Kate Millett – författare

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors-D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet-and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors-D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet-and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

It is, in the words of the noted Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, "a passionate, heroic effort to fathom the nature of a phenomenon that all too often drains us emotionally and incapacitates us intellectually."Millett analyzes the individual's monumental fear of the state through the rich literature of its expression—a mixture of literary text (Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Mathabane's Kaffir Boy, Bharadwaj's film Closet Land), the reports of witnesses, legal theory, and historical account. The literary version of their experience is the most arresting; it prevails and persuades with the greatest effect: the reality of the victim, the social and psychological climate of life under dictatorship, the moment of capture when one is "disappeared," that pivotal electronic second after which nothing is ever the same.

Kate Millett''s tremulous and hauntingly beautiful memoir begins with a telephone call from Minnesota where her mother is dying. Her return home to a severe, intelligent, and controlling matriarch is the catalyst for a meditation on her upbringing in middle America and her subsequent outcast status as a political activist, artist, and lesbian.Mother Millett is an intensely personal journey through the author''s interior life, a subject she has visited over the years in such classic texts as Sita and The Loony Bin Trip. In these pages are reflections on a life of political engagement, beginning with the sexual politics of the feminist movement, proceeding to the struggle for gay liberation, and culminating in her campaign for housing rights on the Lower East Side of New York where she and her neighbors currently face eviction. Throughout, Millett confronts her fears of losing her mother, the anchor to a world she has long ago rejected but which continues to define her.Echoing Philip Roth''s Patrimony, Millett writes with great poignancy about caring for the person who brought her into the world, a role reversal that brings with it both devastation and grace.