Lesbian Erotics

by Jay, Karla

• ISBN13: 9780814742259
• ISBN10: 0814742254
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-04-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

The question of whether lesbians have sex, how they have sex, and when they began having sex has long obsessively preoccupied the heterosexual imagination. Today, discussions of lesbian sex abound with such terms as romantic friendships, stealth lesbians, and genitally sexual. As we approach the end of the twentieth century, lesbian sexuality remains hotly contested ground. What exactly qualifies as lesbian sex? What is the relationship, if any, between lesbian erotica and heterosexual pornography? How did the issue of sex in lesbian communities come to be such a fiercely debated subject?Lesbian Eroticsis the first anthology to investigate the cultural production of sexually charged images of lesbians in film, law, literature, and popular culture in general. The contributors address an enormous range of sexualities and fora in which these sexualities flourish. In her chapter,Not Tonight, Dear, I'm Deconstructing a Headache: Confessions of a Lesbian Sex Therapist, Marny Hall illustrates how difficult some women find it to maintain erotic tension in lesbian relationships. Elizabeth Meese grapples with increasingly complex sexual identities in cyperspace. Kitty Tsui, cover model forOn Our Backs, relays how she developed her own body into an art form in order to combat stereotypes of passive and invisible Asian women.This work, as Karla Jay writes in the introduction, invites readers to consider the implications, variations, and complexities of lesbian erotics. In the end, it is our sexual lives that mark us as outlaws. Therefore, we need to investigate and engage representations of our sexuality to define for ourselves, if we so choose, the scope, shape, and permutations of lesbian erotics.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
On Slippery Ground: An Introduction	p. 1
Not Tonight, Dear, I'm Deconstructing a Headache: Confessions of a Lesbian Sex Therapist	p. 15
Pedagogy, Jurisprudence, and Finger-Fucking: Lesbian Sex in a Law School Classroom	p. 28
Tongues or Fingers	p. 40
Staging the Erotic	p. 53
Give Joan Chen My Phone Number Anytime	p. 62
Between the Sheets: My Sex Life in Literature	p. 71
Camille Paglia and the Problematics of Sexuality and Subversion	p. 85
Taking on the Phallus	p. 101
Recasting Receptivity: Femme Sexualities	p. 125
Clits in Court: Salome, Sodomy, and the Lesbian "Sadist"	p. 147
The Regulation of Lesbian Sexuality Through Erasure: The Case of Jennifer Saunders	p. 164
She Must Be Seeing Things Differently: The Limits of Butch/Femme	p. 183
Dracula's Daughter: Cinema, Hypnosis, and the Erotics of Lesbianism	p. 196
To Touch the Mother's C(o)untry: Siting Audre Lorde's Erotics	p. 212
Abrotica: The Lesbian Erotic and the Erotic Abject in Anais Nin's House of Incest	p. 227
Encoding Bi-Location: Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Erotics of Dissimulation	p. 241
For Further Reading	p. 269
Contributors	p. 280
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.