Shulamith Firestone, 1997 © Lori Hiris
Discussed in this essay:
Airless Spaces, by Shulamith Firestone. Semiotext(e). 232 pages. $17.95.
Legends, fairy tales, and myths are rife with the constraints of prophecy: the necessity of surrender before the all-powerful grammar of future time; the hubris of trying to manipulate destiny; the shock of having already fucked your mother, despite your best efforts not to. Myth assumes that the future is like walking into a narrow tunnel, and the light at the end is neither train nor sunshine, but some terrifying third thing, blinding in its inevitability. Don’t even bother trying to guess. In these stories, the witch is always right, always in the wrong way. But what of the seers themselves? Are they never burdened, heartbroken by the unexpected shape of their own accuracy? Do they ever look at the world they predicted and say, That’s not what I meant? That’s not what I meant at all.
I must begin in the register of the mythical to discuss Shulamith Firestone, because that was the deliberate and unabashed scale of her project. It is often observed that The Dialectic of Sex, the work of theory she published in 1970, at the age of twenty-five, verges on the silvered edge of science fiction. The book floats like an opaline shape behind silhouetted winter branches, a cross-hatched, shining sky-thing, confounding yet airborne. A precocious manifesto of total feminist revolution, it is wildly flawed, and wildly far-flung; it is this wildness that has sustained it longer than much of the other cultural production of its milieu. An invigorating, infuriating read, its sentences buzz with the zeal of a convert. As she writes, “if there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it.”
Like many of her peers, Firestone called for “full sexual freedom.” But she expanded the meaning of those words. The Dialectic of Sex locates the source of all domination and hierarchy in the biological family, synthesizing Marx and Freud in an effort to dismantle the “sex class system.” In the future Firestone dared to imagine, families would be replaced by collectives, children would have autonomy, pregnancy would occur outside the body, and work would be fulfilling rather than demeaning. There would be “communistic anarchy” and the end of nation-states. Her argument is often contradictory and impulsive, working backward from a paradisiacal climax, leapfrogging over almost every practical concern—and plenty of ethical ones too. At its worst, her rhetoric is bigoted and myopic, perpetuating antiblack stereotypes in her psychosexual analysis of racial hierarchy in the United States. But she strives toward a worthy goal: “not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself,” so that “genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.” This sentence alone has redirected the life projects of many feminists, myself included. While some of her contemporaries were calling for global gynocracy and a return to the matriarchal, Firestone wanted to reshape biological reproduction and shed the categories of man and woman. She wanted us to “transcend Nature,” become something more human.
In the decades after The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone experienced a decline in her mental health, leading to periods of institutionalization and fleeting recovery, and withdrew from the women’s movement. Her only other book, Airless Spaces, was published in 1998 by the small radical publisher Semiotext(e); it was reissued earlier this year, with an introduction by Chris Kraus and an afterword by Susan Faludi. A novel in shards, Airless Spaces tells the stories of people who spend their days in and out of mental hospitals, afflicted by poverty, bureaucracy, and stigma. If The Dialectic of Sex is a euphoric glimpse of a distant UFO, Airless Spaces is a chemtrail latticing a gray sky, haunting those below. Its table of contents attests to its resolute gloom, with sections titled “Hospital,” “Post-Hospital,” “Losers,” “Obits,” and, finally, “Suicides I Have Known.” Firestone drifts between memoir and fiction; there are no sharp turns. Airless Spaces might easily be read as the scraggy roman à clef of an ex-revolutionary, defined by its lack of engagement with the former work of its author. (One imagines an eager critic holding each chapter up to the light, like a dollar, to search for a hidden watermark of politics.) But the difference between The Dialectic of Sex and Airless Spaces is not the difference, if there is one, between a radical feminist and a madwoman; it’s the gulf between soothsaying and surviving the present in the very society you once dreamed of overthrowing.
