Imaginary Domain:abortion,pornography..

In this groundbreaking book, Drucilla Cornell engages the heated debate surrounding abortion, pornography and sexual harassment. Tackling such topics as feminist hardcore porn and its women directors, back alley abortions and the ill-defined and misunderstood boundaries of sexual harassment, Cornell calls for a new feminist identity--one that embraces both sexuality and sexual difference. Cornell's position on pornography provides a vigorous and astute critique of Catharine MacKinnon. unveiling underlying assumptions, implicit presuppositions, sexism and sophistry, Cornell offers a provocative and much-needed reassessment of issues of privacy and the body, individuation and justice, equality and difference, pornographic speech and acts. In MacKinnon's philosophical reliance upon women's status as object, Cornell finds not a commitment to the principle of equality, but an implicit acceptance of inequality and she suggests that MacKinnon's argument entails a further denigration of women. In a strong defense of the right to abortion, Cornell takes the liberal conceptions of the body and "choice" to task. As a truly radical defense of women's bodies, Cornell's work makes nothing short of a demand for the right to safe and legal abortions which, she suggests, inheres at the level of women's bodily integrity, implying that abortions are philosophically permiseable until the moment that a woman's ubilical cord is severed from the fetus. In addition, Cornell engages descriptively, analytically and critically with the work of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls.Cornell, Drucilla is the author of 'Imaginary Domain:abortion,pornography..' with ISBN 9780415906005 and ISBN 0415906008.