About Andrea Dworkin

http://www.andreadworkin.net/memorial/

This is a memorial website to Andrea Dworkin which provides biographical details about Andrea Dworkin and the life that she lived, written a year after her death in 2005. 

http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/index.html

This is the Andrea Dworkin website and online library.

Andrea Dworkin's reputation and legacy is anything but a given, both within the feminist community and outside of it. One of the better reviews of the diversity of her life and career is her obituary in The Guardian, where she worked as a writer: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/apr/12/guardianobituaries.gender.

She is as well known for her opposition to pornography from a feminist perspective (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmEsu1TTJ-Y) as she is for her graphic, rape-narrative writings like the book that we are going to read over the course of this semester). There were those who loved her (http://www.andreadworkin.net/memorial/toandreawithlove.html), those who hated her (including, among others, Larry Flynt, who accused her of endorsing incest), and those who were critical of her strategy of critiquing gender subordination (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18egan.html). 

The book that we are going to read for this semester, Mercy, has been viewed as "Declaring War on Men" (http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/15/books/declaring-war-on-men.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm), important in naming atrocity (http://demonista.livejournal.com/31476.html), as an "event" in gender politics (http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-27/news/vw-1533_1_andrea-dworkin), as a critique of the current legal orthodoxy on gender (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265442), and as pornographic (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3312343). It is, in theory, a novel; in practice, it is somewhat (if not entirely) autobiographical of Andrea Dworkin (a question played with in both the prologue and the epilogue of the book). On one hand, it is meant to suggest that the main character could be anyone; on the other hand, it is an account of deeply personal experiences that shaped her view of gender politics. 

Testing Anonymity

(Sent from a different, anonymous email address) 

Testing Email Posting, Blog Rules

The class blog is at mercyreading.blogspot.com. It is not searchable, and your posts will be anonymous (all under my name) because you will email them to drlaurajd.mercy@blogger.com, and they will then be published. I will be able to see the email address they came from, but no one else in the course (or on the internet) will be able to. You may comment (anonymously) on others' posts to engage in the conversation, though posts only will count as substantive contributions for the purpose of grading (7 points each, plus four points for comments over the course of the semester).  While no topic is off limits, please do use discretion in your use of explicitly sexual content. You willsee, when you logon to the blog, a warning about adult content. This is not meant to give you free rein on all adult content, only to allow the subject matter of the course to be discussed freely. 

Class description: (Un)Common Reading: Mercy

(Un)common Reading: Mercy

When controversial feminist Andrea Dworkin’s first fictional book was released in 1991, it was reviewed in the New York Times as “declaring war on men.” Perhaps that review was with good reason considering that the main character in the book, Andrea, tells a graphic story of a life of sexual abuse to explain while she now kills men. Though fictional, the book has been tagged as autobiographical, a property which Dworkin acknowledged shortly before her death.

The shocking language, graphic representations, and impassioned cries for freedom of slave narratives often frequent literature courses in high school and college – but Dworkin has written a book similar in style and substance about what she sees as the continued enslavement of women through sex subordination generally and sexual violence specifically. Using shock to make the invisible sexual violence of the world visible, Dworkin takes a very different approach to gender rights advocacy than either feminist theorists in academia or the feminist movement in the United States.

This one-credit course is centered around Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy, with short supplementary readings from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Beloved, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and My Bondage and My Freedom. Weekly discussions will center on the literary style, advocacy strategy, politics, and context of this controversial book, with brief lectures setting the scene for each part of the book.

Students uncomfortable with graphic sexual content and/or graphic sexual discussions should not enroll in this course.

Students will be expected to participate in discussions about parts of the book over the course of the semester, engage the (limited) supplemental readings, and contribute at least one post to the class blog over the course of the semester (anonymously, of course). The class blog will be an attempt to document the experiences of college students engaging with Dworkin’s Mercy in a similar, visceral, immediate sense as the narrator of Mercy accounts for her (tragic) life experiences.