Abstract
This article interrogates what has been referred to as the Fifty Shades in contemporary popular culture and media - a cultural trend that represents female desire and pleasure in terms of submission and masochism. The article reflects on how contemporary feminist literary criticism and theory might approach this phenomenon. The texts in question claim to liberate and empower women sexually, when in reality they perpetuate a deeply conservative and hetero-normative view of sexuality, desire and pleasure. More specifically, the article discusses how a feminist analysis of the pleasure generated in many women by these depictions of female submission and masochism can avoid being locked into a reductive dichotomy between sex-positive and sex-negative feminism, which characterised many feminist debates in the 1970s and 1980s. This article discusses ways in which the feminist literary critic can approach a cultural phenomenon that is not confined within a popular literary sphere, but that also dominates much contemporary popular media and trade. The scale of the media context in which female desire has been recently popularised, shaped and circulated poses new questions to - and demands new approaches of - feminist analyses, which this paper seeks to address.
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