Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives - Softcover

Fahs, Breanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 143843782X ISBN 13: 9781438437828

Publisher: SUNY Press, 2011

Synopsis

A candid and provocative critique of women’s sexual liberation in America.

Although conventional wisdom holds that women in the United States today are more sexually liberated than ever before, a number of startling statistics call into question this perceived victory: over half of all women report having faked orgasms; 45 percent of women find rape fantasies erotic; a growing number of women perform same-sex eroticism for the viewing benefit of men; and recent clinical studies label 40 percent of women as “sexually dysfunctional.” Caught between postsexual revolution celebrations of progress and alarmingly regressive new modes of disempowerment, the forty women interviewed in Performing Sex offer a candid and provocative portrait of “liberated” sex in America. Through this nuanced and complex study, Breanne Fahs demonstrates that despite the constant cooptation of the terms of sexual freedom, women’s sexual subjectivities―and the ways they continually grapple with shifting definitions of liberation―represent provocative spaces for critical inquiry and personal discovery, ultimately generating novel ways of imagining and reimagining power, pleasure, and resistance.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Although conventional wisdom holds that women in the United States today are more sexually liberated than ever before, a number of startling statistics call into question this perceived victory: over half of all women report having faked orgasms; 45 percent of women find rape fantasies erotic; a growing number of women perform same-sex eroticism for the viewing benefit of men; and recent clinical studies label 40 percent of women as "sexually dysfunctional." Caught between postsexual revolution celebrations of progress and alarmingly regressive new modes of disempowerment, the forty women interviewed in Performing Sex offer a candid and provocative portrait of "liberated" sex in America. Through this nuanced and complex study, Breanne Fahs demonstrates that despite the constant cooptation of the terms of sexual freedom, women's sexual subjectivities--and the ways they continually grapple with shifting definitions of liberation--represent provocative spaces for critical inquiry and personal discovery, ultimately generating novel ways of imagining and reimagining power, pleasure, and resistance.

About the Author:

Breanne Fahs is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University and a practicing clinical psychologist specializing in couples work, sexuality, gender identity, and trauma recovery.

About this edition

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 143843782X
• ISBN 13: 9781438437828
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376