Shulamith Firestone’s visionary first book The Dialectic of Sex dared to look at how feminism could shape the future. Finding herself drifting into a new ‘airless space’ after her experience of New York City radical feminist groups, Firestone wrote her first work of fiction.
Airless Spaces portrays the psychic suffering, bureaucratized poverty and small crises of everyday life. In a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces follows characters in psychiatric wards and out in the streets of New York City to move beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional spaces to record acts of cruelty and kindness.
With an accompanying Reader featuring contributions by Laya Seghi, Lourdes Cintron, Susan Faludi, Chris Kraus, Lola Olufemi and Hannah Proctor.
About the Author :
Shulamith Firestone (1945-2012) was born in Ottawa, Canada, and grew up in St. Louis, MO. After receiving a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, she moved to New York City. There she founded some of the first – and foremost – radical feminist organizations in the United States. In 1970, at the age of twenty-five, she published The Dialectic of Sex, one of the most widely discussed books of the second-wave feminist movement. Semiotext(e) published Airless Spaces, her second book, in 1998.
Review :
'The very short stories in Airless Spaces masterfully depict all kinds of minor atrocities that eventually lead to each person’s downfall: a forced shower, a snub, a slow-moving bureaucracy, a repurposed lounge.' - Chris Kraus
‘In the century I’m most familiar with, the twentieth, the explosion was never-ending, the pieces tinier and tinier. Shulamith Firestone, in her radical insider’s tale, informs us repeatedly like lightly pelting rain that all of us are vanishing in a century of institutions that take and take until everyone has gone away and there’s no one left to shut the door.’ – Eileen Myles
'This book comes out of a long lonely adventure. A season in hell. The result is a series of devastating observations made entirely without rhetoric. It operates like a parable—deceptively simple and stark, almost imagistic as little pieces fit together with little pieces, pretending to be about small outcast lives when in fact it is an encyclopedia of our age—a harrowing record of what really goes on among us where the wounds of life bring on the invasion of institutions which inflict still more suffering—a stifling atmosphere of isolations where souls are automatically and needlessly lost. This is a prophetic book with enormous consequences since the airless spaces multiply now and begin to take over.' - Kate Millett
'Reading Airless Spaces in the twenty-first century, I was struck not so much by the book’s anachronisms but by how apropos to the present it seems, as well as by the forms of sociality and care it does contain beyond first appearances... Filled with loss, loneliness and failures of connection, Airless Spaces insists on taking love seriously by exploring the uneven damage inflicted by an unjust and oppressive world inimical to loving.' - Hannah Proctor
'If Shulamith Firestone’s last work haunts the feminist movement, it may be because it suggests something disturbing about feminism itself... For Firestone, to live successfully as a woman under patriarchy—to submit to the unfairness of gender relations, to smilingly endure your subordinate status and the limits it places on your freedom and dignity—was itself a kind of well-adjusted madness, a trade-off wherein women gained social approval in exchange for accepting the myth of their own inferiority.' - The New Yorker
'In Airless Spaces, one is not born, but rather becomes, a patient. Mental illness is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but a product of a warping institution. Firestone’s characters struggle before they are committed, yet it is the inhumanity of the hospital that ultimately cements their status as outcasts.' - The Washington Post
'If The Dialectic of Sex is a euphoric glimpse of a distant UFO, Airless Spaces is a chemtrail latticing a gray sky, haunting those below... It jostles between depicting people at their most atomized—outside consensus reality or social contracts—and their most blurry and indistinct... While The Dialectic of Sex closes with a vision of earth as it is in heaven, Airless Spaces closes with a paranoid fixation on the hereafter that gradually dismantles Firestone’s here and now.' - Harper's Magazine
