Phillips, Kristen, ed. Women and Erotic Fiction. Critical Essays on Genres, Markets and Readers. Publishers ISBN: Download PDF. Today we are seeing a growing interest in erotic literature for women. I am thinking about, for example, Catherine M. After the enormous success of E.
James Fifty Shades trilogy we have had, at least in Sweden, an explosion of both erotic romance but also of erotica aimed at a female reader. In Women and Erotic Fiction twelve chapters analyse and discuss texts that focus on sex and desire. In many ways this collection breaks new ground, which is a task that is both rewarding and problematic. There is a need for more research on erotic fiction aimed at a female reader and there is definitively need for more research that compares and contrasts different kinds of erotic texts.
In this short review I hope to introduce this collection of chapters, but at the same time raise a question about what erotic fiction for women is and how the label can be problematic. Phillips argues that erotic fiction for women can be empowering. Yet, empowerment is a tricky concept. What does it really mean? Empowering for who? I have spent a lot of time talking about the empowering and feminist potential in popular romance and notice how I unwillingly fall into the trap of defending the genre and how, when cornered by students to give concrete examples, I notice how I tend not to give any.
This is the dichotomy that Linda Lee discusses in her chapter on romance novels where she says that: [End Page 1]. Most scholarship on romance novels falls into one of two polarized camps that view these novels as conservative forms that uphold existing patriarchal structures, or as subversive resisting forms that challenge existing structures There is a little bit of that opposition evident in this collection.
Several of the chapters present thought-provoking and highly critical readings of popular texts, but there are also some that find themselves needing to defend the texts they are studying, a position that is both uncomfortable and problematic. Several of the chapters in this collection, however, show how ambivalent the texts discussed are and it is that ambivalence that is truly interesting. It is always difficult to organize chapters on a variety of subjects that focus on very different texts; another way to go would have been to divide the collection by texts under discussion.
