Andrea Dworkin, American activist and author (d. 2005)
Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist writer and activist. She is best known for her analysis of pornography, although her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US Constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
The central theme of Dworkin's work is re-evaluating Western society, culture, and politics. She did this through the prism of men's sexual violence against women in a patriarchal context. She wrote on a wide range of topics including the lives of Joan of Arc, Margaret Papandreou, and Nicole Brown Simpson; she analyzed the literature of Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, Leo Tolstoy, Kōbō Abe, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, and Isaac Bashevis Singer; she brought her own radical feminist perspective to her examination of subjects historically written or described from men's point of view, including fairy tales, homosexuality, lesbianism, virginity, antisemitism, the State of Israel, the Holocaust, biological superiority, and racism. She interrogated premises underlying concepts such as freedom of the press and civil liberties. She theorized the sexual politics of intelligence, fear, courage, and integrity. She described a male supremacist political ideology manifesting in and constituted by rape, battery, prostitution, and pornography.In Dworkin's lifetime, two volumes were written with consideration and analysis of the body of her work: Andrea Dworkin by Jeremy Mark Robinson, first published in 1994, and Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin's Art and Politics by Cindy Jenefsky in 1998. Following Dworkin's death, several works by or about her have been released. A play, Aftermath, was produced in 2015 by John Stoltenberg after he found unpublished writing of hers that he edited for the stage. An anthology of her work, Last Days at Hot Slit, was published in 2019. In 2020, a documentary feature about her, My Name Is Andrea, by Pratibha Parmar was released, and a biography of her life, Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary, by Martin Duberman, was published.