Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence [1983]

Feminism criticizes the male totality without an account of our capacity to do so or to imagine or realize a more whole truth. Feminism affirms women's point of view by revealing, criticizing, and explaining its impossibility. Feminism has been widely thought to contain tendencies of liberal feminism, radical feminism, and socialist feminism. As feminism has a theory of power but lacks a theory of the state, so marxism has a theory of value which becomes class analysis, but a problematic theory of the state. The rule form, which unites scientific knowledge with state control in its conception of what law is, institutionalizes the objective stance as jurisprudence. Feminists have reconceived rape as central to women's condition in two ways. Some see rape as an act of violence, not sexuality, the threat of which intimidates all women. Others see rape, including its violence, as an expression of male sexuality, the social imperatives of which define all women.