I’m a great admirer of MacKinnon, particularly her unwavering commitment to fighting the masculinity-made apocalypse of bodies that are pornography and prostitution.
Thus, I was curious to peruse her conversation with The TransAdvocate, a trans-militant website that is hostile to corporeal feminism. While the interview never once addresses MacKinnon’s scholarship on prostitution and porn — a shocking omission, given these are the very subjects upon which her research and writing achieved global recognition — TA preferred to proffer a sequence of leading fuzzywuzzy questions about “gender identity”.
That omission matters even more now, when porn platforms, clip sites, and trans cams shape how many people first encounter trans sexuality online.
This commentary on Beauvoir, from MacKinnon in that interview, felt particularly abstruse to me:
“I always thought I don’t care how someone becomes a woman or a man; it does not matter to me. It is just part of their specificity, their uniqueness, like everyone else’s. Anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.”
While I suspect MacKinnon didn’t intend for her comments to be a definitive presentation of her philosophical and activist views, her responses nonetheless suggest an endorsement for anti-materialism and libertarian analysis (at least as far as her views on gender are specifically concerned).
MacKinnon’s interview left many of us with with more questions than answers, and here are some of mine. I was strongly influenced by reading Ms Hell Bedlam’s commentary, and I put forth some of my own inquiries . . . as a transwoman with a keen interest in Beauvoir who is questioning transgenderism.
(1) If “culture is misogynistic to the core”, & biology is construct, doesn’t that mean MtF mint femininity based upon replications and stereotyping?
(2) Do you think that Beauvoir meant “becoming woman” simply as a flight into self-authored abstraction?
(3) Why does Beauvoir argue consistently that feminist epistemology is resultant from sex-specific embodiments?
(4) Why did Beauvoir employ a passive formulation in the original French for “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” (emphasis mine) — that is, to put another way, “woman *is* made” and not “she is making”?
(5) If ‘female’ is a verbal or rhetorical concept, why do porn and prostitution exist specifically to target and denigrate female bodies for men’s gazes and ultimately for male consumption?
(6) If ‘female’ is mere media nomenclature, then why even speak of ‘women’ as a coherent, static sex class? If ‘women’ is not consistently understood, then how is oppression consistently applied and achieved? Surely prostitution and pornography show us that patriarchy’s primary mechanism of power is to control and maintain the material realities of females?
(7) If ‘sex’ is only a discursive/mental reality, then why have sex segregated spaces at all? Group showers, perhaps?
(8) If the ‘sex binary’ is a social construct, bereft of material facticity, how are women systematically oppressed . . . and have been so — cross-culturally, cross-geographically, and cross-historically — for centuries?
(9) Did Beauvoir believe that the female sex, as biological embodiment, precedes the discursivity men put upon it?
(10) What did Beauvoir mean when she asserted the following: please note this passage appears very closely to “women is not born” claim. Does this statement not sound like “TERF” thinking? Isn’t it weird to make up special derogatory slurs for feminists whose opinions one doesn’t agree with?
IS SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR A TERF?
