University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review Volume 15 Issue 2 Article 3 1993 MacKinnon and Equality: Is Dominance Really Different? Laura W. Brill Follow this and additional works at: https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/lawreview Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, and the Law and Gender Commons Recommended Citation Laura W. Brill, MacKinnon and Equality: Is Dominance Really Different?, 15 U. ARK. LITTLE ROCK L. REV. 261 (1993). Available at: https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/lawreview/vol15/iss2/3 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Bowen Law Repository: Scholarship & Archives. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review by an authorized editor of Bowen Law Repository: Scholarship & Archives. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ESSAY MACKINNON AND EQUALITY: IS DOMINANCE REALLY DIFFERENT? Laura W. Brill* I. INTRODUCTION Catharine MacKinnon has made impassioned and influential argu- ments about equality and feminist theory. Her arguments demand fur- ther analysis and critique if feminists are to develop an effective ap- proach to attacking gender oppression and improving the status of women through the law. MacKinnon's argument, articulated in a 1984 essay entitled Dif- ference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination,' falters on at least two major points. First, she fails to adequately distinguish between con- flicts in feminist theories of gender difference, on the one hand, and court decisions resting on the acceptance or rejection of gender classifi- cations, on the other. This analytical blending, combined with an overly narrow interpretation of the Aristotelian model for equality leads MacKinnon to dismiss, too readily, equality arguments based on the Aristotelian model.