Women, which defined sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination and violation of equality under the law, gave a new language and legal framework to women’s experience in the workplace.4 What are your thoughts on the way that this issue is being taken up today, in the context of #MeToo, the high-profile cases of sexual harassment in politics and media, as well as the more ordinary patterns and practices of inequality at work?CAM:It is gratifying to see sexual harassment starting to fulfill its potential as a core recognition of the sexualized inequality of power. When ads were pulled after media executives were accused of it, I knew we were getting somewhere. Suddenly, being associated with accused perpetrators was perceived as a problem that had to be solved, rather than managed or covered up, at worst a public relations/human resources flap to placate.Sexual harassment as a legal claim was created by interpretation, in the common law tradition; that gave it recognition without further legislation but limited its reach. The survivor could sue for damages and equitable relief, for instance, but nothing direct could be done about the perpetrator, if the company or school chose to cover his costs and to continue to value him. With #MeToo, we see real consequences to perpetrators for the first time. By the way, the cry that these accused persons should get “due process” before being fired essentially is a demand for more rights for anyone credibly accused of sexual harassment than any other employee has, under conditions of employment at will, unless they have contracts that specify otherwise.Sexual harassment is a claim against unwelcome sexual pressure under conditions of unequal power. In some cases, this has transmogrified into prohibition on any, including welcome, sexual relationships between people who have unequal power. In some circumstances—such as massive inequalities of several kinds of power (age, authority, celebrity, money, experience, family, work or school hierarchies, sexuality, gender identity, usually piled on top of and through sex and gender as such), conflicts of interest actual or potential—these rules are understandable. Experience has also shown that often sexual relationships of unequal power especially that begin as largely mutual can go awry, with destructive consequences at work and school as well as for the person with less power in the relationship.But my basic sense is that per se prohibitions exist to make life easy for the institutions, so they don’t have to figure out whose side they are on and what really happened when a complaint—usually by the person with less power—is made. It gets them off the hook of facing down the powerful person with what they actually did. Since schools especially have done such a monumentally poor job of dealing with sexual harassment complaints, perhaps this is the best they can do. It does not, however, solve anything when the hierarchy is social—sex, gender, sexuality, grade in school, athletic or Greek status, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion. A lot of work is needed here, to put it mildly.The current craze for “restorative justice” also calls for caution. As an elaboration on the notorious “informal procedures” in schools, survivors—who are typically traumatized, just want what was done to them to go away, and are often in no position to value themselves far less fight for themselves—are often pressured at a highly vulnerable time into processes with no safeguards or independent representation. They trust the school to help them, in loco parentis, when the school’s primary interest is typically its brand, its reputation. By the time the survivor figures out they are being used and getting nothing, it is often too late to salvage their time, health, and education. And the perpetrator, who may be manipulative and canny and well-advised, often goes on to repeat what they did, if they haven’t already. This is not to say that restorative processes can’t work for some people under some circumstances, although they are no different in content from creative civil remedies. Their generalization as policy is a concern, posing serious potential damage to survivors individually and as a group.RM & AC:How does the concept of intersectionality inform your analysis of politics and power? How do you respond to the mainstreaming of ideas that you and other legal theorists and scholars developed decades ago? Have we understood these ideas and their analytic potential?CAM:It has always been clear to me that at least race and economic class had to be taken into explicit account in order to say anything accurate about women as a collective group. All my work has done this, always. It became possible to do far more with this reality, strengthening immeasurably the possibilities for analysis and change, when my colleague Kimberlé W. Crenshaw brilliantly theorized intersectionality first in 1989, continuing to today.5Without knowing which scholars are being referred to, it is impossible to evaluate any mainstreaming of ideas we have pioneered. Generally speaking, often the concepts and information are ignored; frequently they are appropriated but bastardized, watered down and stripped of their radical potential, domesticated; many times they are simply stolen, as if they are common knowledge, their origins never cited. Not infrequently, my work is lied about and the lying version is criticized, while what I actually say is claimed by the author as both their own and what is really needed. My least favorite is academics or litigators who virulently criticize a concept I have advanced, do everything to oppose it, then claim it as their own when it becomes widely accepted. Then it turns up in their obituary and the press refuses to correct. Some people appropriate my insights and develop them further, which even without credit is a contribution.My own experience is that courts have been far more receptive to my work and deployed it far more accurately, than academics. They are more interested in solving problems than in advancing their careers. Also, in law, plagiarism is victory. It is much better for the legitimacy of an outcome to have a court or agency or legislature use your work as their own than to be cited for it.RM & AC:Your framework for understanding and addressing sex inequality has been adopted in several countries around the world and has profoundly impacted international law and human rights. How do you see your work in relation to an internationalist or global perspective on women?CAM:I see being a woman as global citizenship. Women from around the world ask me to support their survival, their initiatives, which I do when their terms and mine align. Whatever my work can contribute to urgently needed change, when it resonates around the world, as I have learned it does, is worth doing.RM & AC:Why is it important to understand feminism as a politics? What, for you, are the most important areas of political inquiry and movement today?CAM:What is important is to understand that the social subordination of women by men, often institutionalized in legal systems or marginalized or ignored in them, is a system of eroticized power, hence political, making opposition to it a political movement. Properly understood, this analysis would transform analysis of men’s politics among men, where it also operates. Missing this crucial dimension hobbles political science and theory.The most important areas of work begin where this system starts—in sexual abuse of children, boys as well as girls—and where it ends—in pornography and prostitution, mass engines of buying and selling human beings, disproportionately feminized ones, for rape for profit, exploiting the most vulnerable with impunity in ever widening gyres.NotesRobyn Marasco is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia 2015), which reconstructs the emancipatory project of critical theory around the idea of negative dialectics, as well as several articles on critical theory and politics. She can be reached at [email protected].Alyson Cole is Professor of Political Science, Women’s & Gender Studies, and American Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include: The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford 2007), Derangement and Liberalism: The Political Theory of Michael Paul Rogin (Routledge 2019), and How Capitalism Forms Our Lives (Routledge 2020). She can be reached at [email protected]Catharine A. MacKinnon is a scholar, lawyer, writer, and activist on sex equality issues under domestic and international law. She pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment as sex discrimination in employment and education, with Andrea Dworkin framed the harms of pornography as civil rights violations, proposed the Nordic/Equality model to abolish prostitution, conceived with clients and first established legal recognition of rape as an act of genocide, and is among the most widely cited legal scholars in the English language. Among many honors, she is the 2022 recipient of the Henry W. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence, one of only twenty-six awarded since 1895, and of Yale Law School’s Award of Merit, its highest honor for a graduate. She can be reached at [email protected].1. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).2. The superb work of Max Waltman, a Swedish political scientist, provides updated documentation of this extensive body of research; see Max Waltman, Pornography: The Politics of Legal Challenges (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021).3. For discussion, see Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality,” 46 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 46 (2011): 271–309. The countries that have adopted this model, in addition to Sweden, are Norway, Iceland, The Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, and Israel.4. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).5. Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989): 139–67; and Catharine A. MacKinnon and Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Reconstituting the Future: An Equality Amendment,” The Yale Law Journal Forum, (Dec. 23, 2019), https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/reconstituting-the-future-the-equality-amendment. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Ahead of Print The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722808 Views: 64Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 30, 2022 © 2022 Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.