ABSTRACT
In 1989, Catharine MacKinnon published a collection of essays called Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in which she argued that the state was male and that gender was an effect of sexualised male dominance.1 The essays secured MacKinnon’s standing as a feminist superstar and, as Wendy Brown notes, also allowed her to make a ‘splash in the mainstream’.2 The book stripped away Anglo-American law’s flaunted objectivity, or point-of-viewlessness, exposing its male standpoint and the ways in which it institutionalises men’s interests. Together, they documented an unrelenting and pervasive patriarchy in which ‘woman’ was an effect of sexual subordination, and myriad liberation strategies were jinxed by false consciousness.
