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Ellen Willis

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Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, 1941–November 9, 2006) was an American political essayist, journalist, and pop music critic.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Willis was born in the Bronx [citation needed], New York and grew up in the borough of Queens. Her father was a police lieutenant in the New York City Police Department [1]. Willis attended Barnard College [2] 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 [citation needed]. In the late 1960s and 1970s, she was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, and has since written 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. As of 2006, she was a professor in the journalism department of New York University and the head of its Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism [3]. She lived in Queens with her husband Stanley Aronowitz and her daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz. On November 9, 2006, she died of lung cancer. [4]

[edit] Writing and activism

She is also known for her feminist politics and was a founding member of 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".[5] 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. Coming from a Jewish background, she wrote a number of essays on anti-Semitism, and was particularly critical of left anti-Semitism. In several essays and interviews written since the September 11th attacks, she was cautiously supportive of the idea of humanitarian intervention and, while opposed to the US invasion of Iraq [6], she was critical of certain aspects of the anti-war movement.[7] [8]

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.[9]

[edit] Books

(Reissued 1992 with new introduction as: Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-And-Roll. Wesleyan University Pr. ISBN 0-8195-6255-6)

[edit] External links

[edit] Essays by Ellen Willis

[edit] Reviews and critiques of Ellen Willis

[edit] Interviews

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