Pedagogy, Politics, and Betty Dodson'sLiberating Masturbation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2229705 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emily Sutton (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 311-331 |
| Publication date | 2024-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/727205 |
| OpenAlex | W4388742553 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 4 |
In the last years of her life, the late feminist sex educator Betty Dodson may never have been closer to the zeitgeist. Dodson appeared on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix series The Goop Lab, was fictionalized on Broad City, and was the subject of a glowing New York Times profile. Dodson rose to prominence in the early 1970s as a sex educator who both repopularized the vibrator and facilitated group masturbation workshops. In spite of this pop-cultural embrace, there have been no sustained critical accounts of her work. In this article, I read Dodson’s 1974 pamphlet Liberating Masturbation across the twin contexts of second-wave feminism and her contemporary renaissance. Her idiosyncratic, bawdy theory and practice complicates a history of second-wave feminist politics, and she remains a rich, productive figure to think with. Melding sexology, aesthetics, technology, and an unabashed libidinal energy, Dodson advocates for collective, erotic pedagogy as a source of knowledge production. In doing so, her work carves out a space for pleasure and joy in the messiness of lived experience
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Feminism · Media studies · Pleasure · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |