Embracing Our Eroticism: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Women’s Eroticism

Abstract

Women’s sexuality has been examined through political, religious, scientific, and social lenses. Despite advances, discourses driving sexual expression embody double standards, pathologizing, and silencing. Women’s own experiences are largely ignored in existing literatures. Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) is a qualitative methodology rooted in Foucault’s examinations of power and discourse construction. In this FDA, 111 women answered questions about their erotic definitions, experiences, and barriers to expression. Discourses emerging from the data included my own definitions, free but caged, voices of influence, and caution. These discourses are situated within social and institutional contexts, and therapeutic considerations discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.