Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory (Verso Classsic)

Foregrounding the body, this remarkable collective work explores the sexualization of women’s bodies, charting the complex interplay of social, political and cultural forces which produce a normative “femininity.” A series of projects which focus on concrete instances of sexualization (hair, legs, the slavegirl stereotype, women’s gymnastics) lead to a broader examination of the relationship between power and sexuality, the social and the psychological. Placing themselves at the crossroad where feminism and socialism meet, the contributors move seamlessly between the autobiographical and the analytical, questioning the diversion between personal and political, mapping the knot of memory and desire at the heart of the gendered body. Vitally, these accounts do not present sexualization as a passive inculcation of social norms: the individual is presented as taking an active role in the construction of gendered identities.

This book was written by members of a socialist-feminist network based in Hamburg and West Berlin. Frigga Haug, the editor and co-ordinator of the project, teaches politics and sociology in Hamburg. Female Sexualization was originally published in the series Questions for Feminism edited by Michele Barrett, Annette Kuhn, Anne Phillips and Ann Rosalind Jones.