The chapters are mostly character sketches, often titled after their subjects’ full names, as if mimicking a medical file or a newspaper article. Some use the names of real people, but many seem to be aliases for Firestone herself. In its fragile totality, the book articulates the small, grave days of those persons whom the culture most often turns away from. In doing so, it steps into an unusual, and at times uncomfortable, mode of narrative, featuring weeks that are circular, protagonists who are vacant, and endings with no resolution. There is political possibility here, but its manifestations are stranger and lonelier than a revolution.
Firestone studied painting and made portraits in her youth, and Airless Spaces evokes that practice: stark images, boxed and framed, wrested from context yet stylized by the traces of a single lived instant. The stories sit like figures in a painting by Alice Neel, if all the camaraderie in Neel’s work were drained out: staring straight ahead, some steely, some yearning, countenances slightly askew, drawn with thick streaks of candor, elbows jutting sideways. The furniture always seems a little rickety; the room is only half filled in. The world beyond their immediate, urgent aura is blank as snow.
Firestone was born in 1945 in Ottawa, Ontario, to an Orthodox Jewish family. Her mother, a German-Jewish descendant of scholars and rabbis, escaped the Holocaust; her father was an assimilated Jewish Brooklynite who became Orthodox as a teenager. When Firestone was an infant, her father, then a soldier in the U.S. Army, witnessed the immediate aftermath of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen; as Shulamith’s sister Tirzah described it, “He was blown apart by the visuals, the unseeable visuals he took in.” In other words, Shulamith’s childhood occurred after an apocalypse. On the strange, surviving side of the end of the world, she grew up the second of six children, the eldest daughter. Their family settled in St. Louis, in a strict religious household defined by unwavering gender hierarchy. Only two of the six Firestone siblings remained Orthodox as adults, but Shulamith may have learned important lessons in her childhood, in form if not in content: how to commit oneself to a utopian project, holding fast to an ideology repudiated by mass culture; how to salvage a network of intimacy (however fraught) from the wreckage of historical dehumanization; how to step outside time.
Between 1967 and 1970, Firestone founded, led, and left four major feminist organizing groups in Chicago and New York City that were responsible for some of the most iconic political actions of the period: the 1968 protest at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, during which bras, mops, and lipstick tubes were thrown into a “Freedom Trash Can”; the “burial of traditional womanhood” at Arlington National Cemetery; and the first-ever abortion speak-out at the Washington Square Methodist Church. But the consciousness-raising sessions that Firestone and other feminists ran regularly across several apartments and offices in the East Village probably had the most far-reaching influence, along with their various publications, in which lodestone phrases like “the personal is political” and “sisterhood is powerful” first appeared. The effect is impossible to fully quantify, but the friendships, enmities, arguments, insights, subgroups, and countergroups that issued from these gatherings generated the lion’s share of the movement’s discourse.
When The Dialectic of Sex was published in October 1970, Firestone had already dropped out of feminist organizing; charges of elitism had caused her to part ways with the New York Radical Feminists the previous summer. This was hardly an isolated event. The infighting within the women’s-liberation movement was constant and severe. The ideals of self-critique and leaderless democracy sometimes led to brutal expulsions, in which founding members were voted out of their own organizations for having committed the sin of organizing them. In her afterword to the new edition of Airless Spaces, Faludi quotes a letter from Firestone to her sister Laya that recounts the dissolution of the group:
Basically, I don’t believe finally that the revolution is so imminent that it’s worth tampering with my whole psychological structure, submitting to mob rule, and so on, which is what they’re all into.
