I particularly appreciated this review, because the author admits to having a lot of preconceived notions about Dworkin specifically and feminism in general. It starts like this:

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I thought I knew everything I wanted or needed to know about Andrea Dworkin. She was the foul-mouthed, fat feminist who favored overalls
and supposedly claimed that all sex between men and women is rape.

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After reading the book, however, the writer admits:

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"Heartbreak" has given me a deep respect for the author. . .it is the story of a deeply committed human being willing to challenge injustice where she sees it. . .as much the story of a singular life as it is a manifesto on how to be a good person. In our deeply conformist age, Dworkin provides a model of conscience in action that should inspire everyone of any stripe to look, to listen, to think.

Finally, she reminded me to resist the urge to stereotype and marginalize strong women.

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Heartening what just a little bit of education can do to transform an initially biased and uninformed assumption.

For more on Dworkin: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/hearbreak.html

And speaking of smashing stereotypes, you gotta check out ACLU's Dworkin Lie Detector page. Much of what people think is fact about Dworkin falls into the realm of myth:
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/LieDetect.html

Comments? Observations? Recipes? If there are any Dworkin scholars/fans out there, I'd love to hear an informed take on her work. She takes a lot of flack these days for her immutable anti-prostitution and anti-porn stance, which many people believe is outmoded (eg. What about porn made by women, for women? Ditto homosexuals? What about women and men who chose to be prostitutes, and feel happy and empowered in their work? etc.)

Also lot of people think the Canada Customs vs. Little Sister's debacle can be directly attrituted to the legal meddling of Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon.

[ April 14, 2002: Message edited by: annie.victoria ]

I never heard anyone claim that they had anything to do with Canada Customs' harassment of Little Sisters or Glad Day book store, though.

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Since a lot of people popping in and out of this forum seem to have rudimentary questions about feminism and it's history, it sounds like Andrea Dworkin's autobiography "Heartbreak" might provide a good primer

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????????? I admit I haven't read the book. But if you want to start talking about the history of feminism read the book of Ruth. Or at least a Bronte novel. And I find it offensive that feminism has to be pigeoned-holed this way. We are not all a bunch of bra burning radical certifiable nut cases like Dworkin and Daly and..... need I go on.??????????

annie, getting hot under the collar

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But if you want to start talking about the history of feminism read the book of Ruth. Or at least a Bronte novel.

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Sorry, perhaps I should have clarified to say that the Dworkin memoir would provide a good primer for feminism in the last part of this century. From what I read in the review, and from what I know of Dworkin as a public figure, it's clear she was at the front lines of most of feminism's political battles from the 60's up until now.

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We are not all a bunch of bra burning radical certifiable nut cases like Dworkin and Daly and..... need I go on.??????????

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I decided from talking to her, that the only reason she liked being "the other" was because she got alot of money from that.

And she is one of the rudest people I have ever met.

Jeff House, there's a good case to be made for the Dworkin/MacKinnon link to Canada's obscenity laws and, thus, what happened with Little Sister's and Customs. To read D and MacK's side of the story, see my last link. Here's a very thumb-nail sketch of how these things hook up:

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Little Sisters Bookstore in Vancouver is suing Customs, asserting that Customs should not have the right to seize books on suspicion of obscenity. If the case is won, obscenity will have to be determined by the courts, not by Customs. It is not at all certain that the case will be won; a recent Supreme Court decision in Canada used language from American anti-porn activist Catherine MacKinnon to define pornography as material that is "violent" or "degrading" to women. Such laws can be used to keep ANY SM-related material from ever being published--which is exactly the intent.

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The above was from a pro S&M website: http://www.unrealities.com/adult/ssbb/d2.html

The "recent case" cited above is Crown vs. Butler, which radically changed Canadian law. MacKinnon testified, and much of her testimony had to do with speech-act theory, and work she had done with Dworkin. This is all very convoluted, so I won't go into it, but the long and the short of it is that the work done by D and MacK had a radicalizing effect on how the Canadian legal system defines the "harm" done by pornography. And that definition, some say, led directly to the actions Customs ended up taking against little sisters.

Tomorrow I will post some more links, if anyone's interested in hearing the long version of all this.

Someone once said, "Instead of "pornography is the theory and rape is the practice" (a quote from either Dworkin or MacKinnon), it's become "America is the theory and Canada is the practice"--referring to how they were able to lay the legal groundwork in the States for what was to come in Canada.

Sorry, I'm getting bogged down in all this stuff. I'd still like to hear more from anyone with an interest in Dworkin. Has anyone read her book(s)?

[ April 15, 2002: Message edited by: Relyc ]

[ April 15, 2002: Message edited by: Trespasser ]

[ April 15, 2002: Message edited by: Mandos ]

On the issues of D-Mc, Canada's laws and harassment of Little Sisters et.al., I have a few thoughts. I haven't read any of the information in the links posted above, so this is not an argument in fact - more an opinion on human nature. And that is, I'm not sure I'm convinced that Canada Customs, a large bureaucratic entity enforcing the status quo, would be all that prone to being significantly influenced by the work of a couple of feminist scholars. Unless the agency was inclined to act in that way - i.e. censor and harass gay pornography - anyway, something not hard to imagine for a status quo force dealing with something outside the mainstream. Their work may have provided some justification, but my gut tells me the basic impetus to censor would be there, regardless.

[ April 15, 2002: Message edited by: MJ ]

There's another problem with the wish to legally restrict injurious speech, according to Butler. MacKinnon presupposes a very simple and straightforward semantic universe: there's a pornographer, there's his unambiguous 'message' and at the receiving end there's a victim who gets injured by it. Butler insists that this is an inaccurate and restricitve account of how meaning operates. First of all, to repeat the point from the first passage, the pornographer is not born out of his own head. Second, and not less important, there is no clear pathway between the speaker and his utterance on the one hand, and the utterance and the way is understood by the addressee, on the other. Yes we are spoken by the languages we're born into, yes we are conditioned and named by circumstances outside of our control; but there is no absolute precision and no accordance among 'languages that speak us'. So, to make things more specific, to assume that pornography always gets delivered to the unsuspecting vulnerable female victim and never misses the target means that we are shutting our eyes to a space of freedom. MacKinnon probably had to posit things that way in order to have a case against the porn industry (which is noble). Still, many important things have been harmed in the process.

As some queer kinky writers have realized it all too well. Books imported by bookstores like Little Sisters have been returned for depicting sexual scenes that are 'debasing' to women and that include violence (I remember reading in that Califia collection that the customs agents also had problems with anal sex in general). Yet for some writers - among them some feminists - writing about brutality and domination in a sexual context is a better way of dealing with it than writing of 'egalitarian intercourse'. They have always been surrounded by the former, found sadism even where they least expected to, and for writers like Dorothy Allison being turned on by brutal sexual behaviour (and writing about it) was the only way to survive their own childhood sexual abuse. So putting all that into words opened a niche of freedom for them. Language moves in much more mysterious ways than MacKinnonites would like to admit.

[ April 15, 2002: Message edited by: Trespasser ]

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I'm not sure I'm convinced that Canada Customs, a large bureaucratic entity enforcing the status quo, would be all that prone to being significantly influenced by the work of a couple of feminist scholars.

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Their work may have provided some justification, but my gut tells me the basic
impetus to censor would be there, regardless.

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