ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Catharine A. MacKinnon, a feminist thinker, who has became a controversial figure within feminism largely due to her role in the "sexuality debates" of the 1980s. MacKinnon's work has made important contributions to feminist understandings of the role of sexuality in the maintenance of gender inequality. Her creative approaches to sexual harassment, pornography and the law have been taken up in important debates within feminist theory on questions of sexuality, gender and the meaning of "woman" under conditions of patriarchy on a global scale. MacKinnon is interested in Marxism only insofar as she is interested in the problems of ideology, consciousness and political action. In an essay against postmodernism, MacKinnon argues as she did in her two-part Signs article: those ideas are connected to the body through sexuality, which is the lived practice of a gender arrangement that is by definition an experience of hierarchy.
