Unmastered
A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
One of O Magazine's Must-Read Books for June 2013
A provocative and personal meditation on sex, power, and female desire
Today's women, we're told, have more options in exercising their desire than ever before in history. And yet the way we talk about desire is virtually as constrained as it was for the Victorians. There's an essential paradox at the heart of female sexuality: What we demand in our public lives is often in direct contrast to what we crave in our intimate lives.
In the tradition of Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf, Katherine Angel has forged a path through cliché, convention, and secrecy, and the result is Unmastered, a searching and idiosyncratic account of her studies in sex as an academic and of her experiences of sex as a woman.
Unmastered isn't merely personal confession; it is also a powerful reckoning with our contradictory and deeply entrenched notions of sexuality. Angel embraces the highly charged oppositions—dominance versus submission, liberation versus dependence—and probes the porousness between masculine and feminine, thought and sensation, self and culture, power and pliancy, always reveling in the elusiveness of easy answers.
With remarkable candor, Angel reflects on the history of her encounters and beliefs, and shows how our lives are shaped by the words we use and the stories we tell. The result is a revelatory book that examines and then explodes our most deeply rooted assumptions. Lyrical, brave, and sometimes disarmingly funny, Unmastered will start a thousand debates.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this thinking woman's meditation on sexual desire, Angel challenges readers to consider whether feminism has actually liberated women to lay claim to their own desire and satisfaction. Her intellectual touchstones include Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, and Michel Foucault, and Angel sprinkles quotations from their writings throughout the book to emphasize and illuminate her own ideas. The narrative ghostly and poetic at its strongest charts the course of Angel's affair with an unnamed man. Her passion for him erupts onto the page, often in the form of a sentence or two separated from its neighbors by copious white space, an unconventional style that mirrors the dynamic nature of sexual tension and release. Meanwhile, she contemplates a variety of issues associated with her physical desire: she admits to an interest in pornography, but acknowledges that her definition of it might differ from someone else's; she asks her lover to tie her up, but he only does so later when she hasn't asked; flashing back to another affair in the book's most moving section, she describes terminating an unplanned pregnancy. In the end, Angel doesn't offer up any pat answers to her questions because she knows that none exist; desire, like liberation, is individual not universal.
