Though it’s now two decades since Andrea Dworkin died, her widower John Stoltenberg still finds it difficult to talk about her. “I sometimes break down,” he warns me, his mellow voice bumpy for just a moment. In a way, of course, she’s all around. He has stayed on in the Washington DC condominium where she died (he lives there with his husband of 15 years, Joe Hamilton); her books and music – she loved country – are a constant reminder of the life they shared. But her absence is deeply felt nonetheless. “It was a huge loss. Sometimes, I turn to her work just to hear her voice again. I connect to the way her mind was working, and I kind of invent a conversation with her.” In truth, it’s a blessing that she was a writer. In 2005, at the mortuary to discuss her cremation, he heard the horrible word “cremains” for the first time. “In that moment, I had the insight that Andrea’s remains would really be her words. They live on as she doesn’t.”
At first, admittedly, those words continued to be read only by a select few. At the best of times, Dworkin was a polarising figure, her uncompromising feminism despised by right and left alike (the right insisted she was a man-hater who believed all sex was rape; on the left, sex-positive feminists loathed her crusade against pornography). But slowly, this changed. “She joined several zones of conversation,” as Stoltenberg puts it. First, the scholars started working on her, devoting chapter after chapter to Dworkin in their academic books. Then, a new generation of feminists began rediscovering her. “I’ve subscribed to a service that tracks mention of Andrea, and I really shouldn’t spend so much time with it, because it giveth and it taketh away,” he says. “I mean, people still write the most vile stuff about her. But there’s also the most amazing engagement and rapture around her work, especially from younger women. Only yesterday, I came upon her entry in the Urban Dictionary…” With a smile, he reads it to me. It calls Dworkin “the most iconic radical feminist EVERERRR” and deploys several exclamation marks for emphasis.
