Andrea Dworkin Archives - Public Seminar

Sex & Gender

What Happened to Desire?

A response to Liza Featherstone

December 31, 2019 • by James Livingston

In classic psychoanalytic fashion, Featherstone doesn’t reduce the political dividends of desire to the consequences of sex as most of us understand and experience it: as “genital fun.” She’s interested in something “more broadly libidinal,” something more dangerous to order and to hierarchy of any kind. In short, she’s interested in what Freud called ...

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Feminists Say

Gagging on rape

August 13, 2018 • by Vanessa Place and Cassandra Seltman

Last year the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality published a panel called "The ontology of the rape joke," organized around a performance by Vanessa Place of her piece, "Rape joke." The panel included responses from Jamieson Webster, Jeff Dolven, Gayle Salamon, Kyoo Lee, Katie Gentile, and Virginia Goldner, and ended with ...

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A Feminine Imaginary Without the Eye

Audio Pornography and Representational Politics

June 15, 2018 • by Kiyomi Ren Mino

Pornography follows us everywhere. What was once confined to stashed magazines and adult stores now streams freely on our laptops and phones. Motivated by what the freedom of pornography means for women’s liberation, I provide a commentary to Drucilla Cornell’s chapter, “Pornography’s Temptation” from her book, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography & ...

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Why Can’t Women Bridge the Left-Right Divide?

Reflections on the 1984 Indianapolis Anti-Pornography Ordinance

May 23, 2018 • by Claire Potter

When did coalitional organizing between feminists and conservative women become impossible? I’m not sure, but as a feminist there is one place and time that I remember vividly: Indianapolis in the spring of 1984. There, led by Mayor William Hudnut, III Republican politician Beulah Coughenour and local movement conservatives, that city ...

Why Can’t Women Bridge the Left-Right Divide?

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A Lot of Things Are Broken

Why focusing on sex won’t fix sexual harassment

January 31, 2018 • by Claire Potter

This post was originally published by Eurozine and was accompanied by three other posts that Public Seminar will repost later this week. Following the first wave of the #MeToo movement, a new phase of reflection has set in. Here, four authors and journal editors from the US and Europe assess #MeToo's ...