Books by Catharine A. Mackinnon

The miniscule motion of a butterfly's wings can trigger a tornado half a world away, according to chaos theory. Catharine A. MacKinnon's collected work on gender inequality including new pieces argues that the right seemingly minor interventions in the legal realm can have a butterfly effect that generates major social and cultural transformations.

This volume contains the oral testimony of victims of pornography, recorded at hearings on a groundbreaking civil rights law drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. From the first hearings in Minneapolis in 1983 to those in Massachusetts in 1992, the witnesses offer their personal experiences of sexual subordination due to pornography.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, noted feminist and legal scholar, explores and develops her original theories and practical proposals on sexual politics and law. These discourses, originally delivered as speeches, have been brilliantly woven into a book that retains all the spontaneity and accessibility of a live presentation. MacKinnon offers a unique retrospective on the law of sexual harassment, which she designed and has worked for a decade to establish, and a prospectus on the law of pornography, which she proposes to change in the next ten years. Authentic in voice, sweeping in scope, startling in clarity, urgent, never compromised and often visionary, these discourses advance a new theory of sex inequality and imagine new possibilities for social change. Through these engaged works on issues such as rape, abortion, athletics, sexual harassment, and pornography, MacKinnon seeks feminism on its own terms, unconstrained by the limits of prior traditions. She argues that viewing gender as a matter of sameness and difference--as virtually all existing theory and law have done--covers up the reality of gender, which is a system of social hierarchy, an imposed inequality of power. She reveals a political system of male dominance and female subordination that sexualizes power for men and powerlessness for women. She analyzes the failure of organized feminism, particularly legal feminism, to alter this condition, exposing the way male supremacy gives women a survival stake in the system that destroys them.

A practicing attorney views the sexual harassment of working women as a pervasive social problem and presents a legal argument that it is discrimination based on sex.

More than half a century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defined what a human being is and is entitled to, Catharine MacKinnon asks: Are women human yet? She exposes the consequences and significance of the systematic maltreatment of women and its systemic condonation as she points toward fresh ways of targeting its toxic orthodoxies. A critique of the transnational status quo that also envisions the transforming possibilities of human rights, this bracing book makes us look as never before at an ongoing war too long undeclared.

In the past 25 years, no one has been more instrumental than MacKinnon in making equal rights real for women. This collection brings together previously uncollected and unpublished work in the national arena from 1980 to the present, defining her clear, coherent, consistent approach to reframing the law of men on the basis of the lives of women.

MacKinnon contends that pornography, racial and sexual harassment, and racial hate speech are acts of intimidation, subordination, terrorism, and discrimination, and should be legally treated as such.