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

150). Locating Bentley’s memoir in debates concerning the definition of pornography and erotica entails the negotiation of a number of divisive, intersecting, and nebulous territories. It is, in fact, often highly difficult to position contemporary women’s sexual narratives when attempting to understand them as works of either “pornography” or “erotica,” largely due to the fact that neither of these terms—nor their corresponding associations—are entirely appropriate in describing the form and function of the nonfiction genre. Erotica is usually defined as a fictionalized literary genre understood “as a realm of fantasy, play, and experimentation” and is “linked to aesthetic notions of quality” (Paasonen 139), whereas the definition of pornography rests on detailed yet hyperbolic depictions of sexual arousal, scenarios, acts, and sensations with the purpose of eliciting arousal in the audience. The affective power of pornography depends on the authenticity of these explicit representations, while the affective power of erotica depends on the characters’ articulation of sexual desire and their emotional and psychological investment in sexual encounters. These aesthetic divergences are further complicated by Dana Wilson-Kovacs’s comment that “[e]rotica is associated with women while porn is associated with men,” (148) marking the genres as distinctly gendered spaces. Pornographic formulas are often perceived by women as—if not offensive—then limited in scope, full of reductive meanings and predictable action, whereas erotica is viewed as catering to women in a more approachable and understanding manner. As Clarissa Smith astutely notes, despite the fact that pornography is occasionally produced for a specifically female audience, there remain widespread theorizations of pornography as “a field of representation and consumption inimitable to women's experiences of sexuality” (9).

For this reason, sexually explicit memoirs written by women are often positioned as inherently concordant with erotica, a genre that is textual rather than visual and primarily female authored rather than male produced. When approaching the genre, audiences could be forgiven for expecting not only a sustained attention to both characterization and the description of tactile sensations but also writing that is of a high