Andrea Dworkin (1946– 2005) was an American radical feminist author associated with antipornography, antirape, and battered women's movements of the 1970s and 80s. She wrote more than ten books, both nonfiction and fiction, and she coauthored, with feminist law professor Catherine Mackinnon, the highly controversial Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance of 1983. Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, and coowner of Seagull Salon in New York. Her art criticism appears regularly in The New Yorker and Artforum. Amy Scholder is an editor and writer. She is currently producing a documentary feature, Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, and serves as board president of Lambda Literary. Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, and coowner of Seagull Salon in New York. Her art criticism appears regularly in The New Yorker and Artforum.
Fateman and Scholder's anthology is useful as a primer on works by
a figure consigned to the radical fringe of feminist
discourse.—Kirkus Reviews
Dworkin wants us to look straight at those questions in feminism
that are the most delicate, the most painful, where women have the
most to lose. Dworkin had reason to be angry: Her life was marked
by the kind of male violence that is disturbingly common yet
consistently goes unacknowledged.—Bookforum
Dworkin became the ultimate symbol of radical feminism for a
generation coming of age in the 1970s and '80s. This collection of
her fiction and nonfiction mixes her most controversial writing
with autobiography, like “My Suicide,” an essay discovered after
her death in 2005.—New York Times Book Review, "New and
Noteworthy"
So what is it in Dworkin's long-neglected oeuvre that has suddenly
become resonant? Perhaps it's simply because we're in a moment of
crisis, when people seeking solutions are dusting off all sorts of
radical ideas. But I think it's more than that. Dworkin was
engaged, as many women today are engaged, in a pitched cultural
battle over whose experiences and assumptions define our common
reality.—Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
Yet time has smoothed many of Dworkin's rough edges. As her
overheated rhetoric cools, what is left is the singlemindedness of
a woman who courted disgrace, harassment, and mockery in pursuit of
liberation. If her tactics were flawed and her polemics often
excessive to the point of camp, her ability to trace the awful
vitality of sexism is still resonant. “Equality is a practice,” she
wrote. “It is an action. It is a way of life. It is a social
practice. It is an economic practice. It is a sexual practice. It
can't exist in a vacuum.” The book reintroduces her as a
revolutionary thinker unafraid to be the stereotypical “angry
woman.” Indeed, she embraced that role. She was an artist of rage,
alternately poetic and ridiculous, incisive and messy, compelling
and tedious.—Boston Review
It's book that a new generation of feminists should want to get
their hands on.—Bustle
The book is a mirror for what I've been afraid of for years: being
defiant, being ugly, being unloved by men, even being unloved by
other feminists like Andrea Dworkin.—Nona Willis Aronowitz, New
York Magazine's The Cut
Last Days At Hot Slit pays homage to the Marchiano-era
Dworkin, to the anachronistic anti-porn persona everyone loves to
hate, but along the way, it makes some much-needed jagged cuts.—The
Daily Beast
Dworkin sacrificed her comfort, her reputation, and to some extent
herself for her writing. What she never gave up was style. —New
Yorker
Last Days at Hot Slit provides a service by virtue of its inclusion
of previously unpublished pieces and excerpts from out-of-print
books, but there's also great skill behind the respectful, honest
depiction of Dworkin's fraught development as an
intellectual.—Dissent
The new collection of Dworkin's writings Last Days at Hot Slit,
edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, is an exhilarating
reminder that however you're currently doing feminism, it's
probably wrong. Dworkin's writing is forceful, unapologetic,
pleasurable without making its author seem likeable. She describes
herself, pointedly, as 'one of those serious women.' What Last Days
reveals, according to its editors, is that Dworkin shaped our
current world without ever being recognized or appreciated as
Great, in the ways that Great Men traditionally are, and it's hard
to disagree with them. We get our ideas of how we're supposed to
be—shaven or not, angry or otherwise—from somewhere, and one of
those places is her work.—Commonwealth
Dworkin claimed a radical femininity, refusing to perform her
gender in order to satisfy the patriarchal palate; she was loud,
fat, indifferently dressed, un-made-up. She didn't ask for
permission to speak; she simply spoke, when and about what and to
whom she wished. She demanded. She insisted. She refused to be “a
woman” while insisting on framing her experience, sexual and
otherwise, as being shaped most fundamentally by the female-ness of
her body, by the hatred and violence directed at that body from
deep within patriarchal culture. For Dworkin, women's (and,
ultimately, men's) survival depended on the acknowledgment of this
hatred and the consequent rejection of patriarchy.—Los Angeles
Review of Books
The second-wave “anti-sex feminist” was born too soon. Dworkin was
largely dismissed as a ranting man-hater during her life (she died
in 2005), but these collected essays reveal a passionate,
clear-eyed rationalist who got what movements like #MeToo have only
begun to espouse: Equality is a matter of life and
death.—Newsweek
She's a brilliant powerhouse, an extreme voice for our extreme
times.—Holland Cotter, New York Times Book Review
Last Days at Hot Slit, a new anthology of Dworkin's work, shows
that the caricature of her as a simplistic man-hater, a termagant
in overalls, could only be sustained by not reading what she
actually wrote—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Book Review, "Books
of the Times"
Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder have edited an excellent new
collection, which includes excerpts of Dworkin's fiction and
nonfiction books, speeches, essays, and unpublished
autobiographical writing…Dworkin lived decades before #MeToo: she
heard hundreds of accounts of women being assaulted. Echoing
Dworkin's own experiences, the stories affirmed for her that sexual
assault was widespread and common, most of it committed not by
strangers but by acquaintances, intimate partners, coworkers, and
bosses—'normal men,' as she emphasized in speeches, respected
elders of the community, or perhaps 'the boy next door.'—The New
York Review of Books
A selection of her writings that makes a powerful case for
[Dworkin's] complexity, wit, stylistic originality and political
relevance in the grab-'em-by-the-pussy era.—The Guardian
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