Are Women Human? by Catharine A. MacKinnon

MacKinnon is a towering figure on the world stage, far beyond categorisations that in application, trigger derision or marginalisation. MacKinnon-the author of 11 brilliant and theoretically rigorous books, professor of law at the University of Michigan, and a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study at Stanford-as a feminist scholar is somewhat like describing her as a bookish blonde: accurate, but also a little ridiculous. ” -Charles King, The Times Literary Supplement She asks how international law, specifically international human rights protections, might be structured to take account of the uniqueness of crimes against women. In this collection of previously published essays and public lectures, MacKinnon focuses on the international legal dimensions of feminist theory.

Along with the late Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon has also become one of the major thinkers and activists on the issue of women’s rights in the global arena, particularly regarding the way in which enduring distinctions between the public and the private spheres (in areas such as pornography, for example) sustain a matrix of inequality and exploitation. MacKinnon is the world’s leading feminist legal theorist, and her work over the past three decades has helped create an entire field of theorizing about gender, the State, and law. In a world where women pervasively suffer violence, however, it takes the fierceness of good theory to move us a little closer to peace.

This book is indeed fierce, unrelenting in its naming of abuse and hypocrisy. MacKinnon’s central theme, repeatedly and convincingly mined, is the hypocrisy of the international system when it faces up to some crimes against humanity but fails to confront similar harms when they happen to women, often on a daily basis… Are Women Human? is a major contribution both to feminism and to international law… By casting herself as a peace-builder, MacKinnon issues a pointed challenge to her adversaries, who boringly stereotype her as a fierce amazon on the warpath against male liberties.

As elsewhere in MacKinnon’s work, we find plenty of trenchant and eloquent writing but we also find more systematic analysis and more extensive scholarship than we sometimes get, and the book is the richer for it. Unsettling in the best sort of way, Are Women Human? shows to be not only a prodigiously creative feminist thinker who can see the world from a fresh angle like nobody else (and I mean the angle of reality, as opposed to the usual one of half-reality) but also one of our most creative thinkers about international law.

Are Women Human? by Catharine A. MacKinnon