ABSTRACT
Liberated from subjection to biologico-Christian standards, pleasure must now be politically correct. While what pornography signifies has always constituted a site of intense contestation, Walter Kendrick argues in The Secret Museum that it has become a locus of impassioned debate for US and European feminism in the 1980s. The rhetorics that represent these conflicts over the normative and strategic valence of pornography/sexwork are isomorphically reproduced in most contemporary feminist representations of assisted reproductive technologies. A few feminist writers make the homology between feminist representations of reproductive technologies and pornography/sexwork explicit. It is a much unacknowledged irony that feminism’s attack on compulsory natalism has stimulated contradictory fantasies, desires, and investments for a diversity of maternal positions and identifications. Radical feminist critiques of individualist ownership as inherently masculinist, however, themselves rely on an uncritical, essentialist embrace of feminine “difference”.
