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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374709884 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2013 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 390 KB |
About the Author
Katherine Angel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University. She has written on sexuality, pornography, and the relationship between culture and desire for The Independent, Prospect, and The Observer, among others. She lives in London.
Katherine Angel, the author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (FSG), is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University. She has written on sexuality, pornography, and the relationship between culture and desire for The Independent, Prospect, and The Observer, among others. She lives in London.
Read an Excerpt
I
1.
Nearly ten years ago, in that sweltering summer, that heat wave summer, when to walk just half a mile meant a sticky sheen of sweat, I developed a phobia of moths.
* * *
I had never liked them, my nervousness shaped no doubt by my mother’s fear of the things. Her brother used to breed huge African specimens in their East Anglia home; they would fly up at her, startled, out of her shoes, her bedclothes. And then there was a teenage summer spent in a Gothic pile in France, where hordes of angry bees rattled behind the chimney, and disconcerting noises-off unsettled the most rational of family and guests. Fat armies of sated flies and flotillas of dark, wide moths appeared every night in a bedroom in which my sister eventually refused to sleep.
* * *
When the stay was over—but only then—we speculated giddily about dead bodies under floorboards.
* * *
So far, so manageable. But when that heat wave brought fatter, more alien moths to a tiny university town where I was deeply in love, and caught in the headlights of a Ph.D., dislike burgeoned into something else: an all-consuming terror whenever one would flap and flutter into view. Its blurry agitation would have me darting across a room before I knew what I was doing. Once, I leapt out of a shower in panic as one frantically ricocheted around the folds of a curtain. Out like a shot, I stood dripping shampoo on the hall carpet. The worst prospect: a moth sticking itself to my wet skin. It might disintegrate. A wing would be detached from a body; several different bits of moth might be stuck to me.
* * *
Dead, dismembered moth.
* * *
I went to a friend’s next door to rinse my hair.
* * *
There was a phase of nervously checking, at arm’s length, the curtains in my bedroom before sleep, poised to sprint from the scene should one rise from the lurid floral pattern. The pleasure of open windows on summer evenings was fraught with danger: those awful things, drawn to the light. Static, embracing a wall, they were almost worse, for they would inevitably move, taking disorganized, fitful flight. And when they were immobile one could see, if one dared look, their dreadful texture, their vile components.
* * *
I dreamt, once, of one pinning me down on the stone slabs of a suburban garden. It settled softly on me, trapping me under its insect blanket.
* * *
The wings—warm and dark, flimsy but strong. The furry texture of the body.
* * *
Those fucking moths.
Copyright © 2012 by Katherine Angel
Reading Group Guide
In the tradition of Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf, Katherine Angel's Unmastered forges a path through cliché, convention, and secrecy to examine the gorgeous puzzle of sexuality. We're told that women now have more access to their sexuality than ever before, and yet, in some ways, we are still too constrained to voice—or even recognize—our own wants. What we desire, Angel finds, is a crosscurrent running beneath what we think and say and know.
Through Angel's scholarly investigations of sex and her own personal experiences, Unmastered examines the fierce appetites that ebb and flow in us: for power and for pliancy; for liberation and for connection. It anatomizes desire and pleasure, joy and suffering. Reveling in the elusiveness of easy answers, Unmastered opens a space to talk about the things we often believe cannot be bounded by words.
The result is a searching, erotic work that shifts in meaning and resonance even as it is read. Lyrical, brave, and sometimes disarmingly funny, Unmastered will start a thousand debates. We hope that the following discussion topics will enhance your reading group's experience of this transformative journey.