Full Description
The Feminism of Uncertainty brings together Ann Snitow's passionate, provocative dispatches from forty years on the front lines of feminist activism and thought. In such celebrated pieces as "A Gender Diary"-which confronts feminism's need to embrace, while dismantling, the category of "woman"-Snitow is a virtuoso of paradox. Freely mixing genres in vibrant prose, she considers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and offers self-reflexive accounts of her own organizing, writing, and teaching. Her pieces on international activism, sexuality, motherhood, and the waywardness of political memory all engage feminism's impossible contradictions-and its utopian hopes.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Feminism of Uncertainty: I 1
Part I. Continuing a Gender Diary
1. A Gender Diary 21
2. Critiquing a Gender Diary 59
Part II. Mothers/Lovers
3. Introduction to Mothers/Lovers 71
4. Dorothy Dinnerstein: Creative Unknowing 80
5. From the Gender Diary: Living with Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923-1992) 93
6. Changing Our Minds about Motherhood: 1963-1990 97
7. The Sex Wars in Feminism: Retrenchment versus Transformation 123
8. The Poet of Bad Girls: Angela Carter (1940-1992) 139
9. Inside the Circus Tent: Excerpts from an Interview with Angela Carter, 1988 148
10. The Beast Within: Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo, by David Garnett 153
Part III. The Feminist Picaresque
11. Introduction to The Feminist Picaresque 159
12. Occupying Greenham Common 163
13. Feminist Futures in the Former East Bloc 191
14. Feminism Travels: Cautionary Tales 204
15. Who are the Polish Feminists? (Slawka) 216
16. "Should I Marry Him?" Questions from Students 228
17. The Peripatetic Feminist Activist/Professor Spends One Day in a Small City in Albania 238
18. Certainty and Doubt in the Classroom: Teaching Film in Prison 241
Part IV. Refugees from Utopia
19. Introduction to Refugees from Utopia 273
20. Remembering, Forgetting, and the Making of The Feminist Memoir Project 275
21. The Politics of Passion: Ellen Willis (1941-2006) 293
22. Returning to the Well: Revisiting Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex 297
Part V. The Feminism of Uncertainty
23. Introduction to The Feminism of Uncertainty 307
24. Life Sentence: My Uncertainty Principle 310
25. Doubt's Visionary: Doris Lessing 316
26. Utopia, Downsized: A Farrago 328
27. The Feminism of Uncertainty: II 330
Appendix: Publication History 335
Bibliography 339
Index 355
