Sexual (Dis)Orientation - Gender, Sex, Desire and Self-Fashioning

In order to trace the operations of discourse in the self-fashioning of women, Wilton (human sexuality, U. of the West of England) examined the literature on sexuality, conducted a survey, interviewed women who had become lesbian, appropriated material about lesbians from a training workshop, and studied published autobiographical accounts of lesbiTamsin Wilton interviewed close to a hundred women in order to understand how we go about constructing a sexual identity as 'lesbian' or 'heterosexual'. How do women experience desire? What are the differences between men and women as sexual partners? How do desire, pleasure, intimacy, gender and morality become part of women's sense of self? Asking these, and other questions, this study breaks through the stand off between essentialists and constructionists to propose a fresh re thinking of the desiring self.