Unmastered

In UNMASTERED, Katherine Angel traces desire as it circulates through the culture that surrounds her, following the imprint it leaves on her own memories, fantasies, and reading. In this searching, erotic work, Angel reflects on the history of her own feelings, contemplating the porousness between thought and sensation, self and culture, power and pliancy. By doing so, she finds an irreducible complexity to our sexual life, concluding that, "We are more than our beliefs. We don't align, neatly, inside ourselves, a stack of equal cards."

An experimental, fragmentary work on desire, which explores the possibility of a female language, UNMASTERED examines the tangled relationships between sexual pleasure, love and loss. It charts a terrain fraught with risk and the pain involved in letting go, in opening, and possibly losing, oneself to another. In trying to think anew about desire, Angel weaves a dark and delicate text, always questioning the difficulty of desire in a landscape where our desires are not our own.

Katherine Angel has written on sexuality, pornography, and the relationship between culture and desire, for The Observer, The Independent and Prospect. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University, and her current research explores the history of female sexual problems in the UK and US, from the 1960s to the present.