Sunday, January 11, 2009


The Captivity and Restoration of Patty Hearst

One juror, reflecting on the decision to convict, noted that Hearst's postcaptivity interest in radical feminist tracts like Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, which she read under the SLA's sway during her captivity, was "more important than some things" in arriving at the
verdict. The jury considered the intellectuals and their insistence on the limits of free will, and blanched; speaking for American culture as
a whole, the jurors had tired of elite discourse's flirtation with the complexities of the protean, overdetermined self.
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