Introduction to Mothers/Lovers

The pieces I’ve included in Mothers/Lovers from the glut we all produced, trying to reclaim what we saw as the deeply radical and liberatory potential of feminism, are representative of two modes I used then for entering this discussion. First, my analysis of the antipornography position, “The Feminist Sex Wars: Retrenchment Versus Transformation.” Second, several of many literary reviews from this period of Sturm and Drang. My piece about David Garnett’s human-to-animal fables was meant to sneak up on more unstable ideas of sexuality than the prevailing feminist discourse allowed. The two pieces here about Angela Carter, including reviews and an interview, also were meant to point to transgressive and radical alternatives. This great feminist writer was taking apart sexual mores by altering all the old scripts.