Toward a Feminist Theory of the State was written over an eighteen-year period (parts of it have already been published), but its unity as a theoretical expression of one individual's vision is obvious. Since the chapters were written relatively independently of each other, the reader has to do a bit more work than usual to bring them together. But that they fit together as smoothly as they do must attest to something strong and consistent in Catharine MacKinnon's own intellectual odyssey.

How useful is that unity for other feminists engaged with MacKinnon in the collective project of feminism as political movement? My response to this question is mixed. This book confirms my previous impression of MacKinnon's work as an eloquent expression of a radical feminist stance, and I see many of its strengths as related to that which is most creative and insightful in radical feminism. But it also reveals for me radical feminism's limits and problems.

The first section of the book focuses on the relation of feminism and Marxism. Three of its four chapters were written in the mid 1970s, and their lack of timeliness is irritating, since the arguments and positions MacKinnon grapples with here strike me as having been superseded by later debates. All the same, they made me appreciate the power of MacKinnon's vision and her eloquence in articulating it. She makes a very persuasive case for the view that something fundamental has divided Marxism and feminism, and that attempts to merge the two must prove futile. Because the central organizing categories of Marxism and feminism—production and sexuality—are crucially distinct, any notion of a Marxist feminism must involve some undercutting of that which, for MacKinnon, is basic to feminism.

MacKinnon is certainly correct in stressing the centrality of production for Marxism. I would agree that the limits of that category are the limits of Marxism, leading to weaknesses in its ability to analyze gender as well as to a host of other deficiencies. One problem, however, with her analysis is that it equates Marxism with socialism, and so has little to say about the relation of feminism to socialism, other than the obvious point that socialist men have not always been supportive of feminism.

But what I see as a not trivial feature of the last decade of feminism is that many Marxist women, in coming to see the limitations of Marxism for feminism, increasingly came to describe themselves as socialist feminists instead. That way, they could retain a historical awareness and a commitment to overcoming economic inequality while abandoning the Marxist insistence on the primacy of production. The feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser has confirmed my own observations that this change in the vision of many Marxist women has meshed with the increasing tendency of many radical feminists to include socialist concerns, such as attention to the issue of class, in their political perspective and organizing. In the eighties, the divisions between radical feminists and those who once called themselves Marxist feminists have come to seem less important than they were during the seventies.

But this is not how MacKinnon views feminism either in these early chapters or throughout the book. Socialist feminism is either ignored altogether or dismissed as often amounting to Marxism applied to women. Instead, she explicitly states that “Radical feminism is feminism.” But this appears to endorse implicitly that kind of radical feminism most widespread during the seventies: a feminism creative in its focus on the family and personal life, but weak in its attention to history and diversity.

In the middle section of the book, the focus turns away from Marxism to what MacKinnon feels is distinctive about feminism. Her claim, in brief, is that feminism possesses its own method, consciousness raising. Unlike objectivist modes of knowing, consciousness raising recognizes its own involvement in the knowing process, takes as its object that which is intrinsically social, and is directly related to political practice; indeed, in consciousness raising, awareness becomes political practice. But, asks MacKinnon, what is it about women's experience which leads to such a distinctive mode of awareness? Her response is that “Sexual objectification of women—first in the world, then in the head, first in visual appropriation, then in forced sex, finally in sexual murder—provides answers.”

If there is one idea that forms the true core of this book, it is MacKinnon's identification of sexuality with women's oppression. This provocative claim gives the book much of its unity and much of its strength. As MacKinnon notes, there must be something beyond coincidence to explain the fact that the word “sex” refers both to gender and sexuality. (Even if one adds “at least within the English language,” something significant is still being said about speakers of this language.) If one combines this linguistic clue with the observation that a more than superficial connection exists between the sexuality we know and issues of dominance and subordination, one has to acknowledge that MacKinnon is on to something major.

The crucial question for me, though, is how do we interpret such insights? In what kind of framework are they situated? My major disagreements with this book follow from my perception that MacKinnon does not take these strokes of awareness as starting points for a self-critical investigation—a search for the places her insights meet negations, counter-examples and differences. Rather, she uses them as means in the creation of a theory which is ultimately totalizing.

I do not mean that MacKinnon's writings reveal any obviously simplistic methodology. The power of her thought stems from something more than a handful of insights; she is a highly sophisticated theorist who has clearly devoted a lot of time and thought to issues of method. She is careful to claim that feminist theory as she describes it does not aspire to the kind of universal, “objective” status that she correctly imputes to certain readings of Marx. Nor does she believe that any of the claims she makes follows from anything “natural” to human beings, and she carefully reminds us that sexuality is a social construction. The problem, however, is that she is a social constructionist with little concern for history.

For example, she makes a connection between feminists' turn to consciousness raising in the 1970s and women's relegation to the social sphere of private and domestic life. However, she does not analyze this connection historically. If she had, she might have been more wary about converting the feminist claim which was made necessary by women's relegation—that “the personal is political”—into an apparently ahistorical claim about women's lives. She says that “the personal is political” means “that women's distinctive experience as women occurs within that sphere that has been socially lived as the personal—private, emotional, interiorized, particular, individuated, intimate—so that what it is to know the politics of women's situation is to know women's personal lives, particularly women's sexual lives.” This statement amalgamates the experiences of all women to those for whom the relegation to home and domesticity did, at a certain point in Western history, come to mean an experience of life as “private, emotional, interiorized, particular, individuated, intimate.”

