The inquiry into teaching feminist “classics” seems apropos now, given a resurgence of anxieties about the relationships between political beliefs and sexual/gender identities, anxieties that echo those of the 1970s. Teaching texts from the seventies that make “bad feminist” claims in the midst of other powerful arguments can contribute to nuanced understandings of feminist pasts, in order to intervene in oversimplified progress or loss narratives that often characterize current representations of lesbian-feminism. Here, I revisit Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, an ambitious project that calls for overthrowing patriarchy. Not surprisingly, such a far-reaching project also has foundational flaws; in particular, its essentialist conception of gender is explicitly transphobic and implicitly racist. I am calling for rethinking Gyn/Ecologynot because I think we can recuperate it from its constitutive problems, but because analyzing the ways in which calls for liberation are intertwined with fundamental exclusions can provide insight into current feminist debates over such issues as combating sexual violence and the resurgence of trans-exclusionary feminism. Gyn/Ecologyis an ambitious book; I want to encourage students to learn from the mistakes of earlier radical claims while not giving up on the possibilities of radicalism altogether.

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