Gender and Sexuality

I am sure it was a difficult book to write: the issues are extremely complex, the transdisciplinary range of the areas covered extensive and detailed, and the finished product extremely succinct and presented with an admirable clarity. Yet throughout, the passionate commitment to the task of making women’s oppression visible, readable, audible, indeed refusing to let it not be seen, read and heard modulates, in a specifically feminine voice, the social science genre of expository prose and factual representation which Rowland, as writing subject, adopts from her particular institutionalised position as both woman and writer of a Women’s Studies text.

The mind, a friend of mine (female) once said to me, is the sexiest organ. I agree absolutely; and this extremely uneven anthology is replete with evidence that what turns us on – in the flesh, in art, in literature – is not genital activity per se, but the reactive imagination.

Of or pertaining to sexual love; arousing or satisfying sexual desire, the Macquarie Dictionary says of erotic, though the Greek erotikas means simply ‘pertaining to love’. The editorial introduction to this book (though, happily, not the actual editorial exercise of selection) opts for the Macquarie’s first definition and interprets it narrowly:

A phrase like ‘And God so loved the world, she …’ has a radical impact on that most deeply ingrained convention; the contract underlying and validating much of Western culture that the logos is masculine and the power behind the logos is designated, generically, as ‘he’. Our culture is patriarchal; patriarchal power derives from God and that power is symbolically inscribed in language.