The rise of TERFism (trans-exclusionary radical feminism) in the past few years only solidified my conviction that radical feminism had run its course as a political and intellectual movement. MacKinnon’s ongoing commitment to law and law reform as well as her objections to ‘postmodernism’ that more than occasionally hinged on pedestrian anti-intellectualism ( ‘Nice neutral word, difference, and it has all that French credibility.’) did not help my relationship with radical feminism either. Soon thereafter, I discovered the ‘sex wars’, lesbian separatism, and – worst of all – Judith Butler, who took my thinking about gender toward a radically (?) different direction. Before I knew it, I was knee-deep in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and I was…furiously nodding in approval? It had been almost a decade since my last semi-serious engagement with radical feminism, with which I became intensely, but very briefly, enamoured in the late 2000s. I decided to start with the basics, including a crash course on feminist legal theory for those of my students who were not familiar with it. In late 2020, I found myself teaching a course on gender, law and development.
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