Sexuality and Contemporary Literature By Joel Gwynne and Angeli ...

is inclined to be “unwilling to condemn pornography” (Gamble 44), recent erotic memoirs demonstrate a challenge to sexual absolutism or those who may pass judgment on any facet of women’s sexual decision making.

Yet, while a number of mass-market erotic memoirs authored by contemporary women espouse (post)feminist sensibilities (Gwynne 2011), Toni Bentley’s The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2006) remains one of the few which actively situates its sexual politics in the context of feminist writing and scholarship. Written in a manner that is distinctly literary and—at least compared to mass-market erotic memoirs²—highly sophisticated, Bentley’s text provides a useful frame of reference for gauging the extent to which postfeminist culture has co-opted and undermined the genre of literary erotica. To this aim, this chapter seeks to answer the following questions. Does Bentley celebrate women’s autonomous negotiation of sexual decision making, or conversely, does her memoir reflect a saturation of, and submission to, male dominated sexual values ascribed by the popularization and mainstreaming of the sex industry? Additionally, to what extent can the author’s subjective experience of agency be understood in the context of postfeminist discourse and the mainstreaming of pornography? Prior to answering these questions, it is important to contextualize Bentley’s memoir in debates surrounding definitions of pornography and erotica.

Pornography, Erotica, and Feminism

The history of pornography has largely concerned the written word, yet the genre remains predominantly understood in terms of both visual culture and mass consumption. In contrast, erotic literature, or “erotica,” is usually defined as nonvisual and produced for a comparatively narrow audience. In visual culture, pornography is essentially unconcerned with character development or human motivation, for representing the details of sexual acts and bodily sensations are of primary importance (Paasonen