Making Trouble: Life and Politics

by Lynne Segal

";An international treasure . . . beautifully written, deeply engrossing."; €”Barbara EhrenreichEncountering anarchists in her native Australia led Lynne Segal into political activism, beginning with her first arrest for protesting at the age of eighteen. Moving to London, she spent the 1970s combining motherhood with communal living, politicking, and free love, eventually moving into academia. Looking back at a life well lived, Making Trouble examines where that generation of dreamers have ended up.Lynne Segal is a professor of gender studies at Birkbeck College, London. She has published widely on sexual politics, gender concerns, and social justice. Her books include Straight Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Memoir

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

Lynne Segal is an Australian-born, British-based socialist feminist academic and activist, author of many books and articles, and participant in many campaigns, from local community to international.

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 / 5. Segal's writing style is certainly unique in a way that draws you in and makes this memoir easy to read. At the beginning I didn't like quite how harsh and unrelenting she was in describing friends, enemies and acquaintances alike throughout her life - but by the end I quite appreciated it. The chapter on aging, love and loneliness I thought was particularly good, and there are a number of bits of interesting analysis and anecdotes throughout. However, the book is really let down by its broader political analysis. Segal's focus on "coalition-building" and a personal-is-political outlook that, in her own words, discounts the "reformist-revolutionary" distinction makes a lot of the political outcomes of this text feel quite lacking. It seems bizarre to reflect so well on why and how the bourgeois state has the capacity to subsume feminist struggles whilst also asserting the need to work with any broadly sympathetic bourgeois institutions in our political struggles. Whilst I appreciate her anti-Zionist outlook, the parts of the final chapter on the Palestinian struggle also seemed quite confused. Maybe because of this mish-mashed political analysis, a lot of topics I would be really interested in hearing about (such as the nitty and gritty of producing Islington Gutter Press, and her political activity in heterodox feminist socialist group Big Flame in the 1970s) are not delved into! Instead, historical academic debates are the mainstay of many chapters of the book, being supported by only drops of anecdotes.

[Maggie Malone · Rating 4 out of 5]

“my fingers, if not always my legs, stay crossed”

[Brandy Cross · Rating 2 out of 5]

This starts out claiming it’s not an autobiography. I found this, for the most part, to be blatantly untrue. This is a work about judging the past self and looking at the past self through the lens of the now. The fact that it incorporates the things the past self does and reads does not make it less about the self.

I found most of this work to be incredibly dull. There is very little interesting in the upbringing of a woman so old she barely remembers her childhood except for the vivid bits she’s told her and there. The detached and practical manner she uses for discussion do much to help her believe this work is not about her but do little for the material. A child’s exploits are of little interest without those emotions.

Points of interest include:
* functions of birth control availability in Australia in the 60s. Heavily diluted by the authors privilege in receiving it from her mother.
* Being a single mother in the 60s and 70s. Also heavily diminished by her failure to even broach the topic except to posit she wasn’t there enough.
* Sexual relationships in that early period of relaxing standards and sexual freedom. Diminished by her lack of desire to talk about it and an attitude that reads of disapproval after possibly many bad experiences. This is not a topic that works well with detached practicality.
* Being Jewish. Except what’s discussed isn’t about experiences and history, is about the Palestinian-Israel conflict/clusterfuck
* Maintaining a relationship for this long. Except again, not enough of anything about it.
* Engagement in various political movements. Same story.
* Protests. Same story.

So what is here? Some.

-an autobiography of a leading woman in second wave feminism
-a lot of anecdotes about Germaine Greer
-a distaste for pop feminism and the watering down it’s received by becoming a household name

My favorite part of the book is her chapters on aging. This is something a lot of people simply avoid and here it’s been discussed with fear, trepidation, and an attempt at acceptance. At last, emotion.

While much of the content on aging tackles this subject through the change in status of her feminist peers and her own loss of relationships, it’s poignant and it strikes a nerve. Women age badly. We turn 40 and struggle to find relationships, love, sex. Men continue to find sexual partners well into their 60s but for women that’s the exception and not the norm. It’s something a lot of us don’t think about. We avoid it. That won’t happen to me. Either my current partner will last forever or I’ll be blessed with a never ending string of lovers, right? Statistically wrong. And Segal does an admirable job of explaining how incredibly intelligent and beautiful women end up spending their last decades without sexual partners. It’s not a pleasant consideration but it’s an important one. It’s also a sad one, considering the joy to be found in sex, love, sharing.

Overall, this book is a poorly organized mess with a few spots worth reading. Unless you happen to be into dry critique of a lot of things that happened in the past, with very little of the promised look at the present, this book has very little to offer. That aside, I still like Segal a lot and her humor, wit, and practical approach are very much a credit to other books.

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This came with some photos which is always interesting. I had mixed feelings abotu Segal's take on absolutely everything but I do think as feminists we need to listen to our elders- not to get trapped in their thinking but to get some idea of where they (and therefore we) have come from

In places she was somewhat bitchy and dismissive and I wasn't sure to what extent I agreed with her. I could have dismissed some things she said too- she lacked reflexivity about some of her absolute statements about heterosexuality etc. I feel some empathy for that after I got pulled up on doing much the same thing (in a different way) but I would like to see some rigor from someone who after all has worked as an academic.

Anyway, I am glad I am read it and not sorry to move on to the next thing.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir that engages critically with theory, politics, culture, sex, and aging. I'm probably particularly primed to appreciate this type of scholarly autobiography, but Segal is a clear-headed guide to feminism and socialism, in particular how they manifested in her own milieu. Some of the descriptions of her organizing days devolve into alphabet soup--NAC, ACTT, NATFHE, TUC, IMG, NALGO (from a stretch of about 5 pages)--but this was more a feature of the times than of Segal's writing.

Notes:
On Stuart Hall - p. 152

Good Emily Dickinson quotes - "I am nobody, who are you?" - p. 191

Dismisses online hate speech as "politically ineffective" - p. 233

Makes a pretty strong argument that capitalism is it's own all-encompassing ideology, which co-opts, inevitably, any intellectual movements, including feminism - pp. 258-259

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

For some reason I found the beginning a bit hard to get into, but once past that this was an enthralling read from someone who was at the heart of 70s London feminism, examined from a later retrospect by a significant theorist in the field.

[Haley Roeser]

didn't finish. very soothing and enlightening, but a bit more academic than what serves me at the mo.