Anastasia
radical feminism / materialist feminism
About
I'm a Millennial and a former philosophy, language, and law student with a long and somewhat strange history with feminist thought: my perspective is partially grounded in having attended a Seven Sisters college, but despite being shaped by that and picking up a lot of gender theory by osmosis, I still spent years as the "proper" sort of nominal feminist who stuck to "serious," masculine-coded schools of thought. I also disliked radical feminism and had sympathies for queer theory.None of this led me anywhere good, and I rediscovered a specifically radical feminist analysis piece by piece over time, largely through trial and error. Since figuring out how everything fit together, I've been obsessively consuming feminist theory, particularly but not exclusively radical feminist theory, ever since. My favorite figures are probably Catharine MacKinnon and Collette Guillaumin.
Polemics
Since this question is inescapable, no, I don't consider myself a TERF. I once held a "moderate" gender critical position, but found out the hard way that even that was transphobic and self-destructive. I've written several essays at Substack challenging gender critical ideology in the time since.I don't have a set policy position concerning sex work, but I do strongly believe that the reification of women as an object of sexual exchange is the root of gender oppression and am skeptical of reformist movements. If this makes me a "SWERF," so be it.I have concerns about purity politics within radfem circles, but I'm very strongly committed to the radical feminist critique of sexuality. I don't reject the "sex negative" label, since I do not think there's any reason not to be negative about the way sexuality is constructed by heterosexual power dynamics under patriarchy.
Reading Recommendations
As this is a question that comes up fairly regularly, my standard recommendations are as follows:For anyone wishing for a brief introduction to Second Wave feminism, a good and balanced anthology is Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore's Women's Liberation! It spans about three decades, touches upon many of the major figures, and seeks to present the diversity that was actually present during this time period.For a more extensive reading project, I would suggest Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex as a first stop, followed by Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex) and Kate Millett (Sexual Politics). I would add Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider) and bell hooks (Ain't I a Woman, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center) to this list for the junction between radical feminism and intersectional feminism, as well as Marxist feminist Silvia Federici (Patriarchy of the Wage, Caliban and the Witch). Additional recommendations can be found on the next pages.
Dworkin & MacKinnon
A decent anthology of Andrea Dworkin's writing is Last Days at Hot Slit, which includes significant selections of all of her major works. If you wish to read several of her books in full, in my view her most important contributions are Right Wing Women, Intercourse, and Pornography.Catharine MacKinnon's work usually takes the form of collections of speeches and essays. Chronologically, the first is Feminism Unmodified, while the most recent is Butterfly Politics. Either of these is a good starting place, though I think the second is somewhat more comprehensive. Her actual theory is developed in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, though I believe it is better to have prior exposure to her essays before tackling it.Dworkin and MacKinnon are very powerful when read together, as they profoundly influence each other but are quite different in form, since Dworkin is a social critic and MacKinnon a legal theorist. A third person I would recommend is Dworkin's widower, John Stoltenberg (Refusing to be a Man).
French Materialist Feminism
My favorite form of radical feminism to date is actually what was developed in France, somewhat in opposition to the cultural feminism of Luce Irigaray and others of the school associated with her. This is all highly dedicated to social constructionism and denaturalizing women's oppression. One anthology available in English that includes selections from all the major figures is Sex in Question.The individual works most accessible to English speakers are Christine Delphy's Close to Home, Monique Wittig's The Straight Mind, and Colette Guillaumin's Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology. To those who read French or Italian, I would also recommend Paola Tabet.Their approach has sometimes been described as providing the material basis for a sex class analysis lacking in branches of radical feminism that instead start with bio-essentialism. (Note: for those who wish to avoid anything that could be described as TERF literature, Delphy is gender critical, though it does not appear in her works and is, if anything, inconsistent with her actual theory.)