230279 Good Girl Gone Bad: Women's Sexualities in Fiction and Research (S) (SoSe 2015)

In 1998 US-American writer Erica Jong asked "What do Women Want?" in her book of the same title. In 2015 the answer seems more elusive than ever: women's magazines tell us we are having the best sex of our lives, E.L. James' "Fifty Shades" trilogy has allegedly educated an entire generation in all things SM (neither new nor scandalous, Mrs. James!) and the pornsite pornhub found that women prefer lesbian porn, regardless of their own sexual orientation. Have the good girls gone bad? Is there any such thing as "women's sexuality" per se? Aren't we rather talking about imaginations and interpretations that are subject to change? And if so, who imagines them?
In this class we will seek to survey representations of women's sexualities in literature and look into statistics and non-fictional material for comparison. The scope will be limited to the Western world of the 20th and 21st century.