Women and Sex and Talk

Mahité Breton and I have proposed a seminar for the upcoming American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA conference), Chicago, March 2020.

Women and Sex and Talk

Over 20 years since Candace Vogler’s important essay “Sex and Talk” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 1998), and in the midst of the #MeToo movement and what has been referred to as the “#MeToo novel,” this seminar focuses on what women talk about when they talk about the pleasures, risks, inconsistencies and incoherencies of sex, desire, and intimacy, by looking at recent work by female fiction writers.

While mainstream discussions and debates on these issues often operate based on the premise of self-expression as the enunciative modality leading to self-mastery, writers such as Miriam Toews (Women Talking), Dana Spiotta (Friends and Innocents), Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends), Jamie Quatro (I Want to Show You More), and Eimear McBride (A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing), have crafted narratives that affirm Vogler’s claim that “not all intimacies are affairs of the self,” and that the stories one tells about sex are not always speech acts in search of one’s sovereign subjectivity.

In light of this, what can the contemporary sex novel teach us—precisely through the de-personalizing virtues of fiction—about how women might talk about intimacy, sex, desire and pleasure in ways that make room for the unbearableness—indeed the near-unspeakableness—of sex. How might these so-called #MeToo novels, operate in distinction to the discursive self-assertion and “self-conscious rational agency” and “stable system[s] of sexual self-representation” (Vogler, 344) that are hallmarks of sex talk in the #MeToo movement?

The novels referenced above are stories of non-sovereign resilience “liberated from the fetters of selfhood” (Baumeister, Escaping the Self, 1991), and portray sex beyond romance and the sentimental romantic novel; a liberal egalitarian model of intimacy and love; and the imperative that sex be morally redemptive, psychically and emotionally fulfilling—and indeed, at times, the source of a secure sense of self. As Vogler argues: “at least some kinds of sex (I want to say, goodsex) can’t happen unless people stop worrying about who they are, and what the activity means to them, for them, and about them” (358). To talk about sex without these worries, might be a way to open both sex and talk to the political. Perhaps in terms of configurations of readerships of these contemporary novels, and the public conversations and differently structured intimacies that might ensue, in which the personal is not premised to be the only space of the political (or the sexual). We welcome papers on the novels and authors listed above, as well as other literary and theoretical works on women, sex, and talk, from a range of national and social-cultural contexts.