Explicit Utopias: Rewriting the Sexual in Women's Pornography

by Amalia Ziv

Overview

Explicit Utopias explores a problem that has long haunted feminist, lesbian, and queer critics: the obstacles to imagining women's desire and sexual agency. Pornography is one arena in which women have actively sought to imaginatively overcome this problem, yet pornography has also been an object of passionate feminist contention. Revisiting the feminist sex wars of the 1980s, Amalia Ziv offers a comprehensive and thoughtful reassessment of the arguments and concerns of both camps, tying these early debates to the contemporary surge of concern over the pornification of culture. She also sets out to rectify the lack of critical attention to marginal sexual representations by examining the feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic literature on several key issues, including fantasy, the phallus, identification, and gender performativity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438457086
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	07/02/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Amalia Ziv is Lecturer in Gender Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Pornography, Subjectivity, and the Reinscription of Fantasy

1. Between Sexual Commodities and Sexual Subjects: The Feminist Pornography Debate Revisited

2. The Phantasmatic Gay Man: Cross-Identification in Women’s Pornography

3. Refiguring Penetration

4. The Phallus and Its Vicissitudes

5. Sexuality beyond Gender: Gender Performativity in Lesbian Pornography

6. Female Sexual Subjectivity in a Queer World

Coda: Pornographic Pedagogy, Explicit Utopias, and the Future of Female Sexual Subjectivity

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Presenting a new take on decades' old research, the book … forges new ground by rigorously examining pornography in text format … a refreshing addition to the literature." — Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews

"...a welcome investigation into the possible value of alternative sexual representations for women and feminism." — hypatia

From the Publisher