Re-writing the Body: Pornography in the Service of Feminism

Abstract

Angela Carter’s musings on the female body dealing with representations, re-readings and re-writings of the conventions of the pornographic, published at the dawn of the “feminist sex wars,” saw in pornography a potential critique of the existing relation between sexes and in the pornographer an “unconscious ally.” This article attempts to explore the complex relationship between representation, gender and genre as delineated by The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, The Passion of New Eve, and “Black Venus.” Carter enumerates the conventions of pornography, explicates its various tendencies and undermines them through re-reading, repetition, exaggeration, and parody to bring out the similarities between  the treatment of women in pornographic literature and in institutions sanctioned and nurtured by the society.