More significantly, Dworkin is now respectfully cited, without the usual disclaimers, by mainstream feminist journalists like Rebecca Traister. Johana Fateman and Amy Scholder reintroduced younger readers to an edited collection of Dworkin’s work, The Last Days at Hot Slit (MIT Press, 2019). New female intellectuals want to know why my generation has failed them. Yet since she died in 2005, Dworkin is slowly but surely creeping back into the conversation, I suspect because the problems she wrote about have not gone away. And that infuriated the academics who ridiculed her ideas and marginalized her work in the seminar rooms of women and gender studies programmes. Her mind matured in the crucible of the 1960s anti-war movement, intimate partner violence and an intensive study of violent pornography.ĭworkin’s ideas about justice were crystalline and urgent. Instead, her intellect was formed by her struggle to come to terms with the most personal forms of violence: a family member’s memory of the Holocaust and her early sexual abuse by a stranger in a movie theatre. My guess is that part of what made her such an extraordinary writer is that Andrea Dworkin did not go to graduate school. On the contrary, Dworkin’s theories of sexuality were extraordinarily complex ideas distilled to their essence and articulated so clearly that anyone of any level of education could understand them.

Dworkin’s critics often characterized her theories of sex and gender as reductive or essentialist: rarely did they engage them.

(The Supreme Court eventually affirmed that the ordinance was unconstitutional in 1986.I have always believed that part of the hostility that Dworkin aroused had something to do with a clarity of mind that terrified people who cannot bear difficult and dangerous thoughts. MacKinnon, she wrote a municipal ordinance that was briefly adopted by several cities that defined pornography as a form of sex discrimination. In the 1980s, along with feminist lawyer Catherine A. Starting with her first book, Woman Hating (1974), Dworkin mapped what she saw as a war against men’s historical domination of women, and made the case against all forms of pornography, which she believed incited violence against women. A visible presence at anti-pornography rallies and “take back the night” marches, she wrote and lectured extensively on the subjects of sex, sexuality, and violence against women.Īmong her best-known books are Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), Intercourse (1987), and Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (2002). Center for the Advancement of Public ActionĪndrea Dworkin was a radical feminist writer and activist who became a lightening rod in feminist debates about pornography and censorship in the United States in the 1980s.

Andrea dworkin pornography