Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: Recs Fest (Sexuality)

[viklikesfic]

Thanks so much to everyone who left recs on the women of color theme post! We've got quite a range of recs, and I'll leave that post open so feel free to add some more recs in the comments. You can see the general guidelines for leaving recs on that post, but now it's time for the second theme, which is...

Sexuality! Again, this is a broad category, so feel free to interpret however you like. You can rec non-fiction books about any aspect of sexuality, you can rec sex-positive memoirs by awesome women, you can rec erotic fiction and poetry, you can rec books about feminist takes on sexuality, books that look at sexuality from a queer or trans perspective, etc etc. Any questions, feel free to ask for clarification in comments.

Comments

[holyschist]

Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History (nonfiction)

[torachan]

Well, I recced Jackie Kay on the previous post as an author of color, but she is also a lesbian and writes primarily about lesbians. In addition, her novel Trumpet is about a trans man.

Two of my other favorite female authors are also lesbians who write primarily about lesbians: Ali Smith and Sarah Schulman. I highly recommend everything by them.

[eumelia]

Continuing with Sarah Schulman, I recently read her book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences and it blew my mind.

She articulates and lays out in broad terms how that system of oppression and suppression work in the family, is translated into society at large and is radical about the root causes of the matter.

I have many parts of that book underlined and scribbled. It was an amazing read.

Not to mention that it offers a political reading to personal family interrelations, which we often prefer not to think about,

[marshtide]

I'm going to go with the predictable first off and rec Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. I also found that Michael Cunningham's The Hours was a really interesting companion piece, and crystalised some things about Mrs Dalloway in my mind, and made me want to go back to the original book and look at it from other angles, so I'll throw that one in with it as well.


Next, I have a sort of odd half-rec, which is Swedish author Victoria Benedictsson. It's not a real rec because I haven't properly read her yet (I have, however, tracked down one of the few English copies of her most famous book, Money, which inhabit the Swedish library system, and it's on its way to me), so I'll have to get back to you on what I actually think of her. This might sound a bit weird. What I want to say about her, though, is that she was writing in the late 1800s and frankly discussed female sexuality and also apparently wrote about women who were people and also had a lot of critical things to say about the social conventions of the time. People tell me she's also a damn good writer. I do hope they're right and I'm pretty keen to find out. (She was also a contemporary of Ibsen and Strindberg, and apparently influenced them quite a bit, but is far less talked about outside of feminist circles. She was dismissed at the time as writing too much about women and women's issues and I think that problem actually hasn't gone away.)