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In critically examining the plural representations of sexuality in contemporary literature, this book also has a distinctly global emphasis. The various chapters interrogate sexuality in the work of a number of mainstream American and British writers and also less well-known writers from New Zealand and Canada. All the chapters owe primary intellectual and theoretical debts to three broad and overlapping domains of critical scholarship and practice: feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. What follows is a necessarily selective discussion of the main developments affecting the study of sexuality in these domains as well as an attempt to situate the individual chapters of this book in relation to and in close engagement with these critical developments.
Feminism
In Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism, Lynne Segal argues that the politicization of sexuality fostered by the ascent of second-wave feminism was central to the movement’s counterculture for not only were movement feminists antipatriarchy, they were also anti-imperialist and antiauthoritarian. The mobilization of sexual empowerment was therefore paramount in a revolution against a capitalist bureaucracy that required sexually repressed individuals “for the realization of its life-negating, endlessly acquisitive, and destructive goals,” a mode of social organization contingent on “self-restraint and compulsive work,” both antithetical to “liberated or spontaneous sexual expression” (75). Deconstructing essentialist histories of sexuality was imperative to the endeavor of deconstructing patriarchal capitalist ideologies, as was reappraising the sources of women’s sexual pleasure and specifically underscoring the relationship between suppressed sexuality and social powerlessness. For many feminists, this social powerlessness comprised not merely the subjugation of female sexual desire but the responsibility of acting as “moral custodians of male [sexual] behaviour”, which women themselves were perceived as “instigating and eliciting” (Vance 4). More discursively, feminists challenged the host of