Gender and genre in Emma Goldman

Abstract

Several feminist commentaries on Emma Goldman have focused critical attention on tensions between her anarchist feminist demands for freedom in personal relations and her longing for a stable and fulfilling relationship with a man. This article turns those inquiries around, asking why feminist readings of Goldman have featured those questions. I suggest that Goldman's implicit practices of rhetoric and genre, as much as her explicit ideology and gendered social relations, encourage critics to look for consistency between her political theory and her personal life. I look at Goldman's habits of genre as shaped both by the chronological practices of film media versus theater and by the discursive practices of modernism versus those of romanticism and realism. My goal is to open up a field of questioning in which consistency between her ideological commitments and her love life takes a backseat to inquiry into how she made meaning in politics and in love. © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.