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redbecca's review against another edition
3.0
This book has been hugely influential in a number of fields, though reading it now, it's hard to imagine it could be written today, especially because of how Brown discusses racial politics. It's very much a creature of the 1990s. Let's call it "peak Foucault." I'd say it was "peak Postmodern" except for the lack of clarity for many about what that term means, but she uncritically uses Nietzsche's theories of "ressentiment"and "slave morality" to attack what were essentially movements to her left at the time. The essays at the end of the book, on Marx's "On the Jewish Question" and on liberalism's family values are the strongest and most provocative critiques of liberalism. The discussion of gender and the identity of woman is also a clearer articulation of anti-essentialist feminism than available in Judith Butler's work, and could be valuable for teaching. On the other hand, I found Brown's discussion of race and "identity politics" to be both remarkably polemical and poorly historically informed. The book's emphasis on combating Catherine MacKinnon is a bit like an attack on an already collapsed pinata. I was a grad student in a feminist studies program in the 1990s, and I still don't recall any serious feminist academic agreed with her about anything, so it is hard to understand why she comes up so frequently in the book, unless it's to critique others by association.
garberdog's review against another edition
4.0
Good, but clearly dated. Oddly, the best/most compelling essays were not those for which this book is most famous (eg "Wounded Attachments), which I found to be overly abstract and lacking contemporary relavance, but rather those where Brown most directly engages in explicitly feminist theorizing (eg "The Mirror of Pornography" and "Finding the Man in the State").
As an aside, it's interesting, having now read this book, to note how it circulates in current debates over trigger warnings, the neoliberal university, and related topics. Those who invoke it don't really seem to be engaging with the substance or or nuance of Brown's original arguments, but are instead invoking a quasi-libertarian view of politics, the state, and the subject.
As an aside, it's interesting, having now read this book, to note how it circulates in current debates over trigger warnings, the neoliberal university, and related topics. Those who invoke it don't really seem to be engaging with the substance or or nuance of Brown's original arguments, but are instead invoking a quasi-libertarian view of politics, the state, and the subject.
redbecca's review
3.0
This book has been hugely influential in a number of fields, though reading it now, it's hard to imagine it could be written today, especially because of how Brown discusses racial politics. It's very much a creature of the 1990s. Let's call it "peak Foucault." I'd say it was "peak Postmodern" except for the lack of clarity for many about what that term means, but she uncritically uses Nietzsche's theories of "ressentiment"and "slave morality" to attack what were essentially movements to her left at the time. The essays at the end of the book, on Marx's "On the Jewish Question" and on liberalism's family values are the strongest and most provocative critiques of liberalism. The discussion of gender and the identity of woman is also a clearer articulation of anti-essentialist feminism than available in Judith Butler's work, and could be valuable for teaching. On the other hand, I found Brown's discussion of race and "identity politics" to be both remarkably polemical and poorly historically informed. The book's emphasis on combating Catherine MacKinnon is a bit like an attack on an already collapsed pinata. I was a grad student in a feminist studies program in the 1990s, and I still don't recall any serious feminist academic agreed with her about anything, so it is hard to understand why she comes up so frequently in the book, unless it's to critique others by association.
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