Who is allowed to desire?

Six interlocking essays move from rape allegations, pornography, desire, and teacher - student relations to the carceral state and capitalism, refusing to reduce sexual politics to the claim that consent alone settles every question.

Katherine Angel examines consent, desire, arousal and vulnerability, asking why women must perform perfect self-knowledge to be considered capable of safety and pleasure.

Through first-person stories, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah explores how desire, religion, queer life, trauma, and community shape sexual freedom across African and diasporic contexts.

brown gathers essays and conversations linking pleasure, consent and collective practice, while asking when enjoyment supports freedom and when it remains consumption or privilege.

Virginie Despentes' 'King Kong Theory' is a punk-rock manifesto of modern feminism. Part memoir, part critical theory, it is a raw, angry, and undeniably powerful examination of gender, sexuality, and violence. Despentes writes from the margins - as a former sex worker, a rape survivor, and a punk artist - challenging the sanitized, respectable versions of feminism to embrace the 'ugly', the 'unfuckable', and the dangerous.

Angela Chen uses asexual people’s accounts to question sexual attraction as a measure of adulthood, love and normality, reframing freedom through refusal and relationship differences.

Ho and Tsang use Hong Kong experiences to question expert authority, sexual hierarchies and research language, treating everyday accounts of desire as knowledge.

Convenience Store Woman is an Akutagawa Prize-winning novel by Japanese author Sayaka Murata. The protagonist, Keiko Furukura, is a 36-year-old woman who has worked at the same convenience store for 18 years and has no interest in society's expectations for women - marriage, children, a 'real' career. With dark humor, the novel sharply questions society's definition of 'normal' and its oppression of women who don't conform.

Contemporary queen of memoir-theory fusion Maggie Nelson turns her lens on identity, desire, and family. This instant classic recounts Nelson's relationship with her partner, artist Harry Dodge. Through intimate documentation of family life and pregnancy, Nelson presents a complex portrait of modern queer motherhood with blurred boundaries.

Ding Ling gives Sophia the gaze and the diary: her attraction to a man, her self-reproach and her wish to be understood make agency more complicated than sexual confidence.

In late 18th century Brittany, France, female painter Marianne is commissioned to paint a portrait of aristocrat Héloïse. This portrait will determine Héloïse's marriage, but she refuses to cooperate. During their time together, the two gradually develop a profound and secret emotional connection.

A manga artist with cerebral palsy seeks authorship, sexual experience, and independent life. HIKARI makes a disabled woman not an object of care but a subject with desire, contradiction, and agency.

At a strict Himalayan boarding school, a teenager’s sexual awakening collides with institutional discipline and her mother’s interrupted youth, making desire an intergenerational feminist question.

Bel Powley is a breakout as 15-year-old Minnie, a budding cartoonist and soon-to-be harlot (her word, not ours). Marielle Heller's exuberant journey through the teenage psyche has more penis drawings than a Seth Rogen comedy, and the best part? It doesn't judge.

Never one to succumb to labels, pioneering filmmaker Jane Campion delivers a love story about a mute woman whose erotic affair has life-altering repercussions. And even though Campion would probably fight us on this, one can't help but spot and appreciate what seems to be a feminist vision.

An older sex worker in a Seoul park is drawn into poverty, illness, and requests for death. E J-yong returns aging from demographic abstraction to class, gender, care, and survival.

Touzani connects craft, silence and care to queer desire within marriage, asking how love beyond possession can retain a place and choices for everyone.

Sex educators Tiffany Kagure Mugo and Siphumeze Khundayi use humor to question sexual shame and rigid scripts, inviting viewers to place pleasure, communication and autonomy back in their own embodied experience.

Nepali activist Bivishika Bhandari argues that naming bodies and sexuality is a practical condition for health, autonomy, and economic participation, especially for women taught to treat their own anatomy as shameful.

Argentine sex-worker organizer Georgina Orellano moves from a schoolyard story about her son to questions of stigma, collective organization and labor rights.

This All My Relations episode with Kim TallBear discusses critical polyamory, Indigenous relational ethics, feminism, and settler marriage, making it a key audio resource on how sex, intimacy, and family are structured by colonial power.

Start with episode 2.3 on bisexual self-recognition, multiple pen names and creative labor, connecting erotic expression to identity, privacy and material conditions.