Watery Passion: The Struggle between Hegemony and Sexual Liberation in Erotic Fiction for Women

Abstract

Erotic texts have historically been written for male consumption and women's erotic preferences were either marginalized or assumed to coincide with men's. Following Lakoff (1987), this paper examines the metaphors and semantic associations constructed in and through the first erotic genre explicitly directed to a female audience: the erotic romance novel. The sexual experiences portrayed in 16 romances representing a typical contemporary North American selection were excerpted for a detailed analysis guided by the precepts and methods of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989; Van Dijk, 1993) and cultural critiques (Christian-Smith, 1993; Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990). The genre presents a unique erotic style (Youmans and Patthey-Chavez, 1992) even as it reflects prescriptive formulas meant to enhance its marketability (Paludan, 1994). The analysis reveals that it is contested ground—at once consummation of female desire and hegemonic channeling of that desire into the safety of accepted/acceptable patterns of female agency and female experience.