From Black Lace to Shades of Grey

The affectation of a female narrative voice by the male authors of pornographic works has a long history. But in recent years there has been a spate of publishing erotic fiction, and memoirs, by authentically female writers. While this development surely responds to the same cultural desire to hear women express their sexual experience and pleasure traditionally characteristic of pornography, it has also been widely seen as evidence that women are now increasingly empowered as producing and consuming subjects of erotic representation. This paper offers a discussion of female authored erotic texts published over the last twenty years; from the advent of the Black Lace imprint to the work of E.L. James. The intension is to explore the types of erotic meanings and themes these works contain and the degree of their continuity with established (male-oriented) pornographic forms. But beyond that, the question arises as to what kind of erotic subjectivity female authored texts might help their female readership to form? Moreover, is the process of interpellation one in which the subject produces a new kind of erotic discourse or is she instead assimilated to the given structures of eroticism?