My Name is Andrea: A Review by aurora linnea

On screen in slants of light like the sun returning the actresses speak, another woman’s words in their mouths. The words are Andrea Dworkin’s, from a speech she gave in 1983 to a room full of men. It is a famous speech now, in which she tells the men: “I want a twenty-four hour truce during which there is no rape.” And she says, and the actresses say for her: on that day when not one woman is raped and only on that day will women begin to know freedom. All the women who are Andrea say, “I want to experience just one day of real freedom before I die.” 

When the film ends I am in a dark room asking myself, how many women have been raped today? How many girls, how many women have been beaten, how many have been bought and sold, how many women did men murder today? Andrea Dworkin died in 2005, never having known that single day of freedom she asked for. Men could not spare one day; there was no truce and they have not given us a day of peace, not even one lousy hour since then, meaning that there is no woman in this theater with me in this art museum in this city who has ever experienced real freedom. We sit together in the silence of our bondage, still so unfree. 

The panelists take their place on stage for the Q&A. Both are women, one the organizer of the Maine Jewish Film Festival, the other the director of a local domestic violence resource center. A young woman in the audience raises her hand to ask a question, though she has no question to ask. Instead she expresses her astonishment – and I am paraphrasing – “I had no idea Andrea Dworkin was so radical. She was such a visionary!” She is delighted that Dworkin was opposed to racism, to war. The young woman continues, “I tend to associate women of her generation with trans-exclusionary feminist politics, but…” 

What is wrong with her, I could scream. What is wrong with us? And then I remember: she and I, every woman in this theater, we are all of us so murderously, mind-numbingly, heartbreakingly unfree. 

We were gathered in the Portland Museum of Art for My Name is Andrea, a documentary directed by feminist filmmaker Pratibha Parmar and featuring high-profile actresses in the role of Andrea Dworkin at defining moments in her life and career. Her name, the actresses repeat, means courage. My Name is Andrea premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival to rave reviews, apparently, from publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker, which during her lifetime occupied themselves slandering Dworkin and refusing to print the editorials she penned in answer to their misrepresentations. Now that she has been dead for almost twenty years, it seems, the New York Times is only too happy to dust off a nice little pedestal for her, to welcome the ghost of her into polite society as some kind of #MeToo prophetess—as if #MeToo were the real feminist movement, and the one that had Dworkin at its vanguard merely a (poorly dressed) rehearsal. Dworkin could have predicted this belated change of heart: the only good woman is a dead woman, after all. 

But My Name is Andrea cannot be blamed for the sleaziness of malestream culture’s current scheme to repackage and repurpose Andrea Dworkin, a maneuver reflective not of real reverence but rather the dominant culture’s classic strategy, articulated by Antonio Gramsci, of incorporating insurgent elements as a means to defuse them. Through co-optation, what looks like celebration turns out to be sabotage. While the New York Times may be less than sincere in its newfound affection for its former feminazi boogeywoman, Pratibha Parmar’s admiration seems earnest, and her documentary succeeds as an introduction to Dworkin as a woman, a writer, and a revolutionary. 

Predictably, the film leans on #MeToo to provide the context for Dworkin’s feminism, playing up those aspects of Dworkin’s life and work that resonate with the “speak out” rhetoric #MeToo popularized. There is a definite focus on Dworkin’s personal experiences of male violence: her girlhood molestation by a stranger in a movie theatre, the torturous gynecological exam/rape inflicted on her at New York’s Women’s Detention Center after she was arrested at a protest, the anarchist freedom-fighter husband who battered and stalked her. And while #MeToo is hardly radical, My Name is Andrea avoids bowdlerizing its subject to suit the tastes of today’s junk-feminism-addled palate. With rare even-handedness and clarity, Parmar presents Dworkin’s uncompromising stance against pornography—as well as how that stance relegated her to pariah status, relentlessly pilloried by defenders of pornographic “speech” and “liberation.” My Name is Andrea trounces convention in its portrayal of Dworkin’s opposition to pornography by not simply taking it for granted that she was wrong.

I admit I was leery at the prospect of celebrities like Ashley Judd and Vogue-favorite Soko in the role of Dworkin, but the dramatic vignettes did not spoil the film with glossy revisionism as I feared they might. At worst, they were mildly cliche, occasionally veering towards tackiness. The star-studded flashbacks were inoffensive but in the end unnecessary, for My Name is Andrea contains authentic treasures: home movies of Dworkin as a tiny girl beaming and flapping in pastel puff-sleeved fifties dresses, yellowed photographs of little Andrea on her father’s shoulders, a twenty-something Dworkin kneeling with her arms around the neck of a German Shepherd. There was footage of Dworkin on her typewriter at home (such a treat to read the titles on her bookshelves) and photos of a Dworkin I’d never seen, young and optimistic and regal in a dark caftan standing alongside her husband, Ivan, the anarchist wife-beater. So now I know he looked like any other man. And though I was already familiar with many of the speeches excerpted in the film, what a joy to revisit them, as it is always a joy to return to Andrea, to soak in the tender, grueling seriousness of her singular voice, the hitch that tremored at its pith bespeaking a sorrow and rage almost uncontainable. 

