In 1987, when Andrea Dworkin appeared on the Phil Donahue Present to advertise the publication of her e-book Intercourse, a girl within the viewers requested her, with a mix of incredulity, concern and contempt: ‘What tragic factor occurred in your life that made you are feeling this fashion?’ The viewers hooted with laughter. Dworkin laughed for a second too, in exasperation, after which turned severe:
After we learn the work of male writers they’ll have had horrible and tragic lives and we learn their books for what they provide us. And I need you to learn my e-book for what it may give you. And neglect about me and simply learn the e-book, as a result of the e-book issues.
Dworkin’s books do matter. They comprise sure truths, of the sort many ladies recognise as they hear them, in regards to the bewildering ubiquity of sexual violence, the lie this violence provides to the promise of ladies’s equality, and the continuities between essentially the most grotesque elements of ladies’s therapy by the hands of males and the extra quotidian assaults on dignity with which almost all ladies are intimately acquainted. Dworkin’s books converse in a singularly highly effective voice: she is without doubt one of the extra under-appreciated prose stylists in postwar American writing. Her books matter too within the extra simple sense that they’ve been of actual materials consequence. By means of them, Dworkin helped form the trajectory of American feminism, giving definitive expression to the novel feminist tenet that sexual domination was the beating coronary heart of patriarchy, and putting the authorized battle in opposition to rape, home violence, intercourse work and above all pornography on the high of the feminist agenda.
For the reason that rise of Trump and MeToo, and within the context of a broader disenchantment with the ‘intercourse optimistic’ feminism that was within the ascendancy by the tip of the Eighties, Dworkin is being rediscovered – and rehabilitated – by a brand new technology of younger ladies. The publication in 2019 of an edited quantity of Dworkin’s writings, Final Days at Sizzling Slit, prompted a number of reviewers to declare that Dworkin was the feminist we now want: to precise our collective disappointment with the state of latest heterosexuality, and to know why it’s that, in spite of everything this time, so many males seem nonetheless to hate ladies.
The clip from Donahue seems ten minutes earlier than the tip of My Identify Is Andrea, Pratibha Parmar’s new documentary about Dworkin (its govt producer is Amy Scholder, one of many editors of Final Days at Sizzling Slit). That Dworkin is a feminist for our time is a conviction that Parmar clearly shares. Her earlier documentaries embody Alice Walker: Magnificence in Reality (2014) and Warrior Marks (1993), based mostly on a e-book she co-authored with Walker about feminine genital mutilation. My Identify Is Andrea is a synthesis of authentic archival materials of Dworkin, principally from her frequent TV and radio appearances (she had payments to pay, but in addition an admirable willingness to talk to unreceptive audiences), along with scenes by which Dworkin is portrayed by numerous actors, together with Ashley Judd and Amandla Stenberg (Rue from The Starvation Video games). The movie opens with Judd, in Dworkin’s acquainted overalls however with reasonably much less frizzy hair, talking feelingly to digital camera in traces drawn from Dworkin’s semi-autobiographical novel Mercy (1990):
My nom de guerre is Andrea One. I used to be born in Camden, on Mickle Avenue, down from the place Walt Whitman, the good gray poet, lived, a visionary, a prophet of affection; and I beloved, in response to his poems. I had a imaginative and prescient too, like his, however I’ll by no means write a poem like his, a music of myself.
Subsequent Stenberg speaks from behind a web curtain. ‘My title is Andrea,’ she says. ‘It means manhood, or braveness.’ Lastly, the French singer-songwriter Soko, leaning in opposition to a tree, pencil and paper in hand, tells us that her title is Andrea too. Because the movie proceeds, there are visible allusions to up to date feminist touchstones together with MeToo, Sarah Everard and the ‘Femicidio es Genocidio’ protest in Argentina, all overlaid by audio recordings of Dworkin. The suggestion is that Dworkin’s writings and concepts transcend the circumstances that produced them: a lot in order that they converse for all ladies, even a long time later. (In response to a unfavourable evaluation of Intercourse within the New York Instances, Dworkin wrote: ‘I’ll test again in a decade to see what you all assume.’) Dworkin, right here, is each feminist prophet and Everywoman; we’re all named Andrea.
