Freud, Dora, and Compulsory Sexuality

“Freud, Dora, and Compulsory Sexuality” examines Freud’s attempt to impose male sexuality onto a patient he renamed “Dora.” While Dora, an adolescent girl, did not begin seeing Freud to receive help with a sexual discrepancy issue, this chapter shows that a sexual discrepancy did surface during her treatment, the discrepancy between the way Dora’s male therapist interpreted her sexuality and the way she interpreted her own. The chapter shows how, in the name of treating Dora’s psychological symptoms, Freud imposed his sexual story onto Dora while simultaneously excluding and nullifying Dora’s own thoughts, feelings, and experiential reality.

Impact of Compulsory Sexuality on LGB and Asexual Media Consumers

This paper seeks to explore the effects of media portrayals of heterosexuality on the romantic and sexual development of adolescent lesbian, gay, bisexual, (LGB) and asexual (ace) consumers. The media, specifically network programming, is a powerful tool of socialization which has been dominated by images of heterosexual love since its inception. As a result LGB and ace consumers have been systemically erased from the majority of the United States’ mediated social narratives. Non-straight viewers have therefore been precluded from receiving the social guidance and affirmation allotted to heterosexual consumers whose sexual and romantic behaviors are endorsed by the images portrayed onscreen. The underrepresentation of LGB and ace people is reflected in other major socializing institutions including the home, church, and academic institutions where heterosexuality is taken for granted as the only acceptable form of sexual or romantic behavior, and non-straight people are consequently erased. Furthermore, tracing the gradual increase in portrayals of love and sex in the media over time and the ubiquitous nature of sexuality throughout society, this paper will explore the nuances inherent in the effects of compulsory heterosexuality on LGB people and the effects of compulsory sexuality on asexual people. Ultimately, by understanding television and story-telling as society’s primary means of self-regulation and expression, this paper will interrogate the implications of predominantly heterosexual narratives on the minds and sexual development of young LGB and asexual consumers.

Unwilling Consumers: A Historical Materialist Conception of Compulsory Sexuality

This paper seeks to expand the work of Marxist-feminist scholars Rosemary Hennessy and Nancy Fraser by placing it into conversation with the emerging work of scholars of asexuality and asexual identity. In resisting the tendency to reify the identity category of “asexual” as a newly emerging and dialogically structured identity which stands in opposition to the “allosexual,” this paper will rather attempt to determine its nature as a historically structured and contingent emergence of a particular moment in neoliberal capitalism. From this, it will argue that there need not be a tension between the notions of “compulsory sexuality” and “sexusociety” developed by scholars such as Elizabeth Emens and Ela Przybylo. It will be demonstrated that asexuality can be used as a positional tool in order to illuminate the totality of sexuality as a reified and commodified entity under late capitalism, one which is useful for understanding and resisting the capitalist historical (re)organization of human potentials for sensation and affect.

Negotiating Intimate and (A)sexual Stories

Drawing on a research project looking at women's engagement with therapeutic/self-help literature this paper uses the concept of narrative frameworks to explore women's negotiation of currently circulating stories of healthy womanhood, intimacy and sexuality. In a (western) world increasingly informed by therapeutic discourses, adult women are told they are entitled to happiness and success and failure to do so is seen to result from past (often traumatic) experiences which might or might not be remembered. Central to this construction of womanhood is what (drawing on Rich 1980) I have called ‘compulsory sexuality’ whereby the healthy adult woman is constructed as sexually knowledgeable, active and desirous. This not only puts pressure on all women to construct a (particular) active sexual self but helps to construct those who do not as problematic and directs them to seek both cause and solution in their damaged psychologies. One such cause is said to be childhood sexual abuse and the self-help literature aimed at survivors of such abuse encourages readers to use the idea(l) of an active sexual self as a measure of health, well-being and ultimately womanhood. In this paper I argue that contemporary narrative frameworks of healthy womanhood not only allows for women who are not, or do not wish to be, sexually active to be identified as problematic, but directs them to see themselves as damaged. In critiquing the sexual abuse recovery literature I also show how this can be used to create different a/sexual selves, albeit ones currently perceived to be ‘damaged’.