Abstract
In 2010, University of Bath (United Kingdom) scholars Adrienne Evans, Sarah Riley, and Ari Shankar published “Technologies of Sexiness: Theorizing Women’s Engagement in the Sexualization of Culture” in the journal Feminism & Psychology, where they examine a feminist conundrum elicited by “raunch” culture: “how to value women’s choices of participation in sexualized culture while also maintaining a critical standpoint towards the cultural context that has enabled such postfeminist sexual subjectivities” (p. 114). Evans and Riley’s 2014 book, Technologies of Sexiness: Sex, Identity, and Consumer Culture, extends that theoretical work by including focus groups about pop sexuality with two generations of women that “fleshes out” their concepts.
This book has two parts: The first frames and theorizes sexuality in three dense chapters. The second illustrates their ideas through discussions with women in their 20s and early 30s and women in their 40s and 50s. To begin, in “Sex, Identity, and Consumer Culture,” the authors make such smart and clear moves as eliding the impersonal sexual treatment of Viagra with the popular idea of “retail therapy” to identify connections between neoliberalism, consumerism, and sexuality work. The parade of products synched to ideologies of self-help constitute invasive links between markets and individuals. They leave us “stuck,” the authors argue, in seemingly progressive/nonprogressive sexual regimes.
The project’s scaffolding is in “Doubled Stagnations: Mapping Debates.” Contemporary sexuality’s double stagnation (evoked in the feminist conundrum above) means it is “difficult to say anything useful without also becoming involved in the noise” (p. 19), and dialogues are “unable to develop forward momentum” (p. 18). Their sophisticated representation of feminist literature on such topics as porn wars and pornification anchors that old feeling one gets about gender and sexuality that “the more things change the more they remain the same.” Their dense text sets up their novel contribution of the “technologies of sexiness.”
“Technologies of Sexiness,” their final theory chapter, is derived from Foucault’s move from technologies of subjectivity—sense making—to technologies of the self—application and personalizing that sense. The authors explain, “the sense-making provided by neoliberalism, consumerism, and post-feminism would constitute the technologies of subjectivity,” while “technologies of the self thus constitute those moments when we work on ourselves to make ourselves” (p. 40). They illustrate via referencing what’s involved in buying and using a new-generation vibrator. Later, they animate the technologies of sexiness through discussions of vibrators and a visit to a (straight) women-friendly sex shop.
Two chapters present the interviews: the authors met three times with four younger women, ages 25-31, and (separately) with four older women, ages 48-54. They labeled the groups as “pleasure pursuers” and “functioning feminists.” Whether the authors expected it to be pleasure pursuers versus functioning feminists, it was. The views in each were strongly contrasting. The older group expressed much tension with the younger, while the younger group felt most conflict with those who weren’t “real” pleasure pursuers like they were. Both groups clung to the concept of “authenticity,” which constituted for both a kind of connoisseurship regarding femininity, feminism, and sexuality. Both eventually revealed limits regarding their version of what was gross or improper.
The interviews illustrated how consumerism is injected into the sexual selves of younger and older women—even if in defiant opposition. Meanwhile, the younger group illustrated nearly stereotypical post-feminism—with a fascination with oneself—while the older group dramatized the frequently bemoaned failings of second-wave white women’s feminism with a reflexive normativity about what is best for “women.” I struggled with some nitpicking about the interviews: I knew the subjects’ age ranges, but could find neither the birth years nor the year interviews were conducted. Given the tiny number of subjects and substantive references to generation and cultural change, I kept wondering, wait, were they coming of age sexually in the 1960s or 1970s? How far into the recession were these interviews?
This project aims to break the limitations of homogenizing, double-stagnating discourse on sexualities that they so well described. The authors acknowledge that they limited interviews to white, heterosexual, and middle-class women interested in discussion groups about sex. Yet the authors fell short without more diverse perspectives and subjectivities as reference points in the literature. How, for example, might the authors propose to take the notion of double-stagnations and “technologies of sexiness” beyond the dominant cultural milieu they studied? Theoretical and empirical work on immigrant women, women of color, and sexual minorities would fit well within their work. I found the ideas engaging; I would have liked to read how they consider their ideas might be translated, influenced, or be modified by consulting empirical worlds beyond white, middle-class women.