A similar retreat from history is illustrated in her claim that “The male epistemological stance, which corresponds to the world it creates, is objectivity …” To say this is to lose sight of the historical emergence of the norm of objectivity, its connection with the rise of science and the increasing cultural authority of particular groups of men. This in turn obstructs the possibility of a feminist understanding of other, non-objectivist, theories and ways of knowing, and the specific forms of power that go with them—exemplified by patriarchal heads of medieval manors, men who were influential in such intellectual currents as romanticism, historicism and hermeneutics, and even many men who now derive some of their power over women from knowledge claims unrelated to objectivity (for example, that “the Bible says so”).

As these examples illustrate, the problem of ahistoricity from a feminist point of view is the problem of erasure: erasure of modes by which some dominate as well as modes by which many experience oppression. As a consequence, the forms of experience which are depicted become narrow and fundamentally ethnocentric. Because for MacKinnon sexism means the sexualization of women, forms of oppression which are only indirectly related to sexuality are ignored in this book—the forms of oppression poor women experience in dealing with the welfare system, poor and older women experience with the health care system, or many women experience in obtaining adequate day care, for instance. As I read I kept thinking about all those women whose daily frustrations with life and men would probably not be described by them in terms of sexual objectification.

It is not just that the forms in which women suffer are narrowed to exclude the experiences of many; the very characterization of what it is to be a woman is slim. MacKinnon most typically characterizes women as a singular entity. At one point, she invokes black and working-class women as women who have not fit standardized constructions of femininity. This invocation, which feels so exceptional in the context of her analysis, immediately brought to my mind Elizabeth Spelman's recent argument in Inessential Woman (Beacon Press, 1989) that feminist theory becomes racist not only by excluding mention of black women but by bringing them in only as exceptions or failures to the models being described. In other words, what I missed throughout the book was attention to the diverse meanings of being a woman—the positive and negative meanings of womanhood associated with those who are not only white, Western and middle-class.

The issue of exclusion is also central in MacKinnon's treatment of sexuality. In her eyes sex and oppression are synonymous: “what is called sexuality is the dynamic of control by which male dominance—in forms that range from intimate to institutional, from a look to a rape—eroticizes and thus defines man and woman, gender identity and sexual pleasure. It is also that which maintains and defines male supremacy as a political system.” She has no patience with analyses of female sexuality which affirm that women, in either heterosexual sex or in homosexual sex where there exists any trace of gender roles, can experience agency: “interpreting female sexuality as an expression of women's agency and autonomy, as if sexism did not exist, is always denigrating and bizarre and reductive, as it would be to interpret Black culture as if racism did not exist.” But the existence of sexism is not incompatible with the presence of women's power, of women's resistance, of women's agency. As Ann Ferguson points out in Blood at the Root (Pandora, 1989), changes in twentieth-century attitudes towards sexuality have given many women more agency in sexuality, in spite of the continued exploitation of women's sexuality in general.

In the last section of the book, the explicit focus is on the state. MacKinnon's analysis here is in some respects very interesting, though, ironically, a good part of the analysis replicates criticisms Marxists have often made of liberal state forms. For example, she notes that the freedoms the liberal state protects are primarily negative: freedoms against interference from itself. The liberal state allots few powers to the individual that she or he does not already possess, and provides only limited protection to the individual against the strengths and powers others already possess.

This is a point which many Marxists' critiques of liberalism have made. What struck me as most original and illuminating in these chapters stemmed in part from MacKinnon's application of such standard Marxist charges to issues Marxists have rarely thought about, specifically to rape, pornography and abortion. The corollary weakness, however, lies again in the implicit claim that such issues—that is, those which have to do with women's sexuality—are the only “women's” issues there are.

Again my central concern focuses on exclusivity. Certainly there is nothing problematic in identifying pornography, abortion, or rape as feminist issues. The problem is an analysis which takes these as central and marginalizes issues such as poverty or homelessness. My guess is that MacKinnon would counter my charges with an argument relating these two issues to male control of women's sexuality. But this type of response reminds me of the intellectual maneuvers Marxists have frequently made when confronted with feminist arguments. As MacKinnon would herself agree, the elevation of production within Marxist theory meant that modes of oppression not immediately illuminated by work relations—such as racism or sexism—became marginalized within the theory and ultimately within the practice of Marxists. Confronted by feminists who pointed out the limits of the category of production for illuminating women's lives, Marxists frequently either tried to stretch the category so that it lost all meaning, or attempted to explain sexual oppression as a function of class oppression. But MacKinnon's analysis leads in a similar direction: sexuality is to MacKinnon what work is to Marx. The consequence, in spite of her protestations to the contrary, is another totalizing theory.

Ultimately my critique of totalizing theories is their tendency to turn into political obstacles. Marxism mobilized many to see the inequalities, the injustices wrought by capitalism. But by constituting its own insights as the key to social domination, it became an obstacle to struggles against sexism, racism and homophobia. In the same way, I see a theory such as MacKinnon's mobilizing many women to see the horrors of sexism and the extent to which women's oppression is uniform. But by turning its insights into an encompassing theory of sexism, it also becomes an obstacle to the kind of politics where women struggling against rape can ally with women and men struggling against poverty. And that is the kind of politics I see us most needing today.