“TO ORGASM WITHOUT TERROR” | Feminism or Death by Francoise d’Eaubonne
Review | The OG Ecofeminist On the Side of Life
At the time, Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health was in the works, so there's a focus on matters of abortion that can seem untimely now but never is.
In 1974 the founder of Mouvement de Libération des Femmes and of the feminist ecology movement Feminist Front, Françoise d’Eaubonne published a book that asks the question of our time: feminism or death?
sible, to destroy power. The transfer must be made from
phallocratic man, responsible for this sexist civilization,
to women, awakened to the disasters.
—Françoise d’Eaubonne, Feminism or Death?
The entire heart of radical feminism is here. It has the force of Dworkin, the historical acumen of Irigaray, the theoretical sophistication of Millett, the ambition of Daly, the anarchist daring of Goldman, the commitment of Davis—all wrapped up in the staggered rhythm of a too-faithful translation from the French.
Thrutopia? TrAd? Solving the poly crisis? The conversation in our upcoming Reading Circle will consider these contemporary movements that have their roots all right here.
• women’s sexual/social autonomy and pleasure through
the end of compulsory femininity, or ‘femitude’;
• women’s control over population size via contraception
and abortion as practiced in cultures that recognized femininity as a humanity;
• the replacement of men’s power/domination of the
earth for profit with a women’s ‘power of non-power,’ or
non-dominating principles of social and economic organization.
Yes, please, let’s go! Fuck’s sake, we have been saying this for long enough and men (‘of all genders’) keep riding roughshod over women and the earth—their legally protected privileges making sure it hasn’t cost them enough yet, and by the time it does most of us will be dead or wishing we were.
Orgasm and abortion are central to d’Eaubonne’s ecofemi- nism. Placing these elements of bodily experience at the core keeps the focus on women’s replete humanity and historically proven wisdom regarding rates of reproduction, two principles absent from communist/Marxist goals for revolution and the wider ecological conservancy movements of d’Eaubonne’s day … all the way to this one.
Impeding both orgasm and abortion (women’s autonomy) is the phallocratic institution of ‘femitude.’ Distinct from ‘femininity,’ femitude is that collection of stereotypes and social practices that diminish women’s be-ing to render us servile, right down to how we experience our sexuality. Femitude gives us a word for ‘woman’ in man’s/the patriarchal imaginary that leaves ‘femininity’ and ‘the feminine’ available for positive metaphysical and phenomenological meanings.
D’Eaubonne’s touchstones are Kate Millett and Simone de Beauvoir, founding theorists on this collection of practices. (In fact, if you read these three, you are well grounded as a radical feminist.)
Femininity, in d’Eaubonne’s lexicon, is the female element of sexual difference woven with women’s various temperaments and elaborated historically in the periods when women have asserted their own wills. Femininity isn’t exactly ‘pre-discursive’ or outside politics, but it is not a wholesale construct of ‘masculitude’s’ psycho-sexual projections either.
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