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.
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.