Scandalous women: Gender and identity in top-notch smut

Abstract

Examining a diverse range of texts offering controversial representations of female sexuality, this paper demonstrates a persistent link between literary scandal and anxieties about women's sexuality. Texts from Madame Bovary (1857) to The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2001) have provoked various arguments, from debates about the need to restrain the unruly bodies of women to contestations about aesthetic merit, morality, and obscenity. Indeed, the scandalous literature of sexual women is distinguished by efforts to reduce its transgressions into something manageable, whether through naming and categorisation (‘chick lit’ and ‘posh porn’), textual analysis, public censure, or critical excoriation. The desire to manage controversial material signifies a discourse of containment that suggests both women and literature require strict control. As this paper will argue, the relationship between women, literature, and scandal is one marked by both intra- and extra-textual efforts to restrain not only the unpredictability and power of female sexuality, but also the unruly energies of literature itself.

Keywords::

• gender
• sexuality
• women
• scandalous texts
• ‘posh porn’
• controversy

Notes

^1. Melissa Panarello's 100 of the Brush Before Bed, for example, sold 850,000 copies in Italy alone and has been translated into 24 languages (Todaro 2004), while Belle de Jour'sDiary of an Unlikely Call Girl, originally an on-line blog, was bought by publishers for ‘a six-figure sum’ (France 2006).

^2.The Story of O was written by the French author Anne Desclos, under the pseudonym of Pauline Réage. The novel recounts the tale of O, who is taken by her lover to Chateau Roissy, where she is taught the ‘art’ of sexual submission. O is chained, whipped, branded, and pierced as she is willingly transformed into a sex object. The novel has been seriously critiqued for its representation of women's sexuality as submissive and masochistic, but has also been a source of intrigue: for many years it was believed that the book could only have been written by a man (Bedell 2004). Réage/Desclos has been credited as one of the first women to write frankly about sex.

^3. Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2001) is credited with reigniting the contemporary interest in ‘posh porn’ writing. A Parisian intellectual and art critic, Millet shocked readers and publishers by candidly revealing the graphic details of her promiscuous sex life. Anaïs Nin, a French-Cuban author, is largely known as a diarist, but is also considered one of the best female Western writers of erotica. Her journals recount affairs with figures such as Henry Miller and Gore Vidal, and, most scandalously, an incestuous relationship with her father in Incest: From a Journal of Love (1992).

^4. See Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alyson Miller

Alyson Miller teaches Literary Studies at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. She has recently completed a PhD on scandalous texts.