“The Grossest Rakes of Fiction”: Reassessing Gender, Sex, and Pornography in Sarah Waters'sFingersmith

This article argues that Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002) Waters, Sarah. Fingersmith. London: Virago, 2002. Google Scholar revisits feminist debates arising from the “sex wars” of the 1980s and 1990s in which feminism was divided over its approach to female sexual representation. I argue that the novel rehearses varied debates on gender and pornography, and I suggest that Waters uses such perspectives to provide her own deconstruction of heteropatriarchal representations of lesbianism in pornography.