Using Iris Marion Young to Analyze Catherine MacKinnon

Maria Weber

Iris Marion Young’s essay, “Five Faces of Oppression” provides a lens to critically analyze Catherine MacKinnon’s article “Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination.” Young defines and explains the five faces of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence, as well as gives them a contemporary context. In her articles she notes that only one “face” of oppression has to be present, and different groups have different combinations of the facets of oppression, no one being more important or legitimate than the other.

In my own reading of “Difference and Dominance,” I analyzed MacKinnon’s argument through Young’s general definition of oppression, which is often unconsciously normalized in society, and social groups, which share “a sense of identity,” as well as more specifically through the fourth face of oppression: cultural imperialism (44). Young describes cultural imperialism as “how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as the Other”(59). Both repressed and excluded, a specific group is defined by its relationship to the culturally dominant group. This fourth face of oppression provides a context for MacKinnon’s theory of sex discrimination, as she spends a great deal of time talking about difference and sameness between men and women, and how the question of equality between the sexes. She notes how “man has become the measure of all things” and using Young’s essay, that means women have become the “other” (82). Like Young explains, women have become both dominated and contained, and MacKinnon continues by claiming that in woman’s quest to be equal with men our sex differences, most specifically our ability to give birth, have hindered us, as it would be discriminatory to give exception to our differences.  

Young’s explanation of cultural imperialism gives clarity to MacKinnon’s argument against the ingrained hierarchy in society, where men’s differences are accepted and used as a scale to be measured against, while women’s differences are oppressed and criticized as discriminatory against everyone else. Being able to recognize oppression allows the reader to better analyze MacKinnon’s argument and provides it with greater weight.