My Name is Andrea is not a perfect film. There were moments I winced, as when Parmar juxtaposed audio of Dworkin describing her wish for a “genderless society” with footage of drag queens mincing on the street. Of course, men in false eyelashes striking poses and blowing kisses was not the “genderlessness” Dworkin envisioned—to imply otherwise is obvious pandering to the queer camp. I was likewise unsettled by Parmar’s equally transparent striving to shake Dworkin’s “man-hater” image by drawing attention to her youthful idolization of male radicals like the poet Allen Ginsberg and Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers. It’s a fact that the example set by these men was formative for Dworkin. No less formative, however, was her realization that the men who personified revolutionary struggle were in no rush to disown the privileges male power afforded them. Ginsberg championed pedophilia as a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association; Newton had been a pimp and in 1974 was accused of shooting a 17-year-old prostituted girl—the girl died, and Dworkin did not believe Newton when he claimed the police framed him. The rifts that grew between Dworkin and her old heroes were pivotal to Dworkin’s evolution as a feminist thinker. Her heroes let her down, and for Parmar to leave this out not only obscures Dworkin’s political education but reinforces the Great Man mythos that cloaks figures like Ginsberg and Newton in a protective cocoon. 

Whatever My Name is Andrea’s flaws, they shrunk to trifles once the Q&A got underway. A grim affair, it began with the young woman’s casual dismissal of an entire generation of feminist leaders as “trans exclusionary.” Next came a mother explaining how her children, now in their twenties, view pornography as a means of “taking back their power,” a Times-They-Are-a-Changin’ exegesis that prompted the film festival director to concur that nowadays women can get rich and “call the shots” making porn, because “sex work” has really come up in the world. (Thankfully, several women in the audience disputed this breezy praise of an industry founded on degradation, commodification, and exploitation.) Many minutes were devoted to speculating on the sex lives of Dworkin and her life partner, John Stoltenberg, a gay man. A woman went on at length about her own gay husband, all the “great sex” they had. 

Women who had not read Dworkin’s work and knew nothing about her apart from the caricature men have made of her memory were pleasantly surprised to discover that Andrea Dworkin did not prioritize women as singlemindedly as they’d been led to believe. She cared about racism, about police violence, about poverty, about peace! She desired a “genderless society!” One woman expressed the relief she felt learning that Dworkin aimed to be a “voice for the voiceless,” regardless of gender.

The subtext was deafening: thank god she didn’t set her sights so low as to concentrate solely on women. 

It is because we are unfree that we do not believe ourselves or our sex class worthy of prioritization. There is always someone more deserving than a woman, always some issue more pressing than women’s liberation. We think this way because we do not yearn for freedom because we cannot even imagine it, because for millennia we have been unfree. 

When I had my chance at the microphone, I asked the panelists why self-proclaimed feminists and organizations created to address men’s violence against women have stopped talking about male power, male domination, male supremacy and female oppression, the political emergency that Andrea Dworkin articulated with such clarity and eloquence. Why have we lost that analysis, I asked. Can we afford to lose it?

The director of the domestic violence resource center – the mission statement of which mentions neither women nor men but only “people” and “individuals” – answered. She said that, while her organization does promote a feminist understanding of male violence against women, they must also take into account that domestic violence is experienced by people of all genders, all sexualities, etc. The organization may not do a “perfect job” of balancing these two perspectives, she conceded. But they mean well. Their Good Intention is “broadening the tent.” 

Yet to eliminate all reference to men’s violence and its role in the oppression of women, pretending as if domestic abuse is a “gender neutral” phenomenon that affects all people equally, is not to broaden the tent; it is to take down its poles. I spent years crouching under that disassembled tent, as a women’s shelter worker and as a volunteer supporting raped women on a hotline and in the hospital. We worked our hardest to make it safe in the tent, cozy, friendly, but we could illume no path out of it that would lead women in the direction of female freedom; there was no end to patriarchal brutality in sight from our vantage point beneath the sagging tarpaulin and we drafted no strategies to end it ourselves, deciding instead to avert our eyes; there was no vision, no political literacy, no organized resistance, no action. We took women in and dressed their wounds, told them it wasn’t their fault, sat at their bedsides in the middle of the night while the nurse swabbed between their legs for the rape kit, referred them to a therapist, then released them out into the same merciless manmade woman-eating world, which we had not changed. And what became of women out there, do you dare to guess? The same atrocities happened over and over until they became mundane and I watched the same everyday carnage pooling around me, congealing, thick and dark and dismal, on my knees in a hopeless oversized tent. 

Glad as I was that so many women were out on a Sunday afternoon to see a documentary about Andrea Dworkin, it terrifies me that it could end there for them. What a hideous waste it would be if all they got out of the film was reassurance that Andrea Dworkin cared about things more important than women, women’s dignity, women’s bodies, women’s lives. My desperate hope is that some of the women were roused enough by My Name is Andrea that they’ll find one of Dworkin’s books and actually read it, actually learn something. Start with Our Blood (1976), the book I gave both my younger sisters. Read Intercourse (1987), in spite of what you’ve heard, do it now, it’s urgent. I think that if these women would read what Andrea Dworkin wrote then maybe they could begin to feel it again: the flare in the heart, the animal churn that signals the resuscitation of our longing to be free. And then maybe together we will be ready to chart a plan less pathetic than putting ourselves to the side and selling ourselves short in an ever-expanding tent. Maybe, if we are fierce and proud in our fight for women, as Andrea Dworkin knew we’d have to be if we do not apologize for this fight that we have chosen, maybe then we will finally claim for ourselves one day of real freedom, in Andrea’s honor. 

Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.