Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives

by Breanne Fahs

Caught between postsexual revolution celebrations of progress and alarmingly regressive new modes of disempowerment, the forty women interviewed in Performing Sex offer a candid and provocative portrait of liberated sex in America. Through this nuanced and complex study, Breanne Fahs demonstrates that despite the constant cooptation of the terms of sexual freedom, women's sexual subjectivities and the ways they continually grapple with shifting definitions of liberation represent provocative spaces for critical inquiry and personal discovery, ultimately generating novel ways of imagining and reimagining power, pleasure, and resistance."

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Sexuality

376 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 2011

About the author

Breanne Fahs is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of Performing Sex, Valerie Solanas, Out for Blood, and Firebrand Feminism, and co-editor of The Moral Panics of Sexuality, and Transforming Contagion. She is the Founder and Director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University, and also works as a Clinical Psychologist.

Reviews

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

An important topic, but I didn't feel particularly convinced by Fahs' analysis, especially since by her own admission she sometimes makes conclusions that are not supported by the interviews the book is supposedly based on. If the interviews are going to get discounted, why even bother? I think I would have preferred reading longer sections of the interviews and having more background on who was saying what - a pattern emerged where you could recognize women who were quoted multiples times and could construct their backgrounds, but, for example, there was nothing quoted to speak to the racial diversity of the participants. The one time when women were labeled by race was when a couple of white women shared racist fantasies of having sex with Latino and black men. Fahs addresses this in the beginning, saying that the book's intent is to display a broad range of issues facing women in general and therefore it would be too specialized to address the race or SES status of individual participants, but I felt like a lot of nuance was lost by discounting the fact that women as a category to not face sexist pressures in the same way.
As a positive, the section on faking orgasms was interesting and the discussion of a potential female Viagra (which has run into problems because of companies' failed attempt to separate the body and mind vis a vis sexual responses) was enlightening.

[Gregory Eakins · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Performing Sex, Breanne Fahs provides some eye opening discussion on the state of women's sex lives and the internal secrets and struggles women deal with in modern times.

Fahs' analysis of various aspects of sex is divided into about six sections: orgasms, bisexuality, pharmaceuticals, good sex, bad sex, and porn. Each section of discussion is supported by snippets from interviews with women from somewhat varied backgrounds and viewpoints.

The observations and conclusions brought to light here range from good (performance bisexuality and reasons for faking orgasms), to obvious (women don't like to be raped), to downright wrong (female Viagra and ambiguous rape).

I think the read wouldn't have been so bad if she had not buried the entire contents under a weighted blanked of unnecessary academic prose. Just take a random sentence:

Can (compulsory) bisexuality function as a resistance narrative against compulsory heterosexuality, even while compulsory bisexuality references compulsory heterosexuality?

You have to read it a few times just to understand what Fahs is trying to say, and then you realize it wasn't even worth the effort.

Her entire argument in chapter 3 is this: since big pharmaceutical companies are working on drugs to enhance women's sex lives, they are pushing a narrative that women are fundamentally broken and need drugs to meet societal expectations. There are currently few, if any, effective drugs for treating low libido in women (flibanserin sometimes works, but it's not popular), so it doesn't seem to me like big pharma is working that hard. The second bothersome fact in this chapter is her complete misunderstanding of Viagra. She keeps referring to a "female Viagra" as a libido booster, yet that isn't the function of Viagra. Sildenafil simply increases blood flow - not libido. If she can't even get the basic facts straight, the rest of the argument becomes completely unconvincing.

There are a few good discussion points in this book, but the thick, academic, and repetitive writing style make it a lot more effort that it's worth.

[Valentin · Rating 1 out of 5]

girl how did you spend years and years and years interviewing “women” (read: cis women) and studying sex and gender to write a whole book excluding an entire sector of women with an impossible to ignore relationship to sex. you’re just transphobic

[Laura May · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me some six months to read, because it was simultaneously saddening, infuriating, and overwhelming. It's a pity it's written in such an unnecessarily academic style, as I do think this would be a fantastic leaping-off point for discussion between people of all kinds, and particularly those who either identify as a woman or who have sex with women. It reflects conversations I've had with my friends where we've wondered if we'd done things because we *wanted* to or because we were *supposed* to, and gets at the performative and yet somehow irrevocable aspects of female sexuality.

An incredibly worthwhile read, and I was spamming excerpts of it to my friends, irrespective of their gender. It's certainly made me reconsider my position and what I want out of intimate relationships. Particularly potent in conjunction with Thinking Kink: The Collision of BDSM, Feminism and Popular Culture (though that book is a bit more readable).

From an academic point of view, evidentally I'm disappointed with the writing style that's been applied to what could otherwise be a fantastic resource; that said, I particularly enjoyed the theoretical choices, and it's great to see such solid application of qualitative methods.