Born to working-class parents in Camden, New Jersey, she was a bookish child who inhaled knowledge.

Biographic strugglesĭuberman gives us a story that explains the urgency Dworkin brought to the struggle against sexual violence. And in 2020, Martin Duberman, a skilled chronicler of lesbian and gay life and author of seven previous biographies, gave us the first full biography of this controversial intellectual, Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary (The New Press, 2020). More significantly, Dworkin is now respectfully cited, without the usual disclaimers, by mainstream feminist journalists like Rebecca Traister. Johana Fateman and Amy Scholder reintroduced younger readers to an edited collection of Dworkin’s work, The Last Days at Hot Slit (MIT Press, 2019). New female intellectuals want to know why my generation has failed them. Yet since she died in 2005, Dworkin is slowly but surely creeping back into the conversation, I suspect because the problems she wrote about have not gone away.

And that infuriated the academics who ridiculed her ideas and marginalized her work in the seminar rooms of women and gender studies programmes. Her mind matured in the crucible of the 1960s anti-war movement, intimate partner violence and an intensive study of violent pornography.ĭworkin’s ideas about justice were crystalline and urgent.

Instead, her intellect was formed by her struggle to come to terms with the most personal forms of violence: a family member’s memory of the Holocaust and her early sexual abuse by a stranger in a movie theatre. My guess is that part of what made her such an extraordinary writer is that Andrea Dworkin did not go to graduate school. On the contrary, Dworkin’s theories of sexuality were extraordinarily complex ideas distilled to their essence and articulated so clearly that anyone of any level of education could understand them. Dworkin’s critics often characterized her theories of sex and gender as reductive or essentialist: rarely did they engage them. I have always believed that part of the hostility that Dworkin aroused had something to do with a clarity of mind that terrified people who cannot bear difficult and dangerous thoughts.

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