Notes on Kate Millett. The current promises of the future past

Abstract

Kate Millett's life trajectory gives us the challenge of reading it as a suffering lithium user, or as feminist spiteful to the American academy for dismissing her, or as the ultimate feminist author of women's sexual oppression, or as the hippie artist who survived and resisted even against the state of New York. But who is our Millet? A feminist who refused to read sexual passion in heterosexual terms, which allowed us the theoretical imagination to undo the obligatory ways of the norm. My Millett gave us the epistemological possibility, and which I think that was his most radical contribution, to ask the political question of sex. Is the sexual and emotional relationship between two people of heterogeneous sex-generic mark a form of hegemonic political organization? The epistemological effects of the question can range from the categories of women and men to the political function of sexual practices themselves, a range open to the dispute over the feminisms that have been arriving. Politics are disputed in widely shared narratives of the global entertainment industry, a place of constant interpellation on the affective norms of hegemonic sex and its possible fissures in the readings we make of those cultural objects. The extinction of Millett’s life promises us the bitter taste of a life embracing a feminist political bet of a brutal dissidence. We celebrate that drink, we always do.