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Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, 1941 – November 9, 2006) was an American political essayist, journalist, and pop music critic.
is was born in Manhattan, and grew up in the boroughs of the Bronx and Queens in New York City. Her father was a police lieutenant in the New York City Police Department. Willis attended Barnard College as an undergraduate and did graduate study at University of California, Berkeley, where she studied comparative literature for a semester but left graduate school shortly afterwards .
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Quotations
My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
"Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism" (1977), Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)
In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to What turns me on is erotica; what turns you on is pornographic.
"Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography" (1979), Beginning To See the —Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)
For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable: When religion defines morality, the wall between church and state comes to be seen as immoral.
"Freedom from Religion," The Nation (February 19, 2001)
Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.
"Three Elegies for Susan Sontag," New Politics (Summer 2005), Vol. X, No. 3
Encyclopedia
Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, 1941 – November 9, 2006) was an American political essayist, journalist, and pop music critic.
Biography
Willis was born in Manhattan, and grew up in the boroughs of the Bronx and Queens in New York City. Her father was a police lieutenant in the New York City Police Department. Willis attended Barnard College as an undergraduate and did graduate study at University of California, Berkeley, where she studied comparative literature for a semester but left graduate school shortly afterwards . In the late 1960s and 1970s, she was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, and later wrote for, among others, the Village Voice, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Slate, and Salon, as well as Dissent, where she was also on the editorial board. She was the author of several books of collected essays. At the time of her death, she was a professor in the journalism department of New York University and the head of its Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism. She lived in Queens with her husband Stanley Aronowitz and her daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz. On November 9, 2006, she died of lung cancer.
Writing and activism
She is also known for her feminist politics and was a member of New York Radical Women and subsequently co-founder in early 1969 with Shulamith Firestone of the radical feminist group Redstockings. She was one of the few women working in music criticism during its inaugural years, when it was by and large a male-dominated field. Starting in 1979, Willis wrote a number of essays that were highly critical of anti-pornography feminism, criticizing it for what she saw as its sexual puritanism and moral authoritarianism, as well as its threat to free speech. These essays were among the earliest expressions of feminist opposition to the anti-pornography movement. Her 1981 essay, "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" is the origin of the term, "pro-sex feminism". She was also a strong supporter of women's abortion rights, and in the early 1980s was a founding member of the pro-choice street theater and protest group No More Nice Girls.
A self-described anti-authoritarian democratic socialist, she was very critical of what she viewed as social conservatism and authoritarianism on both the political right and left. In cultural politics, she was equally opposed to the idea that cultural issues are politically unimportant, as well as to strong forms of identity politics and their manifestation as political correctness. In several essays and interviews written since the September 11 attacks, she was cautiously supportive of the idea of humanitarian intervention and, while opposed to the US invasion of Iraq, she was critical of certain aspects of the anti-war movement.
Coming from a Jewish background, Willis also wrote a number of essays on anti-Semitism, and was particularly critical of left anti-Semitism. Occasionally she wrote about Judaism itself, penning a particularly notable essay about her brother's spiritual journey as a Baal Teshuva for Rolling Stone in 1977.
Willis saw political authoritarianism and sexual repression as closely linked, an idea first advanced by psychologist Wilhelm Reich; much of Willis' writing advances a Reichian or radical Freudian analysis of such phenomena. In 2006 she was working on a book on the importance of radical psychoanalytic thought to current social and political issues.
Bibliography
Books
- Willis, Ellen & Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 co-authored with Alice Echols
External links
- by Margalit Fox, New York Times, November 10, 2006.
- by Josh Burd and Nick Brennan, Washington Square News, November 10, 2006.
- by Susie Linfield, Dissent (magazine), Winter 2007.
- , The Nation, November 10, 2006.
- by Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2006.
- by Suzy Hansen, New York Observer, November 20, 2006.
- by Judith Levine, Seven Days, November 22, 2006.
- by Michael Bronski, The Boston Phoenix, November 30, 2006.
- by Chris O'Connell, Pop Matters, January 8, 2007.
- The Common Ills, November 11, 2006.
Essays by Ellen Willis
- – includes links to numerous essays.
- , Dissent, Fall 2006. – links to her essays for Dissent.
- , 1968.
- , Ramparts, 1969.
- , Village Voice, September 19, 1989.
- , The Nation, June 29, 1998.
- , New York Times, March 14, 1999.
- , Salon, November 6, 2000.
- , New Politics #31 (new series), Summer, 2001.
- (A response to Elaine Scarry's “Citizenship in Emergency”), Boston Review, October/November 2002.
- , The Nation, June 17, 2004.
- , The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2005. Note: scroll down page.
-
Reviews and critiques of Ellen Willis
- by Liza Featherstone, The Nation, August 8, 2002.
- by Eugene McCarraher, Commonweal, October 22, 1999.
- by Michael Bronski, Weekly Wire, November 29, 1999.
- by Marcy Sheiner, San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 29, 2000.
- (Discussion of Ellen Willis ""), The Nation, February 22, 2001.
- by Louis Proyect, PEN-L (internet mailing list), March 25, 2003.
Interviews
- , Fresh Air, November 10, 2006 (originally broadcast February 14, 1989). (page links to RealAudio audio file)
- by Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer (radio), March 27, 2003. (page links to MP3 audio)
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