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April 12, 2005
Andrea Dworkin
I've been saving this one, hoping for some sort of brilliant thing I might add to what's already been said about Dworkin since her death. But finally I've decided that repetition has its own merits.
A brave soul has departed. Her work enriched my understanding of myself. She enraged a lot of smart, good people, but she also expressed a point of view that needed voice. And thank god she did. Ms. doesn't add much information to the Guardian announcement of her death, but it does give some background on her life—interestingly, without directly mentioning Intercourse, which probably annoyed the largest number of smart, good people and which was her one work most influential on my own thinking. The links from Ms. do, however, talk about that work, especially here. And Rad Geek says it well:
I don’t know how to say how much her life and her work meant to women’s movement. I don’t know how to say how much she meant to my life. I don’t have the words. I could say that she is one of the most important, controversial, uncompromising, threatening, and brilliant women of Second Wave radical feminism. I could say that her works changed my life. I could say that every cruelty and every uncharitable swipe taken at her—by the pimps and the pornographers, by self-satisfied liberal men and by critics from within the movement—was a testament to how much she mattered and how important it was that someone was there to tell the truth without flinching, that that someone was her. All of these things would be true. But they don’t even begin to touch it. Nothing that I could say would.
"Changed my life." Yes. I can trace several significant moments in the political course of my life, and reading Intercourse was definitely one of those moments. And I have no words to describe its effect on me; that effect was too visceral for the analytic articulation of words, even though Dworkin somehow managed to put the catalyst for those effects into powerful words.
I don't talk about Intercourse much, because either one gets it or one does not, and those who don't get it are mad as hell about it. Those who do are grateful—and some see implications beyond her explicit argument. One of them: that binary gender lends itself to all het sex being rape. Binary gender is, I believe, one of the deep-seated problems of our culture, and certainly in my own life. Intercourse details its heinous consequences.
Andrea Dworkin's death is a great loss.
Posted by senioritis at April 12, 2005 08:22 PM