Right-Wing Women
What makes Dworkin so bracing to read is how relentlessly she defied the prevailing expectation that women stay perched on a tightrope, gingerly maintaining their balance by treading ever so carefully ... Suffused with Dworkin’s uncanny mix of hard-nosed realism and wild-eyed idealism.
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Exacting and ambitious ... Trump, with his hatred, vulgarity, and love of force, seems to offer up an awful confirmation that what she saw was really there all along ... What was uncommon about Dworkin was her willingness to speak about it: to name gender violence as an emergency, its infliction as a kind of terrorism, and its widespread acceptance as a social pathology ... When you read her she surprises you with the rigor of her research and argument, with the panhistorical ambition of her project, and above all with her acute, creative, painfully felt sense of empathy ... Dworkin also makes linguistic choices that I cringe from: she charges into comparisons to the Holocaust and American chattel slavery without thinking of the specific meaning of these historical comparisons .... Many readers come to Dworkin expecting to be made angry. But they stay because they are deeply moved ... Attempts a feminism of greater cogency and commitment than much of what has been on offer today ... Can be unnuanced and myopic. She pays rigorous attention to how sexuality is used to degrade women, but not enough to how it can inspire and enliven them ... She was a woman who had answers.
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Rich and tragically relevant ... Sometimes...polemical, but its excesses are infinitely more erudite and audacious ... Implicit in Dworkin’s analysis, however, is a shocking revelation: Feminists and their nemeses have a lot in common ... What is most striking about Right-Wing Women is its compassion ... Lets some of its subjects off the hook too easily. But reading it also reminded me that shared suffering is always a possible basis of solidarity.
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