Marxism, Feminism, Methodology
and the Law:
Re-visiting An Agenda for
(Literary) Theory
Prof. Stephanie A. Smith
In Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Spring, 1982 Vol. 7 No. 3, Catherine A. MacKinnon published a controversial essay titled "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," in which this University of Michigan Professor of Law (email: kittytoo@umich.edu) sought to argue that "the task for theory is to explore the conflicts and connections between the methods that found it meaningful to analyze social conditions" using the vectors of sex and class. Although MacKinnon did recognize race as another vector, her primary interest was to prove that "sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object." And MacKinnon proceeded to re-shape Michigan and Minnesota rape laws, to significantly alter the legal definition of rape, in highly controversial ways. Because according to MacKinnon's theory, which she has pursued, under currently existing social conditions, sex IS rape.
Since 1982, with the fall of the Berlin wall, and the rise of post-marxist, post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-feminist, post-colonial methodological debates, strictly "feminist" approaches like MacKinnon's have come to be regarded as "old," or as "out-dated," that which belongs securely to the past. And yet the imbalance of economy and power to which MacKinnon's theorization spoke has hardly vanished; legal prostitution, the "traffic in women (and children)" and pornography remain among the largest and most lucrative industries across the globe; women and children still represent the largest proportion of the working poor in the United States; domestic violence, child-abuse, racial discrimination and poverty remain deeply divisive and hotly debated issues.
This course is designed both as an historical
investigation into the critical theory and the socio-political activisim
that sparked and then sustained historical materialist, materialist-feminist,
human and civil rights movements, as well as an inquiry into the legacy
of those debates for continued contemporary ideological formations--debates
that affect our lives as citizens, as scholars, and as teachers.
All required readings are either taken from
the texts above (and available at Wild Iris Books 375-7477, 802 West University
Ave.) or will be online, or will be made available by the instructor.