22 November 2009
initial reviews of one-dimensional woman
it's short and angry, just like me!
Well, the book is out, apparently (or it is if you order it from Amazon - I have no idea what happened there - the publishing date was supposed to be the end of the month. Someone told me that Amazon just send stuff out as soon as it arrives, so I suppose that's what they did. Weird). Either way, it's meant that some copies of the thing are in the world. Feedback has been pretty good so far - the fact that it is so short means that it can be read in one sitting (or in the bath, or anything!) which at least means that people have read it. People seem to find it pretty accessible too, though the first review by Elizabeth Wilson in the New Humanist claims that '[the] often impassioned polemic is also at times muffled by her attempt to include some theory'. But to boring mainstream liberal attacks on 'theory' I say - BAH! Not listening! Read some Kant!
There are two mostly sympathetic reviews online. One at the-sauce.org which notes, among other things that: 'Sexual liberation is not utopia. But the possibility of non-exploitative tactile affection can remind us of the pleasure that comes with human interaction outside the razor sharp competition of the labour market. We can then discover it's not sex alone which needs to be rediscovered.'
There's another review at Auralisings which states that 'Where Power is at her best, is in her analysis of the potential for human transformation by looking back through history.' The reviewer is, however, disappointed that I don't discuss contemporary activists and other theorists that aren't the object of my critiques: 'While we must continue to highlight the co-option and depoliticisation of feminism by the war-mongerers, advertisers and sex industry, there are activists, communities and writers who are challenging this brand of cut-price feminism.' I'd agree with that - one of the things I worried a bit about when I wrote the thing was that I hadn't given enough credit to writers (other than to Ariel Levy, perhaps) and others who were obviously not 'one-dimensional'. Partly I think this was because the book was originally supposed to be just a polemic against the mostly US-based self-help shoes-'n'-chocolate kind of thing that was all over the 90s and early to mid-2000s. It morphed a little bit into something else, so I take quite seriously the reviewer's complaint that I left worthwhile people out, cos I did.
It's interesting in this regard, I think, that there has indeed seemed to be something of a recognition of the assimilation/compatibility of much recent feminism and capitalism. Angela McRobbie's recent The Aftermath of Feminism is a much more serious and well-researched attempt to demonstrate some of these complicities (One-Dimensional Woman is rather like a drunken shouty version of McRobbie's points - I wish in fact that I had read more of her work before I had compiled mine, as a lot of what she has to say, particularly about work, is very close to what I tried to argue). Hester Eisenstein's Feminism Seduced (unfortunately still very expensive at the moment) seems to be arguing something similar - though while McRobbie makes it clear that feminism is not something to give up on, but rethought, it seems that Eisenstein is much more damning in her attack on 'International Feminism'. I'm working on a long piece on the two books so hopefully I can say something a bit more serious and coherent about them both in the next few months.
Anyway - thanks to everyone who has bought a copy, emailed me about it and bothered to read it - it means a lot.
