Zionism, Militarism, and Antiporn: The Affects and Mutations of 1970s Feminist Radicalisms

• In Event: Jewish Feminisms, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine

Abstract

This paper theorizes the Zionism, anti-Black racism, and Islamophobia that came to undergird the anti-porn activism of once militant lesbian feminisms of the 1970s into the 1980s and 1990s. It traces the ways that Jewish feminists including Andrea Dworkin, Phyllis Chesler, and others sought to contend with a dwindling revolutionary landscape through an obsessive preoccupation with figures of victimhood, thereby justifying the bulking up of the US prison and military state in the service of Zionism and carceral feminisms in the intersecting domestic and transnational spheres.

Presenter

• Tamara Lea Spira, Western Washington University