Catharine MacKinnon Quotations

In not having an appointment at Harvard, I'm in the company of a great many people whose work I admire tremendously, in particular women of color.

Law in the United States is at once a powerful medium and a medium for power.

The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.

What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense.

People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals.

In all these situations, there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of sex; they were not coerced enough.

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

Women are raped and coerced into sex.

Stopped as attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequaltiy between men and women.