Analytic feminism emerged in the 1990s as a remarkable phenomenon—remarkable because, prior to that time, the idea of “feminism” modified by “analytic” had seemed unimaginable. The movement exemplifies how analytical-philosophy appropriates radical traditions through philosophical-columbusing, neutralising their critical power whilst claiming rigorous treatment.
Pre-1990: feminism outside analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy’s great theoretical flowering in second-wave feminism (1960s-1970s) occurred entirely without analytic philosophy’s participation. Analytic philosophy, “fussing about logic and language, had no truck with women’s issues.”
Those with feminist proclivities were considered by men of analytic philosophy as radical, threatening, and inevitably “hysterical.” Things could turn ugly—in Sydney, the patriarchy actively hit back against its critics. The small contingent of women in analytic environments needed to look beyond the tradition for feminist ideas.
To be a feminist philosopher was to throw in one’s lot with “continentals” of various stripes. Prominent feminist philosophers who got PhDs in philosophy departments, such as Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, found academic jobs in departments outside philosophy.
Before 1990, to be a feminist philosopher was to be in the wilderness as far as analytic philosophy was concerned. The 1980s emphasis on the masculinity of reason sat uncomfortably with analytic philosophy: if reason was somehow masculine, where did that leave women’s rationality and ability to wield analytic tools?
1990s transformation: Haslanger and Langton
The feminist field within which analytic philosophers could operate changed dramatically in the 1990s. In 1991, logician Virginia Klenk founded the Society for Analytical Feminism as a subgroup of the American Philosophical Association.
The most influential figures in developing analytic feminism, Sally Haslanger and Rae Langton, met in the late 1980s in Princeton University’s philosophy department, where Haslanger was assistant professor and Langton a doctoral student.
- Haslanger: American whose work had focused on metaphysics of persistence and change
- Langton: Born in India to missionary parents, attended University of Sydney (choosing the analytic “Traditional and Modern Philosophy” department), writing her PhD on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
They were later reunited at MIT (Haslanger 1998, Langton 2004), one of the most prestigious American institutions. Langton now holds the Knightbridge Professorship at Cambridge.
Catharine MacKinnon as unlikely source
In the early 1990s, Haslanger and Langton produced key writings that put analytic feminism on the map. Throughout, their point of departure was Catharine MacKinnon, the American legal scholar and feminist activist.
MacKinnon’s work was particularly well-suited to analytic treatment. Her activism—counteracting pornography’s effects on women—took highly specific form dictated by US legal context contingencies. Pre-existing debates concerning pornography regulation were framed in terms of First Amendment rights to free speech. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s 1983 feminist ordinance would make it possible for women to bring civil lawsuits against pornographers for civil rights infringement.
Why MacKinnon seems startling
That MacKinnon provided foundational texts for analytic feminism is startling in several ways:
Impassioned rhetoric: Her style is highly impassioned and uncompromising, far removed from bloodless analytic pedantry. Many best-known texts are “unmodified” printings of lectures.
Anti-liberal Marxism: Her vociferously anti-liberal Marxism made it a considerable feat to repurpose her ideas for liberal arguments, as Langton would do.
Specific claims about subordination: For MacKinnon, the subordination women suffer is, of its nature, (hetero-)sexual. In “rape culture” (advanced capitalist society), the difference between rape and other heterosexual acts is subtle. The very relationship between men and women is one of inherently “eroticized” “subordination.”
Her 1984 definition of pornography (from “Francis Biddle’s Sister”):
the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words that also includes women dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; enjoying pain or humiliation or rape; being tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; reduced to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture; shown as filthy or inferior; bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.
Third-wave challenges ignored
Analytic philosophers’ adoption of MacKinnon coincided with third-wave feminism emerging, which challenged MacKinnon’s approach fundamentally:
Sex positivity: Challenged the idea of women as inherently subordinated by male eroticization
Intersectionality: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s pioneering work complicated things further. Analytic philosophers, whose efforts evacuate themselves from varieties of concrete lived experience, risk reducing intersectionality to metrics of abstract “axes” of oppression.
Queer theory: Challenges seem insurmountable. The “straight reading” of texts is so baked into analytic philosophy that practitioners would struggle even to attempt counteracting it.
Langton’s liberal appropriation
Langton’s first feminist publication (1990), “Whose Right? Ronald Dworkin, Women, and Pornographers” (Philosophy and Public Affairs), turned Ronald Dworkin’s liberal defence of pornography production/consumption rights on its head.
Langton aimed to show, by working “entirely within the Dworkinian theoretical system” and using arguments “modeled closely on Dworkin’s own,” that the “radical feminist” argument against pornography legality “is not only consistent with Dworkin’s liberalism, but is… demanded by it.”
The paper ingeniously overturned Dworkin’s argument by appeal to MacKinnon’s “feminist civil rights argument about pornography.” Yet even in appealing to MacKinnon, the approach remained confined within liberal parameters: the argument showed women’s civil rights win out over producers’/consumers’ rights.
The colonisation pattern
Analytic feminism follows the philosophical-columbusing pattern:
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Liberal marketisation: Participants enter philosophy’s liberal marketplace as free, sovereign individuals. Entry conditions go unexamined.
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Neutralisation: MacKinnon’s anti-liberal, Marxist feminism is repurposed for liberal arguments. Structural critique gives way to rights-based frameworks.
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Methodological constraints: The inability to engage with third-wave challenges (sex positivity, intersectionality, queer theory) reveals analytic philosophy’s limitations.
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Double forgetfulness: Analytic philosophy forgets it is a tradition among others, forgets it is not coeval with “philosophy itself.”
Limited critical engagement
Thanks to analytic feminism’s development, analytic philosophers now have greater exposure to feminist traditions. They face grave difficulties, however, giving those traditions’ critical power its due, thanks to blindness about their tendency to neutralise and defang them.
The liberal marketplace framework prevents genuine engagement with:
- Structural analyses of patriarchy and capitalism
- Challenges to methodological individualism
- Third-wave complications to second-wave frameworks
- Queer theory’s challenges to heteronormativity
Further reading
- Haslanger, S. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique
- Langton, R. (1990). “Whose Right? Ronald Dworkin, Women, and Pornographers”, Philosophy and Public Affairs
- MacKinnon, C. (1984). “Francis Biddle’s Sister”
- MacKinnon, C. & Dworkin, A. (1983). Model Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance
- Schuringa, C. (2025). A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, Chapter 10