In the wake of Shulamith Firestone’s untimely death, a number of tributes have appeared praising her work in feminist theory. While Firestone was a creative and risky thinker, unafraid of advancing drastically counter-intuitive ideas, it would be remiss to fail to point out that she hewed quite closely to one of the most central dogmas of our society – white supremacy. Angela Davis comments:
One of the earliest theoretical works associated with the contemporary feminist movement that dealt with the subject of rape and race was Shulamith Firestone’s “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist Revolution.” Racism in general, so Firestone claims, is actually an extension of sexism. Invoking the biblical notion that “. . . the races are no more than the various parents and siblings of the Family of Man,” she develops a construct defining the white man as father, the white woman as wife and mother, and Black people as the children. Transposing Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex into racial terms, Firestone implies that Black men harbor an uncontrollable desire for sexual relations with white women. They want to kill the father and sleep with the mother. Moreover, in order to “be a man,” the Black man must
… untie himself from his bond with the white female,
relating to her if at all only in a degrading way. In
addition, due to his virulent hatred and jealousy of
her Possessor, the white man, he may lust after her as
a thing to be conquered in order to revenge himself on
the white man.25Like Brownmiller, MacKellar and Russell, Firestone succumbs to the old racist sophistry of blaming the victim. Whether innocently or consciously, their pronouncements have facilitated the resurrection of the timeworn myth of the Black rapist. Their historical myopia further prevents them from comprehending that the portrayal of Black men as rapists reinforces racism’s open invitation to white men to avail themselves sexually of Black women’s bodies. The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous. For once the notion is accepted that Black men harbor irresistible and animal-like sexual urges, the entire race is invested with bestiality. If Black men have their eyes on white women as sexual objects, then Black women must certainly welcome the sexual attentions of white men. Viewed as “loose women” and whores, Black women’s cries of rape would necessarily lack legitimacy.
A week ago I decided to add Firestone to a syllabus for this coming semester. Bad timing, good timing?
May I ask where this Davis quote comes from? Might yet add it to the syllabus.
It’s from Davis’ Women Race and Class, Ch 11. Definitely worth adding, or at least discussing, alongside Firestone! What class is it for?
it’s basically a european intellectual history class, but with a particular focus on understandings of and through violence.
A strong and important analysis of Firestone’s racist thinking. I always had a problem with her visions of womb-less reproduction and her belief that the physical act of pregnancy and lactation consign women to their oppressed status. Many women CHOOSE and value the capacities of our bodies, find pleasure and meaning in pregnancy, child bearing and mothering and do not to want to see gestation in a test tube.
We can mourn her death–and her lonely life–and still critique her thinking.
‘Shulamith hewed quite closely to one of the most central dogmas of our society – white supremacy.’
This is nonsense. EVIL ANTISEMITIC NONSENSE.
The woman was mentally ill. She never had any power. She died a miserable death. I know a cousin of hers. The Rabbi said- tear a strip off your coat for her memory and they did. Back then, a lot of them were tailors or related to tailors. Still, they felt better for it.
You cunts got no fucking respect.
Who will miss you when you die? What have you achieved in any case?
A person can live and die poor and powerless and still make racist statements. You clearly don’t understand what racism is about.
semitic refers to language ; to imply race is so much sophistry. there is and never has been a semitic ” race”
[…] suggestion that ‘When the sex war is won, sex worker’s should be shot as collaborators’, and Shulasmith Firestone’s reliance on racist tropes in her mythic analysis of black men in the (otherwise indispensable) Dialectic of Sex. These episodes are simply especially public and […]
Reblogged this on Going Aground.
Okay, I’ve got to say something. To the comments and the writer of this post: Firestone was right. The analyzation of the phenomena of the fragile manhood of black men was relevent then and it’s VERY relevant now. Firestone was not a racist and did not seek to make black men out to be rapists, but to explain (to us black women who still didn’t get it) their behavior and sickness, which persists to this day and harms us black women. You see, WE are the victims, not the black men that Firestone analyzes. She brilliantly does the work of explaining to us why we are constantly hurt by hypermasculized black men, and it’s liberating. This is Firestone’s effort to reach out to the people she sees as the victims of the black man’s insecuries: black women. And many black women, whether they’ve read this section of the dialect of sex or not, are realizing this behavioral pattern in black men too, and would most likely be fasinated by Firestone’s analyse. I know I was. She’s a brilliant thinker, clearly not afraid of being misunderstood as racist or crazy in order to make her brilliant points. And as a black woman, I respect her and all of the ideas she presents in her book.
Not only that. She claims that white women’s racism is fake racism for it comes from the feeling of having a power they don’t really have, a delusion.Bullshit. Firestone fails to see that though women are powerless compared to men, they do have power over black people. A very bad chapter contained in a very good book.