What does it mean to be sexed and desiring?

It is no wonder that questions of the meaning and practice of desire and sexuality have vexed many feminist thinkers given the sorts of assumptions regarding women's association with the body we explored in Chapter 2. After all, if women are not clear on the significance of their bodily being, what precisely does it mean to be a sexed and desiring bodily being? Why have people typically been so convinced that particular types of sexed bodies dictate particular types of behaviour and sexuality? Does the possession of XX or XY chromosomes (or any other variation) really have an impact on people's behaviour, let alone on their desiring practices? What about same-sex desire? In addition, how should such desiring and sexually embodied practices as pornography, prostitution and sexual violence be understood? Probably more than any other, questions of sexuality and desire test contemporary theories regarding embodiment.

This chapter thus aims to tease out key feminist arguments concerning some of the presumed interconnections between embodied sex difference, sexuality and desire. More specifically, given both our constitutive sexed embodiment and the common assumption of a causal link between sex (in the sense of sex difference) and sexuality, feminist thinkers have argued that thinking about women's bodily being and their being sexed needs to be tackled in conjunction with thinking about what it is to be a desiring being.