It is impossible to disentangle the paranoia of individuals from the paranoid structure of the movement at large; an activist collective is always greater than the sum of its parts and also (woefully, wonderfully) just a bunch of parts—humans who are damaged, temperamental, and afraid. Grief surfaces after hard-won collectivity wanes, sometimes with tragic consequences; the feminist writer Kate Millett observed in 1998 that their movement had failed to adequately support its most vulnerable members, who “disappeared to struggle alone in makeshift oblivion.” Disappointed with her chosen family, Firestone became reclusive, leaving New York City for long stretches. She wore disguises around the East Village—possibly to avoid being recognized after the success of The Dialectic of Sex—and let many friendships wither. After her father died, in 1981, her hold on reality began to weaken. For years, Laya would receive calls from Shulamith’s landlord—there were screams coming from her apartment, taps left running so long the floors buckled. In 1987, Shulamith was involuntarily committed to a residential facility and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
It would be misleading to imply that Airless Spaces is a book about Firestone’s experiences with schizophrenia. Most of the stories are not about madness, per se—there’s very little mention of what got any of the characters admitted in the first place. It is, rather, a book about norms, and the institutions that confer, aid, and enforce them. Firestone spent long stretches of time in psychiatric wards, but she never voluntarily hospitalized herself. In the story “Hating the Hospital,” a character named Rachel, who “had been hospitalized six times in ten years, staying an average of four months per stay,” similarly refuses to admit herself. She “made a point” to require the “wheelchairs, police breaking in the door (sometimes up to ten men at once), EMS ambulances and police cars, handcuffs and injections, the whole bit.” This refusal is not practical or passive; it’s “for honor’s sake. She was involved in major resistance.” Only two paragraphs long, “Hating the Hospital” manages to traverse an impressive range of tonal registers: the logistic (“roughly coincident with the lapse of Medicaid for short-term hospital care”); the poignant (“had she had a calendar she would have scratched off the days”); and the defiant, however fruitless (“it usually took two months to break her”). Several stories in the collection describe elaborate techniques for getting discharged, the inevitable strains of reentry, and the looping incoherence of petty authorities. The texts themselves seem to scan the sky for friendship, which sometimes descends like a thousand migrating birds, jarringly loud and supernaturally elegant, and then lifts off and disappears again, leaving nothing behind but the same frostbitten field.
When I say “friendship,” I mean: any human kindness whatsoever. The bar is low in these stories, or perhaps the concept is expansive. The bonds of mutual political awakening—the sort of togetherness that was once routine, if uneasy, for Firestone—are completely effaced. Plots sometimes climax with a singular instance of physical touch, the kind that might seem mundane for those of us fortunate to be regularly hugged, kissed, nudged, and so on. The lack of touch has as much to do with old age, injury, and the commonplace withdrawal of grief as it does with psychiatric internment or insanity. Sometimes these layer and overlap, like roof shingles, gray on gray. The story “The Old Folks’ Home,” only a paragraph long, describes a woman named Karen telling “the group” about her “ninety-seven-year-old grandmother who, after her husband died, had tried to kill herself three times with sleeping pills, but they had her stomach pumped.” Doomed to a facility, the grandmother “shed tears at the unaccustomed tenderness of gesture when Karen tucked in her old light-blue comforter up around her chin as she sat in her wheelchair.” The text is structured like a set of nesting dolls: a woman trapped in a hospital remembers a woman trapped in a hospital. The patient recounts having been a caregiver as she articulates herself as a patient, emphasizing the context and fluidity of these roles. Someone else would have written a story about an old woman, still alive after three earnest requests not to be, crying at the quotidian touch of her child’s child. Firestone’s framing emphasizes reflection and repetition, making it a story about storytelling. Foreshadowing becomes echolocation. The grandmother’s warning—“Don’t ever end up in a place like this”—is how Karen knows where she is.
Airless Spaces culminates in a portrait of Firestone’s brother, a story titled “Danny.” In the story, his name is the beginning of communicable reality—“The first word out of my mouth was ‘Danny’ ”—and his death marks the end of the narrator’s sustained relationship with sanity. Born less than a year apart, the siblings were estranged in their adult lives, yet twinned in their desire for a life of extreme discipline and sublime self-fashioning; before his death by suicide in 1974, Daniel had given up many of his possessions to live in a Zen Buddhist center in 1972. While The Dialectic of Sex closes with a vision of earth as it is in heaven, Airless Spaces closes with a paranoid fixation on the hereafter that gradually dismantles Firestone’s here and now:
In the end, theories about his death, whether murder or suicide, afterlife or no, contributed to my own growing madness—which led to my hospitalization, medication, and a shattering nervous breakdown.
The future reappears, only this time to haunt.
