AustLit

'Desire: A Reckoning is a remarkable contemporary memoir. Its author, Jessie Cole, is unafraid to be vulnerable – in her life and her writing. This, her fourth book (and second memoir) is an extraordinary exploration of both physical and emotional desire, and the fraught limits of passion, need and want. Cole’s romantic desires are set against deep family tragedy: the suicide of her sister, and then, some years later, the suicide of her father.' (Introduction)

'In our contemporary world, the idea that sex is pleasurable is rarely questioned: pleasure is a key way of understanding what sex is and what it means. Yet this was not always so. Historically, pleasure was not the only, or even the main, expectation from sex for women, and there were significant changes across the 20th century.' (Introduction)

'This article explores the multiple and complex ways white heterosexual women constructed female sexual pleasure and desire in early twentieth-century Australia. It considers the idealisation of female sexuality, and the ways this was both subverted and re-iterated by women themselves, through a study of female writers. It suggests that the challenge to female sexual normativity—as marital and reproductive—was slow and staggered, with many women unable to firmly challenge the sexual ideal. But a close reading of the work of a number of female authors, especially the poet Zora Cross, allows glimpses of how some women did explore, construct and rethink sexual pleasure within their writings, negotiating between the sometimes contradictory impulses of purity and desire.' (Introduction)

'This article explores the conjunctions between bush mythologies and masculinity in late-nineteenth-century Australia, through a focus on sexuality. First, I examine Ward's attitudes towards the sexuality of the bushman, in particular his constructions of heterosexuality, homosexuality, homosociality and inter-race sexuality. It was Ward who more than any other scholar of his generation introduced us to the subtleties of the bushman's private world, and numerous historians of sexuality have since drawn freely on his work, including Dennis Altman, John Rickard and Clive Moore. While acknowledging Ward's legacy, this article also considers alternative ways of thinking about masculinity, the male body and sexuality in the 1890s.'

Source: Article abstract.