On Women
by
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87/99
Scholars' Citation Index
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About This Book
A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag's writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. "The most interesting ideas are heresies," she remarked, and indeed, her writing rejects the familiar and refuses party lines. On Women presents seven essays and exchanges, spanning a range of the challenges and humiliations women face as they age; the relationship between women's liberation and class struggle; beauty, which Sontag calls "that over-rich brew of so many familiar opposites"; feminism; fascism; and film. Taken together, these pieces―relentlessly curious, historically precise, politically robust, and allergic to easy categorization Sontag's inimitable mind at work.
Reviews
"Whether Sontag's defiant uncategorizability strikes you as subtlety or evasiveness depends on your stomach for uncertainty."
"Sontag's stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the feminist debates and preoccupations of her era can be distilled pretty well into tangible guidance for ours."
"To read such a statement in isolation is infuriating enough, and not only because you grow increasingly weary of the conviction that the past must always be measured against our own, supposedly morally superior, times ..."
"highlight both Sontag's ideas at the peak of the women's movement and the breadth of her boldly ranging rhetoric ..."
"Sontag doesn't come alive stylistically or intellectually unless she has cultural material with which to think."
"Though the selections date from the 1970s, the insights remain topical and serve as a window into a brilliant mind whose analysis continues to provoke."
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