Psychotherapy makes storytelling a kind of remedy; so did the consciousness-raising groups that Firestone passionately participated in during her political years. Airless Spaces, however, complicates the idea that speaking one’s truth can lead to liberation. It jostles between depicting people at their most atomized—outside consensus reality or social contracts—and their most blurry and indistinct. An accidental collective emerges: the category of fellow outcasts, those Firestone dubs “losers,” a term as variable, crackling, and ultimately political as “woman.” Every chapter is an individual—with titles like “Ellis Martin Sheen,” “Leon Feldsher,” “Ellin Rubie,” “Debra Daugherty,” “Stanley Moss,” etc.—and the book itself draws up a circle of folding chairs, giving everyone their turn to speak. Some dawdle, roll their eyes, murmur strange details, or complain “like a drizzle,” but almost every story elucidates a material condition. One wonders whether Firestone, by reassembling her memories of herself and her peers, is staging an imaginary consciousness-raising session in the living room of the page, or whether she is questioning the efficacy of the confessional mode as a political tool, thrusting it back into a more aesthetic register. The book disrupts its own curative wish by lingering with those who will never be “well” again, and if the narrow borderland of the chapter break or page turn connects the characters, it also holds them apart.
Doing Time, 1978, by Shulamith Firestone. Courtesy Laya Firestone Seghi
How one enters the category of “loser,” and by extension, the disjointed collectivity of the text itself, is almost always an issue of aesthetics, style, and surface. Perhaps this is why Airless Spaces had to be a work of fiction and not of theory: it required Firestone to collaborate with beauty in order to reveal its terrors. For Firestone’s outcasts, fashion—and physical appearance in general—takes on world-shattering importance. This is, in its way, a book about clothes, their ability to salvage or wreck the teetering self; it’s about how a bad haircut or the wrong pair of jeans can destroy your life. Just as Firestone isolates the moment of skin-to-skin contact that provides vanishing consolation, she is masterful at pinning down the point when a character “began to look like a mental patient, not an attractive woman who just happened to be thrown into a mental hospital.” Firestone zeroes in on the small, painterly details that make someone alien to the mainstream, the seemingly minor decisions that pull someone out of the zone of conventional empathy. Her descriptions are so visual they read almost like the text of a fashion magazine. “The first time I was wearing square-cut forties shorts, in light blue, which were flattering,” she writes in the story “Sheldon Krem.” “But the second time, some ten years later, I was wearing a dingy postal-blue V-cut cardigan which was considerably shabbier.” Note the difference in blues, the way Firestone uses color to tell us the story of the missing decade.
Clothes are also used as shorthand for one’s degree of mental well-being. In the story “The Jumpsuit,” a patient named Ana begs an orderly for a white sweat suit; she “felt like a bride wearing it, one of two competing brides.” The cleanliness of her suit impresses the doctors, whereas “the rival ‘bride’ had gotten a soup stain on her sweatpants, washed the bottom to gray, and now could no longer wear the sweatshirt and sweatpants together.” It works: Ana gets out. On the other side of the hospital walls, however, when she “tried to wear her dazzling white-sweat outfit in late November, she looked like an escapee from a loony bin rather than a high-fashion model.” The psychiatric notion of appropriate girlhood (clean, matching, purposeful) fails to translate in the outside world. The rules change; sanity, like gender, is a moving target.
Firestone’s past life as a feminist thinker is never directly disavowed in these stories—the movement is mentioned here and there—but it is kept on the sidelines. In an essay about Airless Spaces, the scholar Sianne Ngai writes of her “feelings of depression” about Firestone’s “plunge out of history,” which the book
record[s] most poignantly when it is explicitly not recording it, when it is conspicuously silent about how the hospitalized characters in it might have had political futures not entirely disconnected from their political past.
