ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Catharine MacKinnon's proposal defining the social relations that constitute gender. On her view, gender is defined in terms of sexual objectification: roughly, women as a class are those individuals who are viewed and treated as objects for the satisfaction of men's desire. In short, women are the sexually objectified, men the objectifiers. In order to understand the charge that reason is "masculine" or "gendered", it is important to sketch some of the background work that has been done on gender. There are several strategies for addressing the questions which have been proposed and criticized in the feminist literature. Within the Western philosophical tradition, the capacity to reason has been crucial to accounts of the self, and ideals of rationality have been construed as important elements in normative accounts of knowledge and morality. MacKinnon does not often use the term 'rationality', though when she does; it appears that she takes it to be equivalent to 'objectivity'.
