"What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense"
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MacKinnon is swinging at a familiar late-20th-century dodge: when critique gets rerouted into “context,” and “context” becomes a permission slip. Her phrasing is prosecutorial on purpose. “Multicultural defense” isn’t a neutral descriptor; it’s an accusation that cultural relativism can be weaponized to launder brutality as tradition, identity, or difference. In her framing, postmodernism doesn’t merely complicate moral judgment - it supplies a ready-made alibi.
The line works because it collapses a contradiction that often goes unexamined in progressive spaces: the urge to protect marginalized cultures from Western moral arrogance can collide with the demand to protect women within those cultures from harm. “Wherever it is” is the trapdoor. She’s targeting the move that treats violence as local and thus unassailable, while the victims’ bodies are not local at all; they’re the same bodies with the same injuries. Her sting is that the supposed anti-universalism of postmodern thought ends up producing something universal anyway: the recurring exemption granted to male power.
The subtext is also intra-left combat. MacKinnon’s feminism has long insisted that “speech,” “representation,” and “discourse” are not airy abstractions; they are tools that can structure real domination. So when she indicts postmodernism, she’s not arguing over theory for sport. She’s warning that a politics allergic to judging can become a politics that reliably judges the wrong thing: it polices critique more aggressively than it polices violence.
The line works because it collapses a contradiction that often goes unexamined in progressive spaces: the urge to protect marginalized cultures from Western moral arrogance can collide with the demand to protect women within those cultures from harm. “Wherever it is” is the trapdoor. She’s targeting the move that treats violence as local and thus unassailable, while the victims’ bodies are not local at all; they’re the same bodies with the same injuries. Her sting is that the supposed anti-universalism of postmodern thought ends up producing something universal anyway: the recurring exemption granted to male power.
The subtext is also intra-left combat. MacKinnon’s feminism has long insisted that “speech,” “representation,” and “discourse” are not airy abstractions; they are tools that can structure real domination. So when she indicts postmodernism, she’s not arguing over theory for sport. She’s warning that a politics allergic to judging can become a politics that reliably judges the wrong thing: it polices critique more aggressively than it polices violence.
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| Topic | Human Rights |
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