The essays and interviews in “On Women,” a new collection of Susan Sontag’s work, are incapable of aging badly, mervatim writes. “The effect of reading them today is to marvel at the untimeliness of their genius.”
” . The work gathered here represents an overlooked half decade of Sontag’s writing, much of it undertaken between her trip to Vietnam, in 1968, and her first cancer diagnosis, in 1975. Reading the book, one realizes that its pieces are bracketed by death—that Sontag’s entire notion of women was death-ridden, haunted by an awareness of mortality. “Thinking about my own death the other day, as I often do, I made a discovery,” she wrote in her journal, in 1974.
In articulating this double diagnosis, Sontag was careful to distance herself from the rhetoric of the socialist and Marxist feminists of the era; there is, throughout the interview, a noticeable allergy to political radicalism, and a deep conviction that work may be a source of pride, affirmation, and distinction. Yet she also understood, just as those feminists did, that the integrity of the family depended on the exploitation of women’s unwaged, domestic labor.
Does beauty pose a problem for feminism? Perhaps the better question is: Does beauty pose a problem for how women imagine their futures? What would it mean to be liberated from beauty’s conventional images, its stock stories? It is always a little embarrassing for a beautiful woman to write about physical beauty, for she must serve as both the subject and the object of her judgments.
Camp is the hidden nerve running through the essays in “On Women.” Initially conceived of by Sontag as apolitical, it emerges here as the privileged sensibility of a politics of feminist liberation. If camp meant going against the grain of one’s sex by engaging in a “robust, shrill, vulgar parody” of gender, as she described it in her interview with, then there is something fantastically campy in her imagination of the politics of consciousness-raising.
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