Rapport à la littérature érotique et enjeux de respectabilité pour les femmes : une étude de discours publicitaires et prescriptifs

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the discourses on sexuality and gender at work in the prescriptions of erotic reading within the "women's press". By analyzing the legitimization of this reading and the 
recommendation of its use in several French speaking women's magazines, we wish to show that this testifies to the reconfiguration of norms within sexuality, but also that these "reading recommendations" participate in a discursive production on gender that is operative. After having updated the reasons for the proliferation of erotic reading prescriptions in the women's press, this article will situate these cultural exhortations with regard to the construction of sexuality as an enterprise of the self. Then, this article will turn to studying the discursive mechanisms of the promotion of this reading, which seems in particular to guarantee a certain respectability to the female readers. Finally, it will be shown how these exhortations trace the contours of the good erotic subject, understood within a female sexuality perceived as intrinsically different.