Rethinking female pleasure: purity and desire in early twentieth-century Australia

Title: Rethinking female pleasure: purity and desire in early twentieth-century Australia
Creator: Featherstone, Lisa
Relation: Women's History Review Vol. 21, Issue 5, p. 715-731
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2012.658181
Publisher: Routledge
Resource Type: journal article
Date: 2012
Description: This article explores the multiple and complex ways white heterosexual women constructed female sexual pleasure and desire in early twentieth-century Australia. It considers the idealisation of female sexuality, and the ways this was both subverted and re-iterated by women themselves, through a study of female writers. It suggests that the challenge to female sexual normativity—as marital and reproductive—was slow and staggered, with many women unable to firmly challenge the sexual ideal. But a close reading of the work of a number of female authors, especially the poet Zora Cross, allows glimpses of how some women did explore, construct and rethink sexual pleasure within their writings, negotiating between the sometimes contradictory impulses of purity and desire.
Subject: female sexuality; pleasure; gender; women
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1055348
Identifier: uon:15870
Identifier: ISSN:0961-2025
Language: eng
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