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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the discursive register through which lives become grievable by focusing on a case study of the discourses surrounding the death of radical feminist, Andrea Dworkin. I argue that Dworkin becomes embroiled in an interlocking nexus of illicit subject positions that set the terms of her grievability and obstruct recognition of her as a rational being by framing her (1) as the quintessential emotional and irrational woman who is not worthy of the respect typically offered to the dead and (2) in relation to her wild, unruly, and excessive body, which is conflated with her feral work.
Acknowledgments
Valerie Palmer-Mehta is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism at Oakland University. This work was supported by the 2014 Oakland University Faculty Research Fellowship. The author would like to thank Holly Gilbert, Alina Haliliuc, Erin Meyers, and Sara Ahmed for their helpful comments on various drafts of this paper. The author also thanks the reviewers and especially the editor.
Notes
1. Folker Hanusch, Representing Death in the News: Journalism, Media and Mortality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 5–6.
2. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
3. Ibid., 22.
4. Ibid., 34.
5. See, for example, Mushara Eid, The World of Obituaries: Gender Across Cultures and Over Time (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002); Bridget Fowler, “Mapping the Obituaries: Notes Towards A Bourdieusian Interpretation,” The Sociological Review 52, no. 2 (2004): 148–72; Bridget Fowler and Esperanca Bielsa, “The Lives We Choose to Remember: A Quantitative Analysis of Newspaper Obituaries,” The Sociological Review 55, no. 2 (2007): 203–26; Nigel Starck, “Death Can Make a Difference,” Journalism Studies 9, no. 6 (2008): 911–24; Nigel Starck, “Sex after Death: The Obituary as an Erratic Record of Proclivity,” Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and Dying 14, no. 4 (2009): 352.
6. Michael Warren Tumolo, Jennifer Biedendorf, and Kevin Ayotte, “Un/civil Mourning: Remembering with Jacques Derrida,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2014): 107–28.
7. Judith Grant, “Andrea Dworkin and the Social Construction of Gender: A Retrospective,” Signs 31, no. 4 (2006): 967.
8. Dworkin as quoted in Katherine Viner, “She Never Hated Men,” The Guardian, April 12, 2005, Arts & Books section.
9. Christine Stark, “Andrea Dworkin and Me,” Feminist Studies 34, no. 3 (2008): 584–90.
10. Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 168, 196.
11. Starck, “Death Can Make,” 916; Illene Noppe, “Gender and Death: Parallel and Intersecting Pathways,” in Living with Dying: A Handbook for End-of-Life Practioners, ed. Joan Berzoff and Phyllis Silverman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 210–11. See also Eid, “The World of Obituaries,” who reports a pattern of erasure in the West and Middle East.
12. Shulamith Firestone produced similarly provocative writings. However, Firestone was diagnosed with schizophrenia later in life, and this influences the tone of the discourses marking her death.
13. Butler, Precarious Life, 34.
14. Fowler and Bielsa, “The Lives We Choose,” 208.
15. Ibid.
16. Noppe, “Gender and Death,” 210.
17. Shirley Matile Ogletree, Patricia Figueroa, and Danielle Pena, “A Double Standard in Death? Gender Differences in Obituaries,” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 51, no. 4 (2005): 337–42.
18. Eid, World of Obituaries; Noppe, “Gender and Death,” 210; Olgetree, Figueroa, and Pena, “A Double Standard,” 341.
19. Noppe, “Gender and Death,” 210.
20. Ibid.
21. Starck, “Death Can Make,” 917.
22. Noppe, “Gender and Death,” 210.
23. Pamela Roberts and Lourdes Vidal, “Perpetual Care in Cyberspace: A Portrait of Memorials on the Web,” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 40, no. 4 (2000): 521–45.
24. Starck, “Sex after Death,” 342.
25. Anis Bawarshi, “The Genre Function,” College English 62, no. 3 (2000): 356.
26. Fowler, “Mapping the Obituaries,” 148.
27. Lisa Shaver, Beyond the Pulpit: Women's Rhetorical Roles in the Antebellum Religious Press (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 2012), 19.
28. Bawarshi, “The Genre Function,” 355–6.
29. Tumolo, Biedendorf, and Ayotte, “Un/civil Mourning,” 111.
30. Butler, Precarious Life, 34.
31. Ibid., 22.
32. Ibid., 32.
33. Ibid., 34.
34. Ibid., 37.
35. Ibid., 37–38.
36. Sara Ahmed, Willfull Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 140.
37. The term “discourses” is employed here instead of obituary because some of the discourses studied by the authors lapse into opinion, which situates those discourses outside of the obituary genre proper.
