Pleasure Principles

politics, sexuality and ethics

Plot

This volume stems from the Body Politic/Erotic Self Conference, which took as its theme sexuality and the future of sexual politics from the 1990s. It deals with the prevalent unease felt, particularly in cultural studies circles, with the moralistic sexual and gender politics of the 1970s and 1980s. Both at an academic and popular level, the contributors open up the debate for a new engagement with the politics of sexual pleasures. The contributors address the question of how we live our lives as sexual beings, and cover a diversity of sexual pleasures and practices. Moving on from the Freudian constraints of the woman as object/man as subject. "Pleasure Principles" covers: gay and straight voyeurs, men looking at men, women looking at men and women looking at women. It presents a fresh analysis of how we think about and act as sexual beings: the pleasures of looking, reading, dancing, watching films and dressing, as well as sexual pleasure itself.