Beyond the vagina–clitoris debate—From naming the genitals to reclaiming the woman's body

Abstract

Synopsis This study brings in to the open Hong Kong women's suppressed and hidden articulation of their feelings about their sexual body parts. By tracing the heavily regulated and always difficult process by which they came into contact with and related themselves to their sexual body parts, it examines how women were made to develop a sense of self-alienation towards their own bodies, and yet how some of them managed to put up their resistance against such a ‘forced’ dissociation. It also challenges the assumed superiority of using medico-anatomical language to prescribe ‘proper’ names for sexual parts, as they are found to possess a high degree of indeterminacy as sites of arousal and pleasure, and subject to the nature of encounters and relational contexts.