PHIL 242 Lecture Notes - Catharine Mackinnon, Feminist Theory, Orgasm
Document Summary
How does it get attached to male and female? . Mackinnon"s answer: rape, battery, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children, prostitution, and pornography express and actualize the distinctive power of men over women in society; their effective permissibility confirms and extends it. It has become customary to affirm that sexuality is socially constructed. Seldom specified is what, socially, it is constructed of, far less who does the constructing or how, when, or where. This requires capturing it in the world, in its situated social meanings, as it is being constructed in life on a daily basis. Sexual meaning is not made only, or even primarily, through words and texts. It is made in social relations of power in the world, through which process gender is also produced. The study of politics is based on power itself, as socially defined, and the ways this is experienced by material bodies, in real life.