ABSTRACT
A stark, sharp-edged binary has been at the center of American culture: women as sentimental in contrast to men as desiring selves. A series of overlapping binaries remain at the heart of American culture even as they are increasingly contested: man/woman, narcissistic/other-oriented, and desire/affect. The politics of identity did not begin with the civil rights and liberation movements of the 1960s. By the 1970s, a sexual identity politic championing social justice was mobilized by self identified gay men and lesbians. Today, many straight Americans, like their gay counterparts, deliberately and publicly claim their sexuality as an identity. Based on a medical-scientific understanding of the erotic zones of the body, ordinary Americans would be able to effectively give and receive sensual pleasure as a way to express love and consolidate a stable, companionate marriage. While individualization in the sphere of intimacy has raised anxieties of anything goes or hedonism run amuck, Americans have been fashioning variations of a relational ethic.
