Published in 2002 (originally published 1997)
256 pages
Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women.
An anti-war activist and anarchist in the late 1960s, Dworkin wrote 10 books on radical feminist theory and practice. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, she gained national fame as a spokeswoman for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and for her writing on pornography and sexuality, particularly in Pornography – Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), which remain her two most widely known books.
What is this book about?
A collection of her most incisive essays and unpublished speeches, Life and Death makes it clear why Dworkin has found her place in the canon of modern political thought. She begins here with a poignant autobiographical piece, in which she recounts with rare tenderness her childhood in Camden, New Jersey, her political odyssey, and the crushing pain of her brother’s death. Lending her hand to tragic current events, or what she calls “emergencies, ” like the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, the Hedda Nussbaum child abuse case, and the mass murder of female students at a college in Montreal, Dworkin makes clear in her inimitable way the obvious things we stubbornly fail to notice. Finally, she guides us back to the core issues at stake in women’s lives – pornography, domestic violence, rape, and prostitution – and reminds us that even after decades of feminist so-called progress, gender is an ongoing war.
