Abstract

Feminists continue to disagree over the extent to which individual women may be complicit in their own sexual oppression and the oppression of women as a class. This book has argued that such disagreements often paint a picture of women's sexuality in mutually exclusive terms: women's sexual choices are either the product of an oppressive gender politics or the site for a self-defined sexual liberation for women. It has contended that the perspective of the “view from somewhere different” is an epistemological framework that recognizes the strengths of a feminism that situates women's sexuality within a cultural ideology that devalues and subordinates women to the advantage of men. Yet it is also a framework that advocates raising feminist consciousness of this ideology as a first step in the pursuit of women's sexual creativity and power, which along with women's freedom from sexual subordination would allow individual women to determine for themselves how sex and sexuality figure in their lives.