Perhaps best known for her pugnacious critique of pornography and prostitution, which galvanized the infamous feminist “sex wars” of the 1980s, Andrea Dworkin is among the most vilified and revered feminists of the second wave. Pornography, for Dworkin, was a lethal form of propaganda in the service of sexual violence and male supremacism—paradigmatic, even, of the misogyny that structured every patriarchal institution. This made Dworkin, for many liberal and “sex-positive” feminists, a source of embarrassment: she embodied the wounded and reactive strain in feminism that many found damaging to the movement and its vision of liberation. For her enemies, Dworkin was the epitome of misandry and self-loathing; her attitudes towards sex were a pathology, not a politics. Yet, for her allies and admirers, Dworkin was the consummate survivor, unafraid to expose her pain and leverage it as a method of consciousness-raising. And, in the wake of the #metoo movement and the attention it focused on the pervasiveness of sexual exploitation, Dworkin’s work has made a stunning, if vexing, return to public attention. What did sex, power, and politics mean for Dworkin? And what insights for contemporary feminist politics can we glean from her passionately contested legacy?
In this course, we will read two of Dworkin’s best known works, Right-Wing Women and Intercourse, alongside a selection of her essays and speeches—including her tribute to Nicole Brown Simpson, her reflections on Israel and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and her public address on the one-year anniversary of the Montreal Massacre—taking into account both the style and the substance of Dworkin’s writing. What does her prose style reveal about feminism at a specific historical moment? What was the impetus to and substance of her radical feminism? And can we locate in Dworkin’s body of work any traces of the liberation project that once defined a radical feminist politics?
Note:
There *is* no physical Brooklyn Institute. We hold our classes all over (thus far) Brooklyn and Manhattan, in alternative spaces ranging from the back rooms of bars to bookstores to spaces in cultural centers, including the Center for Jewish History, the Goethe-Institut, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. We can (and do) turn any space into a classroom. You will be notified of the exact location when you register for a class.
