American writer
Ellen Willis (December 14 1941 – November 9 2006) was an American essayist and critic. She was director of the cultural journalism program at New York University and co-founder of the feminist group Redstockings. She played an important role in the development of sex-positive feminism.
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Alternative Names:
Ellen Jane Willis
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A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket values; to subordinate every aspect of American life to corporate "efficiency" and the bottom line; to demonize not only government but the very idea of public service and public goods.
Though self-definition is the necessary starting point for any liberation movement, it can take us only so far. The most obvious drawback of identity politics is its logic of fragmentation into ever smaller and more particularist groups: the fracturing of the radical feminist movement along class and gay-straight lines (the racial divide having kept most black women out of the movement to begin with) is the sobering paradigm. What's at stake here, however, is not only the pragmatic question (crucial as it is) of how to avoid being divided and conquered, but our understanding of what it means to be a principled radical...Almost from the beginning, second wave feminism was a study in the limits of the identity politics it did so much to promote.
For my generation, formed equally by the liberating exuberance of rock and roll and the imperial brutality of Vietnam, the question of where we stood on America was inescapable. Was this nation (it!) the enemy, tyrannical abroad, hopelessly racist at home, and in the process of choking to death on a glut of consumer goods? Or were we (we!), however corrupted by various forms of power, still the source of a vital democratic impulse that fed cultural dissidence and subverted authoritarian values all over the world? I took the latter position, and through the '6os and '7os, exploring its paradoxes was a central concern of my writing.