Afterword

The front lines of the “back door”: Navigating (dis)engagement, coercion, and pleasure in women’s anal sex experiences

“…Notably, the likelihood of engaging in heterosexual anal sex also hinged upon women’s perception of power, control, and agency, a finding that also ties in with previous feminist scholarship coming out of the UK on sexual agency and the overlaps between coercion and consent (Gill & Donaghue, 2013; Madhok et al., 2013) In the USA, when male partners made the decisions about sex and contraception, those couples more often had anal sex; when women made decisions about sex and contraception, anal sex became less common (Billy, Grady, & Sill, 2009; Wiebe, 2012), suggesting that interventions must target both partners. A qualitative study of women who had unprotected sex with HIV-positive men found that women did this to experience physical pleasure, enhance emotional intimacy, please their male partner(s), or avoid violence (Maynard et al., 2009); women also avoided condoms largely to please their partners even when they had knowledge about STIs and HIV risks (Maynard et al., 2009), again suggesting that women’s perceptions of power and efficacy impact risk-taking decisions related to anal sex.…”

“…As a key task of critical feminist sex research, explorations of the newer, and potentially more insidious, manifestations of patriarchy and misogyny have paramount importance, particularly as women negotiate the “rhetoric of liberation” in light of evolving sexual expectations (Gill, 2010; McRobbie, 2007; Madhok, Phillips, & Wilson, 2013). As agency and coercion coexist to inform women’s sexual lives (Madhok et al., 2013), women face a plethora of challenges to their sexual empowerment: unequal gendered scripts about sexuality, the prioritization of men’s pleasure, faking orgasm, double standards about “promiscuity,” fusions between empowerment and consumerism, conflicting scripts about sex as power versus sex as oppression, and different entitlement to sexual pleasure and satisfaction (Elliott & Umberson, 2008; Fahs, 2011; McRobbie, 2008). Further, women’s subjective experiences of their sexuality have only recently garnered scholarly attention, as sexual health has trumped negotiations of sexual power imbalances , thus largely ignoring the ways that women engage (and disengage) from sex based on feelings of (dis)empowerment.…”

The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: A postfeminist sensibility 10 years on

“…Moreover, the notion has also ‘travelled’ across other disciplines and fields. It is now used in management and organizational studies (Kelan, 2009; Lewis et al, 2016), psychology (Stuart and Donaghue, 2012), political theory (Madhok et al, 2013; Yates, 2015), education (Ringrose, 2013) and in studies of men and masculinities (Hamad, 2014; O’Neill, 2015). A number of writers point to the extraordinary durability and adaptability of the term and its capacity to speak to a wide range of pressing contemporary issues (Dejmanee, 2015; Negra, 2014).…”

Feminist dilemmas and the agency of veiled Muslim women: Analysing identities and social representations

“…Emphasis within feminism on women's autonomy and choice arguably remains an important act of political recognition and a way of emphasizing the possibilities of challenging gender relations (Madhok et al, 2013). This is more clearly the case with respect to enduring constructions of the 'Third World Woman' (Mohanty, 1988) and specifically of veiled Muslim women as passive victims rather than competent agents (Duits and van Zoonen, 2006).…”