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Hypatia 17.3 (2002) 286-289



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Book Review

Sex Acts:
Practices of Femininity and Masculinity


Sex Acts: Practices of Femininity and Masculinity. By Jennifer Harding. London/Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998.

Headlined "The Science of Women's Sexuality," the cover story in a recent issue of Newsweek magazine describes the current research on women's sexual dysfunction. The discursive equation of "women's sexuality" and "sexual dysfunction" is unmistakable and unsettling. In one fell swoop, the magazine cover's subtitle "Searching for a Female Viagra: Is It a Mind or Body Problem?" pathologizes women's sexuality as one requiring medical intervention, presumes women's "problem" is exclusively psychological or physical, and considers men's sexual needs as the basis upon which women's sexuality should be treated. Readers of the magazine article learn about four sexual "dysfunction types" in women, how Helen Gurley Brown allays the "problem" of bad sex—or no sex—for women over seventy ("You appeal to a younger man by being competent, worldly, glamorous, fun, adoring, good in bed and having a little money!"), and how clitoral suction devices and testosterone patches hold out hope for a flagging female libido. And on and on.

After reading Jennifer Harding's new book, Sex Acts: Practices of Femininity and Masculinity, the question occurred to me: what if we were to understand this Newsweek article as a paradigm case of how the media, scientific, and medical establishments produce and regulate women's sexuality through their own public discourses on sexuality, thereby creating the very knowledge about women's sexuality they purport to discover? If sexuality were conceived as a site of contested discourse rather than a site of empirical investigation, would we be in a better position to evaluate cultural representations of sexuality for their meaning and value in individual women's (and men's) lives? Would we be better able to create new possibilities for reconstructions of sex, gender, and sexuality in a postmodern world?

In Sex Acts,Jennifer Harding argues that the answer to the latter two questions is an emphatic "Yes!" Harding's compact, 138-page book explores how the relations between sex, gender, and sexuality are produced and regulated by a wide variety of institutionalized and individual discourses that can both reinforce and transform traditional notions of sex and gender. She grounds her discussion in the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, whose discursive and deconstructive approach to understanding sexuality Harding believes will [End Page 286] discourage feminists who theorize about women's sexual lives from unwittingly reinforcing modernist categories of biological sex and social gender, and thus from unwittingly reinforcing restrictive conceptions of femininity and masculinity. Harding argues that sex and sexuality, not just gender, comprise a complex of media, scientific, medical, and political discourses that construct, as opposed to reflect, our knowledge about sex. As such, feminists must be wary of politicizing women's sexuality in ways that reify the belief that women's sexuality is a discoverable, oppositional, and stable given in women's lives. And if we accept Judith Butler's contention that gender is an imitative and performative act of inventing, rather than consolidating, femininity and masculinity, then, Harding argues, as feminists we will be in a better position to challenge those traditions sexually oppressive to women.

Chapters 1 through 4 of Sex Acts help those unfamiliar with Foucault's or Butler's theoretical arguments to understand how representations of sex, gender, and sexuality—particularly those institutionalized discourses of science, medicine, and the media—may produce not only knowledge of but power over a culture's sexual attitudes and practices; and that such production can serve a status quo interested in maintaining its hegemony over those discourses of sexuality by couching its discursive construction of sex in terms of discoverable fact and universal truth. Chapters 5 through 9 explore some ways that sex, gender, and sexuality are produced and regulated through a variety of discourses about sex—from hormone replacement therapy, environmental estrogens, and new reproductive technologies to lesbian mothers, single mothers, and lesbians as represented in the media. For those...

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