Coming into Desire

This impressive Roundtable comes at a time when there is considerable tension between two wings of the feminist academic and activist communities. These cultures are broadly grouped around those whose work focus is women and violence, including the trafficking of women, and those who see the commercialization of femininity as opening up possibilities for women in relation to sexual desire. Without wishing to overemphasise the binary—which has been the source of much contention1¹—the issue of sexual agency and where it resides is very much on the table.

SlutWalk in the United Kingdom, with its exuberant slogans, such as “Stop Telling Me – Don't Get Raped. Tell Men – Don't Rape” and “It's a Dress not a Yes,” or “My Clothes Aren't Louder Than My Mouth” sits between these damaging divisions and speaks to women's struggle to represent their own desire, just as this Roundtable is reflecting on what we are encountering in the consulting room.

Despite Freud being all about sex in the popular imagination, the notion of women's desire was barely on the table until—as Luise Eichenbaum points out—the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s made it an extremely important component of the struggle to redefine femininity and the relations between the sexes2. Sexuality and women's desire could be said to define the politics and personal struggles of a particular generation of women coming of age in the late '60s and '70s.

The difficulty with acting in one's own interest, even with being able to identify an interest and a desire, emerged out of the political practice of t