Lawyer and philosopher, born in 1946 in Minneapolis (Minnesota), Catharine MacKinnon is a major figure in the “second wave of feminism” in the United States and worldwide. In the 1970s, she forged her thoughts as an activist within the women’s emancipation movement. While a student at Yale Law School (Connecticut), she defined the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace and helped, through advocacy, to enshrine it in American law.
During the following decade, she attacked pornography as sexual discrimination, and notably drafted, with feminist activist Andrea Dworkin, an ordinance which regulates the filing of complaints by people, direct or indirect victims, of the pornography industry. In 1990, she suggested a legal framework for prostitution, which came into force in Sweden in 2000, which removes all sanctions for prostitutes, while criminalizing their exploiters, the buyers and sellers – a model which inspires French law today. . She also developed the concept of rape as an act of genocide and began to integrate its inclusion in international criminal law. Holder of a chair at the University of Michigan Law School, guest lecturer at Harvard Law School (Massachusetts) since 2009, she continues to work as a lawyer serving victims of male domination.
You have worked mainly on American and international law for fifty years, why publish a book today on consent and the law in France?
Consent is absent from the definition of rape in the French penal code, which rightly focuses on notions of coercion. Despite its absence, this does not prevent the question of consent from constantly being at the heart of rape cases, before the courts, to undermine the examination of coercion, violence or surprise that French law stipulates.
Today, the debate in France and the European Union concerns the explicit addition of the notion of consent in the legal definition of rape. However, analysis of the jurisprudence of countries where consent is the basis of the legal definition of rape – the United Kingdom and its former colonies – demonstrates the opposite: it would be a disastrous step backward for French law, women and equality.
After the revelations of the #metoo wave and the courageous works published by French authors, unmasking forced sexual relations in contexts of inequality, there is an opportunity to strengthen the definition of rape and sexual violence by adding explicit recognition. exploitation of all inequalities – including race, disability, religion, age, as well as sex, gender, gender assignment, sexual orientation, as is already the case , admirably, in other areas of French law. This is what I propose.
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