ABSTRACT
The representation of women's sexuality in public academic discourse in Russia differs from its representation in the West. This chapter presents an analysis of how women's sexual pleasure is constructed in the biographical interviews. It describes the script approach, as the theoretical base of the research on sexuality. The theory of scripts has been applied to research on sexuality in Western sociology and psychology, where sexuality is understood as a cultural construct (a set of learnt behavioural patterns). The chapter also describes that ideal types of sexual scripts are reconstructed on the basis of interviews with urban Russian middle-class women. The different meanings of pleasure, corresponding to the different scripts, are reconstructed on the same basis. The chapter also presents different ways of constructing sexual pleasure in women's sexual biographies by illustrating three concrete life stories.
