Airless Spaces, new edition

Short stories set among the disappeared and darkened sectors of New York City, about characters who fall prey to an increasingly bureaucratized poverty.

After they raised her dose to 42 mg. of Trilafon, Lucy very nearly fainted. She felt a rush of bad sensation comparable to her mental telepathy when her grandmother died ... But there was a good aspect to fainting too. As she was about to lose consciousness, she felt an overwhelming relief. The black velvety edges of the swoon. If only she could faint all the way, black out, and never wake up again ...

Shulamith Firestone was twenty-five years old when she published The Dialectic of Sex, her classic and groundbreaking manifesto of radical feminism, in 1970. Disillusioned and burned out by the fragmented infighting within the New York City radical feminist groups she’d helped to found, when her book hit the bestseller lists, Firestone decided against pursuing a career as a “professional feminist.” Instead, she returned to making visual art, the profession that she’d trained for. She wouldn’t publish anything again until Airless Spaces, in 1998.

Long before her first hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia in 1987, Firestone had fallen off the grid and into precarity and poverty. For the next decade, she would move in and out of public psychiatric wards and institutions. Conceived as a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces is a subtle and deeply literary work. Embedded as a participant-observer, Firestone moves beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional life to record individual lives and acts of cruelty and kindness. The existence that she depicts is a microcosm of the world beyond.

"One way to think of Firestone’s decline is to see her as an anti-feminist cautionary tale, an object lesson in how feminist politics can estrange a woman from society and render her incapable of functioning within it. But another way to read the story of Firestone’s life is equally disquieting: it raises the question of whether there is any difference between madness and being the only sane person in a sick world."
—Moira Donegan, The New Yorker

"Airless Spaces is a remarkable book, the work of an artist who had continued to analyze and critique the conditions in which she was surviving, to observe in and around them larger struggles and injustices."
—Lidija Haas, Bookforum

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.

Chris Kraus is the founding editor of Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series. She is the author of nine books, including, most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.