Exploring the invisible: Listening to mid-life women about heterosexual sex

This century has seen a burgeoning of studies on sexual lives. In the late 1970s a withering feminist critique of heterosexuality was launched exposing previously unheeded power inequalities within the heterosexual situation. Empirically, the Women, Risk and AIDS Project has shown such inequalities to be at the root of many young women's inability to conduct their heterosexual lives with any degree of sexual certainty. The Project concludes that we need accessible accounts of women's heterosexual experiences in order to create a positive discourse of female sexuality. This article represents such a contribution. It looks at the lifestyles of a small group of mid-life women whose heterosexual lives have hitherto been rendered invisible by their very ''ordinariness.'' In the testimonies of these women, evidence is found of a complex interplay of power and resistance through which the women gain both pleasure and affirmative understandings of themselves. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.