Self-knowledge, self-regulation and ambivalence: the production of female desire in the US-UK popular cultural imaginary

Abstract

This article examines how media texts are curbing and conditioning female desire in the contemporary US-UK cultural moment. It analyses eight popular cultural texts: fictional TV shows Sex/Life (2021-), Wanderlust (2018), Gypsy (2017), film Hello, My Name is Doris (2015); factual TV shows Sex, Love & Goop (2021) and The Principles of Pleasure (2022); short story Cat Person (2017); and non-fiction book Three Women (2019). These media call on women to identify and regulate their desires in ways that sustain patriarchal ideals of femininity. Celebrations of female sexuality as a vehicle for self-knowledge are tied up in psychological, physiological and medicalised discourses which pathologise female desire in a binary of low/excessive, or confused and complex. Such discourses mask sexual trauma and present female sexual liberation as a reparative solution to violence. However, transformative understandings of desire as unknowable, contextual and culturally conditioned, which allow for a reworking of gendered relations, also emerge. Bringing together philosophical, psychological and popular debates on female desire with cultural representation, the article concludes that representations largely ignore the relationality of desire as always located within the violence of gender, race and class power structures.