Verso scoops 'provocative analysis of female desire'

Verso Books is to publish Katherine Angel's latest work, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, exploring female desire in the context of the Me Too era.

World English language rights were sold to Verso's Brooklyn-based editor Jessie Kindig by Sarah Chalfant at The Wylie Agency. 

Angel is a lecturer at the University of London, and author of Unmastered (Allen Lane) and Daddy Issues (Peninsula Press). 

The synopsis describes her new book as "a provocative, elegantly written analysis of female desire, consent and sexuality in the age of #MeToo." It goes on to state: "Women are in a bind. They are told that in the name of sexual consent and feminist empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Sex researchers tell us that women don’t know what they want. And men are on hand to persuade women that what they want is, in fact, exactly what men want. In this environment, how can women possibly know what they want—and how can they be expected to?

"In this elegantly written, searching book Katherine Angel surveys medical and psychoanalytic understandings of female desire, from Freud to Kinsey to present-day science; Me Too-era debates over consent, assault, and feminism; and popular culture, TV, and film to challenge our assumptions about female desire. Why, she asks, do we expect desire to be easily understood?

"In this crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions of perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we bring about Michel Foucault’s sardonic promise, in 1976, that 'tomorrow sex will be good again'.”

The book will be released in March 2021.