Victoria Margree

“The mistake is to think that Firestone’s history of acute psychological distress somehow explains the Dialectic, allowing us to see that the meaning of its radicalism, its stridently nonconformist worldview, was always incipient mental illness. The Dialectic thus becomes read as a symptom of Firestone’s “madness.” Which means, of course, not reading it. Not engaging with its ideas; but instead, dismissing it from the scene of serious political and theoretical engagement.
But this is to get things the wrong way round. We must not use “mental illness” to depoliticize radical theory; but use radical theory to politicize “mental illness.” The urgent task is to identify and analyze the social and economic structures that work to produce a widespread psychological distress, to which are attributed diagnostic labels.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“Firestone is therefore claiming that there is a biological component to something that other feminists have taken to be purely cultural. For this, she has been criticized for biologism, or biological determinism. Donna Haraway, for example, has charged Firestone with making ‘the basic mistake of reducing social relations to natural objects’; which mistake – Haraway thinks – then leads Firestone into a dangerously reckless championing of technological control over nature. Michelle Barrett has also worried that Firestone’s account falls into ‘biologistic assumptions,’ wondering whether ‘“feminist biologism”’ can escape the problems of other biologisms – such as suggesting that there is little hope for change. But for Firestone, precisely the point is that without attributing biology some causal role, the ubiquity of male domination remains unexplained. And, I would add, because it is unexplained it precisely is therefore mystified. There is no accounting for why it should be the case that all societies (or even, if one wants to argue for exceptions, most societies) are, and have been, male-dominated. And precisely because there is no explanation, this phenomenon becomes available to other explanations that do seek to claim the correctness and immutability of male rule: to propose, for example, that it is the consequence of an innate male superiority.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone