A conversation with Catharine A. MacKinnon and Kate Kirkpatrick at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 06/02/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Join us at the Library for a conversation about activism and the law with one the most distinguished thought leaders and public intellectual voices of our time.
Catharine A. MacKinnon has been at the forefront of legal and social fights for gender equality for nearly fifty years. In 1979, she was the first to make the groundbreaking argument that s****l harassment in the workplace violates laws against s*x discrimination, setting the legal groundwork for the #MeToo revolution forty years later. Over the course of her career, MacKinnon has contributed to countless issues, including p*********y and prostitution, and court cases that have resulted in unparalleled gains for women’s rights. She has developed a robust philosophy devoted to equality.
Prior to the present book, MacKinnon’s Butterfly Politics collected essays and speeches from her fifty years of fighting for legal and social change. The title refers to the “butterfly effect:” the idea that a butterfly opening and closing its wings can–under the right conditions–cause a tornado on the other side of the world. Considering a legal system built to keep inequality in place which can be transformed into a tool to provide equality rights, MacKinnon develops the metaphor of the “butterfly effect” to propose simple steps that everyone can take to generate large-scale social change.
MacKinnon will be joined in conversation with former American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow and renowned feminist philosopher Kate Kirkpatrick.
About the speakers:
Catharine A. MacKinnon is an internationally renowned scholar, lawyer and jurist. She pioneered the legal claim for s****l harassment and with clients conceived and established the legal recognition of r**e as an act of genocide in international law. Her theory of equality is increasingly being embraced around the world.
Kate Kirkpatrick is a philosopher based at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses primarily on French phenomenology and existentialism; feminism; and ethics. She is author of several books and articles on these topics and an internationally acclaimed biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019), which has been translated into over a dozen languages. She is currently writing a philosophical commentary on Beauvoir’s The Second S*x.
Portrait of Catharine A. MacKinnon by ©Camille McOuat
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
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