A Few Words About Andrea Dworkin 1946-2005

First off, i try not to be just a blog pointing to the same bloggers, even if it means refraining from posting at all.  But Susie Bright has once again nailed it about  Andrea's tumultuous life and death.  The thing i most love about her piece is how she takes down many of Dworkin's critiques while not denying her props for her influence and inspiration.  Other links of interest might be the Wikipedia entry, and several Guardian articles, particularly this one.

Though a little younger than Andrea, i'm older than Susie, and definitely a survivor of an age when feminism was battled in the streets.  There's an utopian aspect to old-time activism which leads to the kinds of premises Dworkin was working from - the idea that a visionary approach to law and policy can create some kind of unprecedented 'equality'.  It seems to me to be a flawed premise, reaching its nadir with the Dworkin/McKinnon law.  Of course, by the 1980's i felt pretty poorly represented by feminism anyway.  An out kinky/bisexual/female was befriended by no 70's politico who didn't want a piece!

In the blizzard of blog comments i've seen in the past few days, someone accused her of overlooking D/s and power issues between genders, but i think that's unfair.  She certainly observed them, but dismissed them as irrelevant because she believed those dynamics were the product of the patriarchy. She may have been wrong about many things, but in her passing she deserves to be noted as a trailblazer who tried in her own brilliant-but-broken way to speak truth to power.