Sexuality by Mottier Veronique;

Author:Mottier, Veronique;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, UK
Published: 2008-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

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For example, as the African-American feminist Bell Hooks pointed out, sexual violence such as ‘rape’ has historically played a particularly important role for black women, as a central element of the system of slavery, and continues to impact on contemporary sexualized portrayals of black women; glossing over such differences in the name of universal male oppression is neither useful nor accurate. The category ‘black feminist’ has, in turn, also been criticized for masking cultural and class differences. For example, the African-American feminist novelist Alice Walker was actively involved in the international campaign against clitoridectomy, which is currently practised primarily in various countries on the African continent and some parts of the Middle East, as well as among some immigrant communities in Western countries. Feminist activists, including the prominent US feminists Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, joined third-world feminists such as the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi to call for the redefinition of the practice as ‘female genital mutilation’ and a form of violence against women. As a result of international campaigns, the practice was declared a violation of human rights by Amnesty International and the United Nations, and made illegal in many Western as well as non-Western legislations since the mid-1990s. Whereas Alice Walker’s earlier work had criticized white feminists for routinely excluding black women by speaking out on their behalf, her anti-female genital mutilation novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), dedicated to ‘the blameless vulva’, and the documentary film Warrior Marks on the same topic which she co-produced, have been accused of cultural imperialism and neo-colonialism, for claiming to speak on behalf of African women on the grounds of her ancestry, while actually imposing an ethnocentric American vision of African cultural practices. More generally, Western feminists have been criticized for focusing on third-world cultural practices, while largely ignoring the fact that surgical interventions on women’s genitals such as ‘laser vaginal rejuvenation’ and ‘designer laser vaginoplasty’ are currently among the fastest-growing areas of cosmetic surgery in many Western countries.

Whereas most feminists would promote a social rather than a biological understanding of gender identity and female sexuality, feminist thought on sexuality had primarily problematized female sexuality while treating male sexuality as, implicitly, unproblematic. Portrayals of male sexuality had echoed biological models of sexuality in taking for granted its naturally aggressive, triumphant, and, at times, violent nature. Feminist critics such as Lynne Segal, joined by theorists of masculinity – a field that greatly expanded in the 1990s – argued that it would be a mistake to conclude that this is also the way in which individual men experience sexuality. As Segal has pointed out:

for many men it is precisely through sex that they experience their greatest uncertainties, dependence and deference in relation to women – in stark contrast, quite often, with their experience of authority and independence in the public world.

A significant degree of sexual anxiety, insecurity, and suffering on the part of individual heterosexual men, also emphasized in the work of Masters and Johnson, has been attested

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