Yet Firestone’s political past was always oriented toward the future. Her “plunge outside history,” a phrase Ngai borrows from Invisible Man, is more like a stepping into linear time—always stifling, and especially so in the reactionary hypercapitalism of the Eighties. The loud presence of feminism’s absence reverberates throughout the book, but I think this is how most women live, their edges drawn by the shuddering negative shape of their own unmanifested uprising. The only chapter in Airless Spaces in which feminism vividly careens into view is “I Remember Valerie,” a story about Valerie Solanas, the author of SCUM Manifesto, who shot Andy Warhol in the midst of her own schizophrenic breakdown. The two women do not like each other. When Firestone visits Valerie—after “she had moved just a block away from me since her release from Mattawan, an institution for the criminally insane. . . . I found her in an apartment better than mine”—Valerie tells her, “I didn’t like your book.” In turn, Firestone confides in the reader: “Frankly, I thought it was a big mistake to recognize Valerie as one of us, a women’s liberationist, let alone to embrace her book as serious feminist theory.” Still, there is a begrudging sympathy. Valerie “waxed paranoid” about how the media was out to get her. Firestone “thought maybe it was true.”
It is easy to project desires onto “I Remember Valerie,” particularly the desire for Firestone and Solanas to recognize what they have in common, to form a bond. It is tempting to read into the small glimpses of solidarity displayed in the story: “maybe it was true,” “were these the demons of killer psychosis, or did she just have a bad case of bronchial pneumonia and shouldn’t be on the street?,” and such. But ultimately, “I Remember Valerie”—like many stories in Airless Spaces—is about witnessing someone’s dissolution into poverty and mental illness and not being able to help them. Firestone doesn’t visit her again and is “too afraid of her to invite her into my sublet” when she encounters Solanas panhandling by St. Mark’s Place. Later, she hears that Solanas has been begging for shelter, “covered with sores and wearing only a blanket,” until she finally “disappeared from the street entirely.” Firestone never attempts to absolve herself of her failure to extend further kindness to Solanas. And yet, there is some elusive solidarity evident in the title, a first-person declaration of another’s fleeting existence: “I Remember Valerie.” That’s a feminism I recognize—a refusal to forget, a shining mark where something, or someone, was once erased, a monument built around the emptiness where a revolution might have sparked and burned.
The hypothetical world of The Dialectic of Sex was predicated on the existence of technology that didn’t exist in 1970. Firestone’s attitude toward the inventions she believed would create freedom is casual, presumptuous in the most endearing way, as if a parenthetical could do a Cher Horowitz shrug: “The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics).” Duh. She envisioned constant networked connectivity, a system of socialized “computer banks” that would, among other things, democratize information, outsource memories, and problem-solve. She predicted the quick advancement of reproductive medicine, and called for artificial wombs. It all seemed outlandish, and spurred outrage and mockery. But now? After successful experiments on sheep and pigs, the FDA is debating whether to approve human trials for artificial-womb technology that would allow severely premature babies to continue developing in a “bio-bag” filled with lab-made amniotic fluid.
One of the biggest bioethical concerns today is not that these trials will catalyze widespread feminist revolution, as Firestone had hoped, but that anti-choice organizations will harness the technology to prevent people from terminating their pregnancies. Offering a viable option for the survival of the fetus outside the human body could expand into enforcing such a procedure, especially as notions such as “fetal personhood” become enshrined in law. Fifty-five years after The Dialectic of Sex was published, our politics are riven by the very issues Firestone foresaw, but in drastically different arrangements of power than she could have anticipated. The social control of reproductive organs, their function, and their meanings; fertility technologies and their potential to disrupt traditional family structures; children’s ownership of their own bodies; women’s naturalized role as caregivers: I could be listing the talking points of a right-wing podcaster. Firestone was off by a mile, a mile as narrow as a hair’s breadth.
The witch’s burden of prophecy is often shared with the revolutionary—right in the wrong way, forced to weather the distorted echoes of conviction, a conviction that once felt transcendent. (I am reminded of Firestone’s dedication in The Dialectic of Sex: “For Simone de Beauvoir, who endured.”) Writing a manifesto can be like sewing rocks into your pockets. “Disillusionment” sounds as though the illusions suddenly disperse, like insects scuttling into corners when the overhead light flicks on, leaving a bare room behind with nothing but a dark fluttering at the edges. But convictions are hard to shake. They can harden, growing heavier as two futures diverge, or in this case, entangle: the better world you dreamed of, sitting on the floor in smoky living rooms, and the one that actually came to pass.
