Women, Sex, and Madness

This book examines sexuality in relation to social anxieties and cultural madness using a critical feminist psychological approach, emphasizing cultural, social, and personal narratives about sexuality and seeing these narratives as fluid, contested, and changing to encourage us to think about sex, bodies, and madness as intertwined.

Breanne Fahs is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, US, and a practicing Clinical Psychologist. Her previous books include: Performing Sex (2011), Valerie Solanas (2014), Out for Blood (2016), and Firebrand Feminism (2018).

Introduction: mad women, precarity, and the possibilities of sex Part 1 Women explain things to me 1 Men, through women's eyes 2 The other third shift? Women's emotion work in their sexual relationships 3 Slippery desire: women's qualitative accounts of their vaginal lubrication and wetness Part 2 Veering and queering 4 Killjoy's Kastle and the hauntings of queer/lesbian feminism 5 The politics of turning rape into "nonconsensual sex" 6 Genital anxieties: using critical sexuality studies to examine women's attitudes about the vulva and vagina Part 3 On the couch 7 Compulsory penetration? A sex therapy romp 8 Are women people? The lusty and chaotic world of sex addiction 9 Therapy without bodies, or why fleshiness matters Part 4 All riled up 10 Warning: capitalism is destroying our sex lives 11 "Freedom to" and "freedom from": a new vision for sex-positive politics 12 Counter-erotics: sex as a form of resistance Acknowledgements Index