The construction of My Identify Is Andrea – half conventional documentary, half experimental biopic – honours Dworkin’s request that we learn her books for what they provide us, reasonably than what they could disclose to us about Dworkin. However the issue with this request, and so with any effort to accede to it, is that Dworkin’s books are so unabashedly shaped out of the actual, and darkest, stuff of her life. Mercy, the novel from which the opening traces of the movie are drawn, is a Bildungsroman by which a girl named Andrea explains how, by way of lengthy expertise of male violence, she turned a assassin of males. Dworkin wasn’t a assassin, but it surely was lengthy expertise of male violence that reworked her from a precocious and outspoken baby with a love of poetry (Baudelaire, Ginsburg) into an icon of feminist rage. At 9, alone in a film theatre, she was sexually molested by a stranger. At eighteen, arrested for attending an anti-Vietnam Warfare protest, she was violently sexually assaulted by two docs in a ladies’s detention centre. A couple of years later, she moved to Amsterdam and married an anarchist who subjected her repeatedly to acts of home violence; after she divorced him he continued to stalk her and beat her. In want of cash to flee again to the US, she turned to intercourse work, one thing she had executed intermittently since highschool – and which she would later describe as a collection of rapes. My Identify Is Andrea provides us glimpses of all these formative episodes, with the curious exception of Dworkin’s expertise of intercourse work. (The movie additionally glosses over the truth that Dworkin’s life companion of greater than thirty years, John Stoltenberg, was and stays an brazenly homosexual man – so it finally ends up suggesting, inadvertently, that Dworkin made some type of peace with heterosexuality.) We see and listen to Dworkin describing these assaults and the importance that they had for her, and watch as they’re restaged by the actors within the movie. On this manner, her private historical past is made exemplary of the feminine situation.
This seems to have been Dworkin’s personal view. Within the early Nineteen Seventies, when Dworkin was fleeing her abusive ex, a feminist good friend gave her the writings of early radical US feminists, together with Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone, in addition to Robin Morgan’s edited quantity of ladies’s liberation motion literature, Sisterhood is Highly effective. This prompted Dworkin to vow, she later recounted, to make use of ‘all the pieces I knew, together with from prostitution, to make the ladies’s motion stronger and higher … I’d give my life to the motion and for the motion.’ For Dworkin, her personal life – ‘all the pieces I knew’ – was the evidentiary base of her writing. From it, she ‘knew’ that prostitution was rape, that pornography was akin to Nazi propaganda, that males’s drive to sexually dominate lay on the base of ladies’s oppression, that the ladies who practised penetrative intercourse with males had been patriarchal collaborators.She was gripped by the ‘conviction’ that what had occurred to her ‘wasn’t actually so private’ however was, reasonably, a clear window to a completely basic actuality: ‘What was taking place to me was taking place to all the ladies that I knew.’ It was for that reason that her ‘autobiography’ might legitimately function the ‘unseen basis’ of her try to theorise the totality of relations between ladies and men.
It’s Dworkin’s unalterable conviction that offers her prose its ringing, prophetic high quality. Type was, for her, in the end a political query, about discovering a type of ‘prose extra terrifying than rape, extra abject than torture, extra insistent and destabilising than battery, extra desolate than prostitution, extra invasive than incest, extra stuffed with risk and aggression than pornography’. In an in any other case vital evaluation of Mercy, the New York Instances praised Dworkin’s e-book for, ‘not like any antipornography textual content’, ‘defeat[ing] prurience’. Dworkin’s ‘stylistic breathlessness – repetition, rhythm, lack of management – conveys not rising ardour’ the evaluation went on, ‘however the determined must have the violence finish.’ But, essential as her certainty was to her prose and her politics, it isn’t in any respect clear that Dworkin was justified in feeling it.
Definitely it’s clear that we right now are usually not. Sexual violence is ubiquitous, and for a lot of ladies it feels just like the defining situation and the deepest actuality of their lives. However that feeling, like all appeals to private expertise, can obscure as a lot because it reveals. What can we make of the poor ladies, particularly poor immigrant ladies and poor ladies of color, for whom elevated susceptibility to violence is a symptom of constructions of oppression from which the lads of their lives additionally, if differentially, endure? Did Dworkin herself not see the contradiction between her unjust arrest and subsequent rape by the hands of the state, and her obvious religion that this identical coercive equipment may very well be wrangled into the service of ladies? Even when we grant, with Dworkin and different radical feminists, that intercourse work can’t be understood exterior the body of gendered hierarchy, what does it imply to disregard intercourse staff’ near-universal insistence that the criminalisation of their commerce makes their lives much less habitable?
