Beginning Again at the End(s) of Ethnography: Response to “The Man at the End of the Machine”

Abstract

When I was preparing to write a chapter on Kate Millett for my book Feminist Thought (1 994), I first reread Sexual Politics (1 970) and then Millett’s autobiographical texts, Flying (1 974) and Sita (1 976). In a passage from one of the autobiographies (at least as I remember it, and I can only remember it because I cannot now find the passage), Millett tells about a conversation reported to her by Steven Marcus. Marcus was the chairman of Millett’s dissertation committee at Columbia University and SexualPolitics was Millett’s dissertation, for which she received a Ph.D. in English. The conversation which Marcus reported to Millett was between Marcus and Norman Mailer; Mailer was complaining. Millett’s critique of Mailer’s writings (along with the writings of D.H. Lawrence, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller) plays no small part in Sexual Politics; she focuses her criticism on Mailer’s insistent presentation of images of anal intercourse-sodomizing women to humiliate and subordinate them to men. Mailer’s complaint was that one of the scenes from one of his texts is misrepresented by Millett; it is not a scene of sodomy, as Millett had described it to be. Marcus, at least as I now remember it, tells this to Millett but she does not seem to care, or at least no change in Sexual Politics is made. So, the “bible” of the new women’s movement, as the popular press first dubbed Sexual Politics, harbors within it a misrepresentation! Had Millett needed to see Mailer in only one way in order to make her point? Had she needed to misrepresent him