ABSTRACT
Catharine MacKinnon's work has been a shaping force in the development of feminist legal theory as well as on the course of legal reform. MacKinnon's most signal legal reform success has been in identifying sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination prohibited by federal employment law. This chapter addresses two objectives. The first is simply the journeywoman task of understanding MacKinnon's theory of gender and especially the methodology she employs. The second objective is to defend an aspect of MacKinnon's methodology that has of late come under political and philosophical attack. She has been accused of gender essentialism, a vice that is variously defined but is most commonly understood to mean treating the concept of gender as a transcultural and transhistorical universal. The price of gender essentialism, according to its critics, is the imposition of false uniformity on the disparate experience of women of different classes, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations.
