Book Review Essay: Healing Feminism's Broken Heart
25 Women's Rights Law Reporter 167 (2004)
11 Pages Posted: 9 Sep 2009 Last revised: 21 Oct 2013
Date Written: 2004
Abstract
Book review essay of Andrea Dworkin's last book, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant. This review examines the use of the “memoir mode” to further political work and rebuts critiques that Dworkin's writing is too “confessional” - incorporating “guilty personal detail for emotional effect.” I suggest that Dworkin’s “confessions” have a distinct purpose. She is not driven by ego or solipsism; instead of focusing on her accomplishments, she creates life-lines between seminal moments in her childhood and young adulthood and the politics that define her life now. The small rebellions of the child echo the large rebellions of the adult. At the end of the book, she writes: “I hope this work can serve as a kind of bridge over which some girls and women can pass into their own feminist work.”
Keywords: feminism, activism, feminist theory, Andrea Dworkin
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