Ziv, A., Explicit Utopias: Rewriting the Sexual in Women’s Pornography: [Review]

Explicit Utopias: Rewriting the Sexual in Women’s Pornography, by the gender scholar Amalia Ziv, is an exploration of alternative pornography made by and for women during the 1980s and 1990s. The book sets out to position alternative porn as a valuable resource for the renegotiation of female sexual subjectivity. Taking as its starting-point American and British female-authored porn of the period, the focus of the book is the ‘phantasmic strategies’, as Ziv describes then, that emerged from this wave of expression in pornography. Phantasmic strategies, in her definition, are the different means that pornographic works by women employ in order to overcome the cultural objectification and construct of women, as sexual objects only.