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E-book Diagnosing Desire : Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century

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Penilaian

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In 2009, popular writer Daniel Bergner published two articles on the com-plexities of female sexuality and desire in the New York Times Magazine. The first, published in January 2009, was titled “What Do Women Want?” and the second, published later that year, in November, “Women Who Want to Want.” It was in these two popular pieces, over a decade ago now, that the seeds of this book were sown. Twenty-first-century women were apparently stricken with low desire, and their sexuality, their femininity, was a frontier to be explored. Bergner’s articles described the new pioneers—the explorers were young, smart, ambitious, and energetic; they called themselves feminists. These new scientists were there to help women figure out what the problem was, why they weren’t in the mood. It was upon reading these articles that I realized that what I now refer to as the “new” science of female sexuality was blossoming, and that it was going to be—already was—very big.In the second of his two articles, Bergner points to both the ambiguous nature of female sexuality and to the ambiguously feminist nature of the driv-ing force behind this new science: “More than by any other sexual problem—the elusiveness of orgasm, say, or pain during sex—women feel plagued by low desire.” Many low-desiring women, however, want to want. He describes how, in her efforts to help these women, the Canadian sex researcher and clinician he interviews in the article, Lori Brotto, deals “in the domain of the mind, or in the mind’s relationship to the body, not in a problem with the body itself.” Bergner suggests that the ultimate therapeutic goal for clinicians like Brotto, then, might be to help women repair this estranged mind/body con-nection by suturing (physical) sensation and (subjective) sexual self- image, and cultivate their own desire, even in the face of what he calls “women’s complex sexual beings.” Questions of women’s sexual complexity, responsive-ness or receptivity, and how their minds and bodies line up (or, more often in these accounts, do not) seemed to be at the heart of this new science and its accompanying sexual response models and treatment protocols for low female desire. But how had it come to be that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, self-identified feminist sex researchers described women’s sexu-ality as reactive, receptive, and responsive? Did these researchers believe, as these popular articles implied, that women’s sexuality operated according to a completely different logic than men’s sexuality? Why were women’s sexual problems, no longer the result of hysteria or frigidity, still so confounding to scientists? And if, as these popular articles posited, women were so sexually complex, in many cases lacking an urgent sense of lust yet also demonstrating strong physiological arousal and a fluid responsiveness and receptivity—how did they get to be that way? Furthermore, how was the problem of women’s low desire to be solved?

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

306.77 SPU d

Penerbit

USA : The Ohio State University Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

284 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780814214510

Klasifikasi

306.77

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Sexual Sociology

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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