[In the following review, Eisenstein argues that the essays in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State are “theoretically significant and important contributions” to feminist theory but notes flaws in MacKinnon's “homogeneous” view of male power.]

MacKinnon's book [Toward a Feminist Theory of the State] grapples with the meaning of politics and how we think about what constitutes the political in terms of sexuality itself. The first section of the book, “Feminism and Marxism,” presents published materials from the mid-1970s, which she says may seem “groping and comparatively primitive” (p. x). Anyone who has not already read these articles (which are slightly revised) will find them theoretically significant and important contributions. For those familiar with the debates between Marxism and feminism this will be a review of familiar territory. Much has changed over the past decade in this debate due to developments within feminism itself. An accounting of these developments would begin to uncover some interesting transformations that have located many socialist feminists of this earlier period outside the debate today.

The second section of the book discusses the method and epistemological foundations of feminism and the politics of sexuality. MacKinnon, like many radical feminists, argues that the feminist method and politics of “consciousness raising” uncovers women's situation “as it is lived through,” as “lived knowing.” Through this process women come to know politics differently—in a different way—because the process of knowing uncovers its own politics. Coming to know the “personal as the political” reinvents the way we think of politics itself because “the personal is epistemologically the political, and its epistemology is its politics” (p. 120).

In the consciousness-raising process sex and gender become interchangeable for MacKinnon, but they do not remain equivalents. Instead, sexuality becomes the linchpin of gender inequality (p. 113). MacKinnon's feminism identifies sexuality as the primary social sphere of male power through rape, incest, battery, sexual harassment, prostitution, pornography, and abortion.

In the third section of the book MacKinnon constructs a vision of the state that theorizes sexuality at its base: state power emerges as male power: “The state is male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women” (p. 162). And the “male perspective is systemic and hegemonic” (p. 114). She asks what state power is for women, how women encounter the power of the state, and how law legitimates male power. She also begins to uncover how the state embodies and serves male interests. This final section of the book points in important directions as it demands a recognition that male privilege is systemic and is organized through the construction of the state.

The discussion put forth about feminist method and politics is crucial for any contemporary understanding of politics today. MacKinnon convincingly argues that gender is a system that divides power and constructs politics. But her analysis of male power and the state appears overly determined and homogeneous. The feminist notion of the “personal as the political” and the idea that there is a “politics to sex and gender” is the unique and valuable contribution of radical feminism to feminism (and to political theory).

But since the development of this notion in the 1970s, there have been crucially important feminist critiques (through the 1980s) of the limitations of this notion. The critiques have uncovered problems with equating (rather than relating) personal and political life and with treating sex and gender interchangeably. Although the realms are completely implicated with each other, they are not simply interchangeable realms. We further elucidate politics when we can explain how the two are similar and how they differ.

Although I would agree with MacKinnon that male power is systemic, I do not think it is internally homogeneous and undifferentiated, as she seems to. The state institutionalizes male privilege. But patriarchy as a system does not merely embody male privilege in terms of sexuality, as male bodies. Gender privilege has a complicated set of structures and institutions that cannot be reduced to maleness per se or sexuality.

The politics of the state expresses different factions with both similar and differing interpretations of male privilege. Clearly, this is evident in the abortion debate today with the varying reactions within state legislatures like Florida, Georgia, and Pennsylvania or in the presidential veto of the House and Senate proposal on broadening Medicaid funding.

MacKinnon does not direct her inquiry here because she rejects the theoretical premise that the state is simultaneously patriarchal and structured by liberal discourse and that these realms remain distinct. She equates liberal feminism with liberalism applied to women and socialist feminism with traditional Marxism. She equates the state with male power; hence, she posits the centrality and homogeneity of sexuality. In this scenario, the politics of abortion only reflects male power.

In the end, she argues that radical feminism (which she terms “unmodified” feminism) is feminism. But the richness of feminism today is that it has emerged out of a transformed Marxism, a revised radical feminism, and a liberal feminism that has uncovered its own limitations via the critiques of women of color, radical feminism, and so on. The source of feminism's radicalism today is that it has been (radically) modified through a dialogue between feminisms. The critiques of feminism by feminisms have refined our understanding of the relationship between the personal and the political. They cannot be equated or collapsed as one.

MacKinnon knows better than most that there are differences between the personal and the political. But her presentation of feminist epistemology and her theory of the state do not give us any room to construct what they are.