ABSTRACT
Women’s historical sex avoidance can, with feminist consciousness, become an act of sex resistance. The sex resister understands her act as a political one. The sexual experience of most women occurs within heterosexual arrangements, and this experience is often lived out as an attempt to escape from the practice of sexuality. Sex resisters can struggle and act within heterosexual arrangements to dismantle the dynamic through which men self-identify as the subor-dinators of women and women self-identify as the subordinated, meanwhile keeping other nonsexual, nonsubordinating aspects of relationships that have value for them. Sex resistance is not to be understood as what has been traditionally known as celibacy, as that which lacks an articulated radical feminist analysis of the subordination of women. Sex resistance has a historical claim to feminist authenticity. It is what many women have done when demonstrating our claims to integrity, to self-possession of our own lives and bodies.
