MacKinnon v. MacKinnon: ontology, science, politics

In 2017, at the height of #MeToo mobilisation, prominent feminist lawyer and scholar Catharine MacKinnon published a collection of speeches and other writing entitled Butterfly Politics . Her career, she says in the introduction, has taught her that seemingly small (as compared with the machinery of domination) legal interventions can, over time, have surprisingly large consequences. Butterfly Politics invokes the memorable hypothetical of the wing flap of a butterfly causing a tornado in another part of the world, framing law as a chaotic system and sex inequality as a complex one. This understanding of sexual politics marks a major shift in the worldview of this influential feminist. Whereas sexism was portrayed as a closed and static system in MacKinnon's earlier work, now, law is a chaotic agent that can destabilise the open complex system of sex. This article is intended to draw attention to this heretofore unnoticed shift, and to connect MacKinnon with the growing group of feminists who have also turned to chaos and complexity theory to think about ontology and politics. At the same time, it raises critical questions about MacKinnon's use of chaos to illuminate the law and to advocate for particular forms of legal activism. This ‘Interchanges’ piece concludes with a call for more effort to draw out positive political lessons of complexity rather than chaos. Because even if we can’t conclude that sexism has one root and that law is particularly efficacious in combatting inequality as MacKinnon does, this doesn’t mean we are left with nothing to guide our action in a complex world.