Spicing It Up: Sexual Entrepreneurs and The Sex Inspectors

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the emergence of a new feminine subject who we call the ‘sexual entrepreneur’. We will argue that the ‘modernization’ of femininity over the last two decades in the wake of the ‘sexual revolution’ and women’s movement, alongside the acceleration and intensi-fication of neoliberalism and consumerism, has given rise to a new and contradictory subject position: the sexual entrepreneur. This ‘new femininity’ constitutes a hybrid of discourses of sexual freedom for women, intimately entangled with attempts to recuperate this to (male-dominated) consumer capitalism. This makes this figure difficult to read, and helps to account for the familiar polarization between those feminists who appear hopeful and optimistic about the spaces that have opened up in recent years for female sexual self-expression and sexual pleasure in Western societies, and those who interpret the same phenomena as merely old sexual stereotypes wrapped in a new, glossy postfeminist guise. Contextualizing our argument in discussions about the ‘mainstreaming of sex’ (Attwood, 2009), we seek to develop notions of ‘sexual subjectification’ (Gill, 2003) and ‘technologies of sexiness’ (Radner, 1993, 1999) to explore the rise and proliferation of discourses of sexual entrepreneurship, and suggest a way of reading this that does not — or at least tries not to — fall back into the old binaries (e.g. either unproblematic liberation or wholesale recuperation).