Above all, what does it imply to affix forces with these on the political proper, as Dworkin did in her legislative battle in opposition to pornography, and to name on a reactionary state to do one’s feminist bidding? (In 1992, the Canadian Supreme Court docket, invoking the rationale developed by Dworkin and her anti-porn collaborator Catharine MacKinnon of their effort to make pornographers liable to civil fits, expanded Canada’s obscenity legal guidelines to criminalise pornography that was violent, degrading or dehumanising. Inside months, Canadian police seized copies of Unhealthy Perspective, {a magazine} of lesbian erotic fiction, from Canada’s first homosexual and lesbian bookstore, which was discovered responsible of felony obscenity.) These questions are usually not posed by My Identify Is Andrea, and to take action would complicate the movie’s reverent angle. However they need to be, and more and more are, questions for us right now. It’s maybe for that reason that the movie’s scenes by which Dworkin’s phrases are spoken by actors by no means totally come off – all of it feels too performative and mannered, nearly schlocky.
Against this, when the true Andrea comes on display screen, she roars. Early on, in one of many movie’s most outstanding moments, we see Dworkin in 1992, debating on the Cambridge Union on the subject of ‘political correctness’. She opens by paraphrasing James Baldwin on the way in which European immigrants, nevertheless ‘despised’ that they had been within the outdated nation, had been endowed, on arrival within the US, with whiteness: ‘They instantly had a leg up as a result of the underside was fastened and the underside was Black.’ The one equality the American founding fathers cared about, Dworkin tells the assembled college students – principally male and lots of of them in dinner jackets – was ‘an equality amongst wealthy white males’. This overlooked most individuals: white ladies, women and men of color, and ‘the survivors of that slaughter of the Indigenous peoples’. It constituted an assault on their ‘freedom, authorized and social rights, self-determination, self-sovereignty’. And, what’s extra:
Leaving out most individuals additionally meant that the society didn’t use or acknowledge or respect the creativity of most individuals, the intelligence of most individuals, the life expertise of most individuals, the inventiveness, the originality, the attitude, the aim, the perception of most individuals.
‘Do you hear the silence?’ Dworkin bellows to the scholars, as if actually eager for a reply. ‘Do you perceive the loss that I’m speaking about? Can you are feeling what’s lacking, what isn’t there?’
Like most of the distinguished feminists of her technology, Dworkin was a girl of considerable mental and inventive presents. And, as with most of the different good ladies of her technology, the form these presents would take, and the makes use of to which they’d be put, was largely decided by a confrontation with male supremacy and the rising battle in opposition to it. Dworkin was not silenced, however neither was she talking free from political and historic necessity. Responding to the viewers member on Donahue who wished to know what had occurred to make her this fashion, Dworkin famous bitterly that Norman Mailer – at nineteen she had known as him ‘America’s most proficient novelist’ – was by no means requested this type of query, regardless of his vibrant life. (Is ‘vibrant’ the appropriate approach to describe stabbing your spouse on the launch of your individual mayoral marketing campaign?) If Dworkin’s level was that each one writing is autobiography, then she was proper, if solely trivially so. She was additionally proper, non-trivially, if her level was that male writers are exempt from the lurid, private inquisition to which ladies writers are routinely subjected, on the tacit assumption that males’s experiences replicate the overall human situation and so don’t stand in want of rationalization. However to learn Dworkin as we’d learn Mailer, or one other male author, is to neglect the precise methods by which a girl’s life – not simply her ‘biography’ or ‘formation’, however the concrete actuality of what it’s to stay out a subordinate position beneath patriarchy – can set the destiny of her mental output.
Think about an Andrea who had, in some way, set all of it apart, all of the violence and assaults on her dignity: an Andrea who had merely acquired on, as Dworkin had deliberate to do as a younger lady, with the enterprise of writing poetry, of constructing one thing stunning. That is an Andrea, I believe we are able to say, who would have didn’t rise to her second. However she would have additionally been, in some methods, freer.
