‘Erotic Fiction by Women for Women’: The Pleasures of Post-Feminist Heterosexuality

This article addresses the material construction of female heterosexuality through examination of the mass marketing of women’s pornography - ‘erotic fiction for women by women’ as exemplified by Virgin Publishing’s Black Lace imprint. Focusing on the gendered construction of sexuality in popular fictions, I explore the pleasures of consumption offered to women by explicitly ‘pornographic’ texts and consider how the shift into a culture of ‘post-feminism’ alters the terms upon which a politics of ‘reading sex’ might be made. The article considers how appropriate feminist analyses of pornography are to account for contemporary manifestations of the post-feminist pleasure of consuming the ‘feminine’ and questions what kind of cultural space is provided by the fictions. In view of a concern to relate mass fictional forms to their discursive placement, I am interested in the ways in which the Virgin imprint produces written erotica as a site of ‘empowerment’ and of ‘liberation’ for women. This is located within current modalities of post-feminist identity in which sexual pleasure and commodity forms are inextricably tied to notions of ‘entitlement’ and consumerist ‘self-determination’.