From Sexual Liberation to Gender Trouble: Reading Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure from the 1960s to the 1990s

The pornographic fantasy world of John Cleland's 1749 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure continues to excite both popular and critical interest after two and a half centuries. The disparity of critical positions on the ideological import of Fanny Hill's lusty adventures testifies to the text's provocative ambiguity, its resistance to a definitive reading. 1 It is this ambiguity, therefore, that demands attention, and I contend that it stems in part from the competing concepts of gender that operate in the novel. On the one hand, women and men alike are constituted by their sex. Women are untapped mines, virgin landscapes, while men are machines, furious engines. Cleland deploys an essentialized concept of gender to naturalize and eroticize economic relations between men and women and to sustain his characterization of Fanny Hill as a happy, prosperous "woman of pleasure" (never a prostitute) for whom pleasure and pain are conveniently and inextricably linked. Cleland's elaborate metaphors repeatedly suggest that Fanny's position in life and her ardent sexual responses to paying strangers are simply expressions of the biologically determined submission of woman to man. Alternatively, however, the novel also suggests at times that gender is neither essential nor absolute but rather performative, as Judith Butler has argued, and furthermore, that this performance frequently takes place, for women,

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From Sexual Liberation to Gender Trouble: Reading Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure from the 1960s to the 1990s

Cited by 13 publications

References 42 publications

Cleland, John

Cleland, John

Confusion Embodied: Epistemologies of Sex and Race in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49) and the Histoire naturelle (1749–1804)

Dreadful Necessities : Nature and the Performance of Gender in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

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