Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin

Selections from the work of radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin, famous for her antipornography stance and role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s.

Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy, Dworkin was a philosopher outside and against the academy who wrote with a singular, apocalyptic urgency.

Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. The collection charts her path from the militant primer Woman Hating (1974), to the formally complex polemics of Pornography (1979) and Intercourse (1987) and the raw experimentalism of her final novel Mercy (1990). It also includes “Goodbye to All This” (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript that calls out her feminist adversaries, and “My Suicide” (1999), a despairing long-form essay found on her hard drive after her death in 2005.

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) was an American radical feminist author associated with antipornography, antirape, and battered women's movements of the 1970s and 80s. She wrote more than ten books, both nonfiction and fiction, and she coauthored, with feminist law professor Catherine Mackinnon, the highly controversial Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance of 1983.

Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, and coowner of Seagull Salon in New York. Her art criticism appears regularly in The New Yorker and Artforum.

Amy Scholder is an editor and writer. She is currently producing a documentary feature, Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, and serves as board president of Lambda Literary.

Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, and coowner of Seagull Salon in New York. Her art criticism appears regularly in The New Yorker and Artforum.