Synopses & Reviews
ANDREA DWORKIN
Of this study of her work, Andrea Dworkin wrote:
Its amazing for me to see my work treated with such passion and respect. There is nothing resembling it in the U.S. in relation to my work.
Michael Moorcock wrote of American feminist and writer Andrea Dworkin: I think feminism is the most important political movement of our times. People think Andreas a man-hater. She gets called a Fascist and a Nazi - particularly by the American left, but its not detectable in her work. To me she seemed like a pussycat] She has an extraordinary eloquence, a kind of magic that moves people.
Dworkin is a very positive writer, always driving onwards for revolution, change and radical thinking. In the introduction to Letters From a War Zone, she writes: I am more reckless now than when I started out because I know what everything costs and it doesnt matter. I have paid a lot to write what I believe to be true. On one level, I suffer terribly from the disdain that much of my work has met. On another, deeper level, I dont give a fuck.
Dworkins lifes work balances the individual suffering of the writer with the larger, worldwide suffering of womens subordination, so that, she says, one becomes, on a personal level, immune to pain, while on the larger, global level, the pain of women and children around the world continues to grow, and continues to make her madder and madder: I wrote them essays and speeches] because I believe in writing, in its power to right wrongs, to change how people see and think, to change how and what people know, to change how and why people act. I wrote them out of the conviction, Quaker in origin, that one must speak truth to power. This is the basic premise in my work as a feminist: activism or writing. Here Dworkin posits her work as a crusade, thats the newspaper term for her kind of polemic, a crusade against silence and violence, against cruelty and inequality, and certainly Dworkin is often portrayed in the media as a crusader, someone who really believes in herself, in her convictions, someone wholly committed, as few others are, to a radical change. Michael Moorcock, in his piece on Andrea Dworkin (New Statesman, 1988) writes: w]hat she fights against, in everything she writes and does, is male refusal to acknowledge sexual inequality, male hatred of women, male contempt for women, male power.
Synopsis
A very powerful feminist and public speaker, Dworkin is the author of the highly influential book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, of which Mary Daly wrote: 'An original, brilliant, courageous work combining massive and precise research with incisive analysis.' Cited by many feminists, often in passing, often in a negative light, Dworkin has rarely been the subject of a full-length treatment, as here. This book sympathetically and critically surveys the chief themes of Dworkin's polemical feminism, including her anti-pornography stance; the controversial bill of rights; sexual politics; and literary sthetics. Robinson links Dworkin to French feminism, queer, gay and lesbian theory, Anglo-American feminism, and American literature. 'It's amazing for me to see my work treated with such passion and respect.' (Andrea Dworkin) Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).