This quote and associated jpg were emailed to me by Caroline Bassett after my talk at University of Sussex, England. She was answering the Queer and Feminist Social Media Workshop’s Question: How can we understand the interconnections between radical art practices and cyberfeminisms?
“The long freezes of feminism leave slivers of ice in the ground. Shulamith Firestone, as her name suggests, both lit the spark and took the heat. That she did so against the odds, with such impatience, with such a sense of having deferred long enough, and with such a sense of hope, makes her work the more compelling. The Dialectic of Sex,is at once a shout of triumph – ‘now it is possible!’ – and a cry of pain and frustration about the distance to travel and the difficulty of getting there. It is in this light that Firestone’s sense of the final and sudden dissipation, the cancelling out of all that weight, the glorious and outrageous and utterly impious demand for an end to all this, to all of the fixed, fast, frozen relation that is sex class, and the demand for something really new, something androgyne, is so very powerful. From this distance, it is easily possible to find her hopelessly utopian in her reading of what technology will do. But I prefer to salute her impossible and properly utopian demand to let the unthinkable arise through the struggle: to take everything that is currently given – and cancel it … “
