are women human? and other international dialogues - by catharine a. mackinnon
TRANSCRIPT
Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, Catharine A. MacKinnon
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006), 432 pp., $35.00 cloth.
In April 2006, Catharine MacKinnon was
interviewed about her new book, Are Wom-
en Human?, for BBC Radio 4’s ‘‘Woman’s
Hour.’’ The presenter, Jenni Murray, had
one main question that she repeated
throughout the short interview to the ex-
clusion of any discussion of MacKinnon’s
arguments: Wasn’t the book’s title simply
too controversial to be taken seriously?
Though frustrating, Murray’s unwilling-
ness to engage with the arguments of Are
Women Human? was strangely appro-
priate. A recurring theme of MacKinnon’s
book is that it is extremely difficult to get
violence against women taken seriously.
MacKinnon’s fundamental claim is that
the violence and abuse routinely inflicted
on women by men is not treated with the
same seriousness accorded to a human
rights violation, or torture, or terrorism,
or a war crime, or a crime against human-
ity, or an atrocity, despite resembling each
of these things closely at least and precisely
at most. Thus MacKinnon asks ‘‘why the
torture of women by men is not seen as tor-
ture’’ (p. 21); why violence against women
within the borders of a state is not seen as a
human rights violation; why the mass rape
of Bosnian and Croatian women by Serbs is
not seen as an act of genocide against those
ethnic groups as such; why the mass rape of
women in general in peacetime is not seen
as an act of genocide against women as
such; why, ‘‘women not being considered a
people, there is as yet no international law
against destroying the group women as
such’’ (p. 230); why the terror imposed by
the violence of male dominance is not seen
as the sort of terrorism against which a gov-
ernment might see fit to wage war; why
atrocities against women ‘‘do not count as
war crimes unless a war among men is going
on at the same time’’ (p. 261); and why, when
approximately 3,000 women are killed by
recent books on ethics and international affairs 261
men in the United States each year, we re-
fer to that state of affairs as ‘‘peacetime’’.
MacKinnon describes the extent and na-
ture of violence against women in the con-
text of the national and international legal
frameworks that do a better or (more usu-
ally) worse job of countering it. Both the
facts and the arguments are hard-hitting.
MacKinnon’s writing is astonishingly
powerful, combining a compelling air of
authority and outrage with a sense of de-
spair at the enormity of women’s domina-
tion by men. It is hard to disagree with
her central thesis that much violence
against women has the severity of a human
rights violation. Moreover, MacKinnon
provides a compelling critique of the doc-
trine that only states can violate interna-
tional law, and that only transborder
atrocities merit international intervention.
Are Women Human? contains philo-
sophical discussion as well as applied polit-
ical and legal argument. One such
discussion concerns the concepts of uni-
versality and difference and engages with
debates on multiculturalism. In the con-
text of a critique of postmodernism,
MacKinnon argues against both relativism
and essentialism. Against relativism, she
notes that many multicultural defences, or
‘‘defences of local differences,’’ are in fact
‘‘often simply a defence of male power in
its local guise’’ (p. 53). Criticizing these
multicultural differences does not imply
cultural imperialism, for sex equality has
not been achieved in any known culture.
As she puts it, ‘‘Feminism does not assume
that ‘other’ cultures are to be measured
against the validity of their own, because
feminism does not assume that any cul-
ture, including their own, is valid. How
could we?’’ (p. 53). And yet, MacKinnon
emphasizes, criticizing cultures from the
universal standpoint of women’s equality
does not entail some form of essentialism.
(The charge of essentialism, she claims, is
really an accusation of racism in disguise.)
For MacKinnon, feminism cannot be es-
sentialist because it is based on a rejection
of the idea that ‘‘woman’’ is a presocial or
biologically determined category. What it
asserts, rather, is that despite women’s di-
versity, ‘‘commonalities’’ remain (p. 53).
MacKinnon thus directly repudiates multi-
culturalists who claim that equality requires
group rights that entrench gender hier-
archy, a move that places her (in this re-
spect) alongside comprehensive liberal
theorists such as Susan Moller Okin and
Brian Barry. At the same time, she is em-
phatic in her criticisms of the conceptual
underpinnings of liberal equality: based on
the idea that equality requires sameness, she
argues, liberal equality cannot deal with the
fundamental ‘‘difference’’ of sex. Instead,
equality must be understood as the absence
of hierarchy, an understanding that necessa-
rily requires making normative judgments
about particular social structures and prac-
tices. Are Women Human? thus criticizes
both sides of the multicultural debate: mul-
ticulturalists for failing to challenge
sex domination, universalists for failing to
challenge their own philosophical premises.
As a whole, the fact that the book is a
collection of discrete pieces, many of
which were created for specific audiences,
is both a strength and a weakness. It is a
strength if the book is read as a historical
record of MacKinnon’s engagement with
various actual political and legal struggles.
One can imagine MacKinnon’s voice in
the courtrooms, parliamentary commit-
tees, and conferences where many of the
chapters originated. Were any of these
audiences able to remain complacent after
hearing her speak? Did any object, or de-
fend themselves? Indeed, if the book is to
262 recent books on ethics and international affairs
be understood in this way, it would have
been illuminating if some of the chapters
were accompanied with a note on the re-
sponses of their audiences. For example,
what did the Swedish parliamentary com-
mittee do when told, ‘‘The Swedish law of
pornography, with respect, is the wrong
law. . . . You have a law against sexual vio-
lence in pornography, and you are sur-
rounded by sexual violence in pornography.
Nothing is done about it’’ (p. 102)?
Reading the book in this way mitigates the
problem that arises when the book is ap-
proached, instead, as a unified work: there is
a considerable amount of repetition. Viewed
as a complete work, the book would have
benefited from being reedited as such, with
unnecessary repetition removed, to help the
reader identify each new argument as it is pre-
sented and give each its deserved attention.
These comments notwithstanding, Are
Women Human? is a book that deserves
to be widely read. It contains important
empirical and legal analysis of particular
conflicts, most notably what MacKinnon
insists must be described as the Serbian
genocide of the early 1990s. It develops
MacKinnon’s own feminist philosophy,
building on the approach developed in
her earlier works and demonstrating how
feminism should respond to international
issues. And it engages directly with con-
temporary debates about culture, global
justice, human rights, international law,
and the demands of equality. As such, it
challenges those from a variety of dis-
ciplines to answer her question: ‘‘When will
women be human? When?’’ (p. 43).
—CLARE CHAMBERS
University of Cambridge
recent books on ethics and international affairs 263