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a masquerade that serves to mask women’s traditional location within heterosexual relationships.
In this collection, two chapters engage with the form and function of passive female heterosexuality. Joel Gwynne’s chapter explores the postfeminist sensibilities of female sexual liberation in Toni Bentley’s The Surrender, analyzing the text’s conceptual representation of sexual politics and material representation of sexual practices. Emphasizing the problematic tendency in postfeminist culture to conflate “empowerment” and “pleasure” as interdependent experiences, Gwynne argues that—despite its celebration of women’s autonomous sexual decision making—Bentley’s memoir nevertheless reflects a saturation of, and submission to, sexual values prescribed by the mainstreaming of the porn industry.
Maya Linden’s chapter examines similar terrain—while not explicitly drawing on postfeminist discourse. In her exploration of sexual masochism in Susanna Moore’s In the Cut (1995), Linden poses critical questions regarding the utopian motivations of feminist critiques of literature that have historically rejected expressions of feminine masochism. Contesting the position that romance plots involving masochistic female characters are damaging to the feminist project, Linden draws on third-wave feminist perspectives of sexuality to centralize the problems inherent in collapsing fiction and reality into the same ideological paradigm. Linden implicitly challenges the dangers of taking too literally Robin Morgan’s phrase “the personal is political” by accentuating the “crucial distance between the real and the imagined” worlds of feminist politics and fictional writing.
In a similar engagement with feminist responses to female sexuality—though in the context of prostitution rather than promiscuity and masochism—Nadine Muller’s chapter examines the convergences between Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) and contemporary attitudes towards prostitution, highlighting the novel’s status as both a comment on and product of the sexual politics and