Dworkin was twelve years younger than the woman she considered her hero, the second-wave feminist critic Kate Millett, and she found herself expanding on Millett’s ideas of structural misogyny a half generation too late. But part of her downfall was simply a matter of timing. It’s true, too, that she wrote with a passion and anger still uncommon in women, and she directed some of her fiercest critiques at fellow feminists who had once been her friends. She held inflexible opinions on pornography and sex work that have fallen dramatically out of fashion, and she made terrible tactical missteps in pursuing her vision of a world without the sex trade. Much of Dworkin’s unpopularity was her own fault. It is still more common to see her ridiculed than cited. Almost fifteen years after her death, her exile from the sphere of acceptable political thought is near-absolute. The left aggressively disavowed her, with other feminists going out of their way to contrast her opinions with their own. The right parodied her with the viciousness reserved for misogyny, mocking her overalls, frizzy hair, and excess weight. She had become less a public thinker than a symbol, an embodiment of feminism’s missteps and excesses.
EVEN BEFORE her death from myocarditis in 2005, Andrea Dworkin was more read about than read.
0 kommentar(er)
