ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Kate Millett, a feminist thinker. Life magazine called it the Das Kapital of women's liberation and Time, as part of its extensive analysis of the women's liberation movement in the summer of that year, called Millett the Mao Tse-tung of feminism and put her on the front cover. Kate Millett's notoriety in 1970 as both media-anointed leader and lesbian betrayer of a movement meant she became both a controversial and somewhat eccentric figure within women's liberation. An unconventional approach characterizes Millett's method in Sexual Politics. Much of the feminist criticism of Sexual Politics since its publication has centered on Millett's reactionary critique of Freud and her tendency towards literal readings of sexual violence in literature. Sexual Politics made heterosexuality a point of historical contention and investigation for feminism, not its raison d'etre, and for that reason it helped create the conditions of possibility for feminist and queer theory in the decades to come.
