Susanne Kappeler takes the feminist proposition that “the personal is political” with unnerving literalness.

She explores responsibility as it is returned to individual behaviour: to the choices through which domination, cruelty and hierarchy are actually enacted. Violence here runs from intimate relationships and sexuality through racism, nationalism and war. 

The result is a deliberately abrasive work of feminist political theory. Kappeler attacks the ways psychological and therapeutic languages can turn actions into symptoms, needs or inevitabilities, thereby obscuring agency. Elsewhere she examines white feminism, heterosexuality, desire, identity and interpersonal exchange as places where political power reproduces itself at microscopic scale. It is not a conciliatory book, and contemporary readers will find parts of its sexual politics distinctly of their 1990s radical-feminist moment. But its central question remains difficult and useful: when explanation becomes sufficiently elaborate, at what point does it begin functioning as an alibi?

Edition / condition: Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, 1995. First Australian edition, published the same year as the UK Polity edition. Paperback. Light rubbing, scratching and edge wear to covers; minor corner and spine-end wear. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.