Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women-and their bodies-want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to? In this elegant, searching book-spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism-Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women's desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood? In today's crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault's teasing promise, in 1976, that 'tomorrow sex will be good again'

Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women-and their bodies-want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to? In this elegant, searching book-spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism-Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women's desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood? In today's crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault's teasing promise, in 1976, that 'tomorrow sex will be good again'

Unmastered is groundbreaking, incisive and moving. Exploring desire and pleasure, grief and pain, it underlines the importance and difficulties of speaking desire as a woman. How do we explore sexuality on our own terms, and find language for our desires, when desire and language are always social? Applying an unflinching gaze to her own life, Katherine Angel has created, in prose both stark and lyrical, a searching and erotic work shifting in meaning and resonance even as it is read.

Contemporary art, as well as our society in general, is - according to the diagnosis of the interdisciplinary art festival steirischer herbst '21 - in a dead end. The Way Out of... features texts by international contributors to the festival's discussion program that outlines ways out of the white cube, failed political art, and an unrestrained digital capitalism, and shows new paths for climate justice, a more critical race theory, and new activists. Accessible and pointedly written, this reader offers rich food for thought on the multiple crises of our times.