Paradoxical Pleasures

Paradoxical Pleasures examines how female desire has been represented as simultaneously submissive and masochistic in a selection of recent, bestselling novels, such as E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey series and Vina Jackson's Eighty Days quintet. Anna Watz's study locates these novels in a broader popular cultural frame to investigate how female submission has become a commodity and is now celebrated as a tool with which women can sexually empower and liberate themselves. This book also explores the figure of the female masochist in relation to what has been described as a backlash against feminism and a resurgence of sexism across post-feminist culture. In addition, Watz analyses how post-feminist and neoliberal discourse often pits feminism against pleasure, female desire and freedom of choice. She argues that feminist discourse surrounding the satisfaction that many women have found from depictions of female submission and masochism must try to avoid being locked into a reductive dichotomy between 'sex-positive' and 'sex-negative' attitudes, which marred many of the debates surrounding feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. By navigating the sensitive terrain of female pleasure in modern erotic fiction, the book also examines how the recent revival of feminism as a popular movement-through websites such as Everyday Sexism and the media presence of personalities like Caitlin Moran-is recurring alongside, and seemingly in opposition to, the current return to more conservative and normative ideologies.