ABSTRACT
The subject of sexuality, as critique of its repression, was central to feminism from a very early point. As long ago as 1947 Simone de Beauvoir interrogated the writings of Montherlant, Lawrence, Breton and Stendhal to discover the underlying fantasies and myths which were attached to the word ‘woman’. In 1969 Kate Millet found in the works of Mailer, Henry Miller and Lawrence dominant constructions of sexuality in which male penetration was undertaken with the purpose of subordinating the female. The feminist analysis of literature written by men is a critique of sexual culture in which liberation of the sexual senses and of sensuality was not found to be possible. The two authors wanted to show that male desire is on the one hand fused with mastery of the object and, on the other, that in the course of the development of patriarchy, sexuality had become altogether equated with male pleasure and therefore with structures of power and powerlessness, constructions of active and passive and ruler and ruled. The ideas of liberation did not simply aim at ‘better sex’, at other sexual practices or at the simple disclosure of the female organs of pleasure, but another sexuality not based purely on reproduction, at the possibility of learning with the body and—what was even more important—of unlearning acquired cultural practices.