38. Tumolo, Biedendorf, and Ayotte, “Un/civil Mourning,” 115.
39. Ibid., 116–18.
40. Ibid., 109.
41. See Dworkin's “Prostitution and Male Supremacy,” in Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 139–51.
42. Grant, “Andrea Dworkin,” 967.
43. Catherine Lutz, “Engendered Emotion: Gender, Power, and the Rhetoric of Emotional Control in American Discourse,” in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harre and W. Gerrod Parrott (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 166.
44. Ibid., 166; Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 170.
45. Lutz, “Engendered,” 158.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 170.
49. Ibid., 170.
50. Tumolo, Biedendorf, and Ayotte, “Un/civil Mourning,” 108, 111.
51. Cathy Young, “The Misdirected Passion of Andrea Dworkin” The Boston Globe, April 18, 2005, Opinion section.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Dworkin, Life and Death, 99.
55. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 172.
56. Susan Reverby, “Spent Years Refuting Dworkin,” The Boston Globe, April 19, 2005, Opinion section.
57. The New Criterion, “About the New Criterion,” The New Criterion, http://www.newcriterion.com/aboutus.cfm (accessed July 19, 2015).
58. New Criterion, “Unheralded Genius?” The New Criterion 23, issue, May 2005, Notes & Comments section.
59. Catharine MacKinnon, “Who was Afraid of Andrea Dworkin,” The New York Times, April 16, 2005, Opinion section.
60. New Criterion, “Unheralded Genius.”
61. Ibid.
62. Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 2.
63. Dworkin, Life and Death, 11.
64. Barbara Tomlinson, Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010), 1.
65. Ibid.
66. Jonathan Gornal, “For Ms. Dworkin, Fact Wasn't a Feminist Issue,” Times of London, April 18, 2005, 11, Life section.
67. Gornal, “For Ms. Dworkin.”
68. Taking her 1999 rape allegation in Paris, which some critics viewed as dubious, as a point of departure, Gornal suggests that all her accounts of abuse were fabricated.
69. Margalit Fox, “Andrea Dworkin, Writer and Crusading Feminist, Dies at 58,” The New York Times, April 12, 2005, Life section.
70. Ibid.
71. Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, “Women's Champion: Obituary, Andrea Dworkin,” Financial Times; London, April 14, 2005, Arts & Ideas section.
72. Katha Pollitt, “Andrea Dworkin, 1946–2005,” The Nation, April 14, 2005, Gender and Sexuality section.
73. Vivian Gornick, “Welcome Buzz Saw in the Gender War,” L.A. Times, April 19, 2005, News section.
74. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 177.
75. Jo Ind, “Perspective: Waxing Lyrical About the Dworkin,’ Birmingham Post, April 14, 2005, Features section.
76. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 171.
77. Ibid., 170.
78. Ibid., 171.
79. Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 82.
80. Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: Penguin, 1974), 113.
81. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 12.
82. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2007): 147–66.
83. Andrea Press, “‘Feminism? That's So Seventies’: Girls and Young Women Discuss Femininity and Feminism in America's Next Top Model,” in New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity, ed. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), 117–33.
84. Ibid.
85. MacKinnon, “Who was Afraid.”
86. Gornal, “For Ms. Dworkin.”
87. Yvonne Roberts, “Wrong and Wild, Just as We Required,” The Independent, April 17, 2005, Comment section.
88. Pollitt, “Andrea Dworkin 1946–2005.”
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. Gornick, “Welcome Buzz Saw.”
92. The Economist, “Obituary in Brief: Andrea Dworkin,” The Economist, April 28, 2005, World section.
93. Viner, “She Never Hated Men.”
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. Stephen Miller, “Andrea Dworkin,” The Sun, April 12, 2005, News section.
97. Times of London, “Andrea,” 58.
98. Fox, “Andrea Dworkin, Writer and Crusading.”
99. Melissa August, “Milestones April 25, 2005: Andrea Dworkin,” Time Magazine, April 17, 2005, Briefing section.
100. The Telegraph, “Andrea Dworkin,” The Telegraph, April 13, 2005, Obituary section.
101. Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 120.
102. MacKinnon, “Who was Afraid.”
103. Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 154.
104. Ibid., 157.
105. Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir, 71.