Sharon Thompson
Co-editors
“A sex manual for the mind. . . “ Jonathan Ned Katz, the Village Voice
“Powers of Desire is like an explosion of conversation after long silence. It presents so many urgent voices (speaking in poetry, fiction, scholarly essays, personal memoirs) that it is hard to know which to attend to first. Surprising things happen in these pages: lesbians ponder the charms . . . of heterosexuality; a gay male leftist gives capitalism its due for willy-nilly promoting sexual freedom; feminists confront the power of masochistic fantasies and attractions; sexual ‘revolutions’ turn into retreats; degradations (of black slave women) become the basis of a hard-edged wisdom; and little girls (not only boys) lust with murder in their hearts. If anything is left out – and having cast their net as wide as ‘the politics of sexuality,’ the editors are sure to be charged with some omissions – it could not have been because Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson found it offensive, unthinkable, or politically ‘incorrect.’ . . . and that saying is invested with a wonderful libidinous energy of its own.”
– Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation
"Evocative. Provocative. Stimulating. All the things a feminist conversation can be."
-- Marilyn Coffey, New Women’s Times Feminist Review
“Powers of Desire . . . may help us to think, and perhaps speak, more carefully about sex. . . . and then fight not against one another, but collectively for the freedom and right to fulfill them.“
-- Martha Nelson, Ms. Magazine
Hooray for Powers of Desire – B. Ruby Rich, In These times