Tamsin Wilton interviewed close to one hundred women in order to understand how we go about constructing a sexual identity as ''lesbian'' or ''heterosexual.'' How do women experience desire? What are the differences between men and women as sexual partners? How do desire, pleasure, intimacy, gender and morality become part of a woman's sense of self? Asking these and other questions, this study breaks the stand-off between essentialists and constructionists to propose a fresh re-thinking of the desiring self.
Author(s): Tamsin Wilton
Series: Dis Orientation: Gender, Sex, Desire and Self-Fashioning
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 240
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 9
Introduction: What’s All This About? Comments on Method and Language......Page 12
1 Of Models and Muddles: Disorientating Theories of Sexuality......Page 17
2 Declaration of Self-Interest: Epistemological and Methodological Conundrums......Page 34
3 What is Sex? Asking the Impossible Question......Page 65
4 Telling the Difference: Desire, Safety and Sameness......Page 87
5 Haunted by the Gynander: Disruptive Genders......Page 111
6 Stand by Your Man? Telling Heterosexual Stories......Page 137
7 Your Mum’s an Oxymoron: Sexuality and Reproductivity......Page 165
8 The Lesbian Vanishes? Notes for a New Sociology of the Erotic......Page 188
Appendix......Page 208
Notes......Page 212
References......Page 214
B......Page 225
D......Page 226
F......Page 227
H......Page 228
L......Page 229
M......Page 230
P......Page 231
S......Page 232
W......Page 233
Z......Page 234
