Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues

By Catharine A. MacKinnon

Book Overview

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? If women were regarded as human, would they be sold into sexual slavery worldwide; veiled, silenced, and imprisoned in homes; bred, and worked as menials for little or no pay; stoned for sex outside marriage or burned within it; mutilated genitally, impoverished economically, and mired in illiteracy--all as a matter of course and without effective recourse?

The cutting edge is where law and culture hurts, which is where MacKinnon operates in these essays on the transnational status and treatment of women. Taking her gendered critique of the state to the international plane, ranging widely intellectually and concretely, she exposes the consequences and significance of the systematic maltreatment of women and its systemic condonation. And she points toward fresh ways--social, legal, and political--of targeting its toxic orthodoxies.

MacKinnon takes us inside the workings of nation-states, where the oppression of women defines community life and distributes power in society and government. She takes us to Bosnia-Herzogovina for a harrowing look at how the wholesale rape and murder of women and girls there was an act of genocide, not a side effect of war. She takes us into the heart of the international law of conflict to ask--and reveal--why the international community can rally against terrorists' violence, but not against violence against women. 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674025555
• ISBN13: 9780674025554
• Release Date: November 2007
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Freedom TO or freedom FROM?

Catherine MacKinnon is back, and she's still fighting the good fight. Like her deceased colleague Andrea Dworkin, a much more obstreperous feminist, MacKinnon came out of the Sixties with a grounding in Marxism, all the better to give her feminist militancy a historical perspective. Here she gives Aristotle's conception of equality ("if men don't need it, women don't get it") the boot. Postmodernist cuties receive their caustic due, too (and it's refreshing to see someone finally point out that the poststructuralist stance is actually cribbed from M+E). 'Free speech' liberals, multicultural apologists and essentialist feminists also get a taste of the lash. So-called Human Rights charters, treaties, declarations and proponents are treated to a megablast of deconstruction. But, in the main, MacKinnon is after the REAL criminals, and, as always, her argument is acute and tenacious. As she sees it, pornography and prostitution are the same (rendering conflicting US laws, however ineffectual, against only one ridiculous) and are sustained upon gender inequality - in turn perpetuated by economic oppression. It is here MacKinnon's push for CIVIL instead of (old-same-old) CRIMINAL action provides women a fighting chance to hit their oppressors back. "Sexualization of inequality" is MacKinnon's primary target, reaching all the way to the horror of Serbian rape atrocities, where "pornography emerges as a tool of genocide." (We must wonder what free rein US troops 'enjoy' in Iraq.) From there, MacKinnon notes, in the wake of 9/11, how almighty forces of 'justice' can be unleashed upon evildoers who attack civilians (buildings, really) but not unleashed to protect women, thousands of whom die every year - year after year - at the hands of their so-called 'natural' protectors, men. And yes, MacKinnon still quotes Dworkin.

SUPERB!

MacKinnon is a force of nature, ruthlessly brilliant and uncompromising. Are Women Human? shimmers in its breadth and force.