The opposite of desire: Sex and discourse in D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce (Michel Foucault)

Modernist novels—by male and female authors alike—use sex to interrogate the limits of representation. They posit that sex constitutes appropriate content for literary novels; they deploy sex as material through which modern identity, so often conceived in reference to sexuality, might be explored. Using Foucault's paradigms for the discourses on sex—the ars erotica, which emphasizes performance and pleasure in sexual acts, and the scientia sexualis, which emphasizes confession and the deployment of sexuality—I examine the representation of sex and sexuality in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando, and the “Circe” and “Penelope” episodes of James Joyce's Ulysses. Through this inquiry, I pay particular attention to how gender intersects with sexuality in the production of sexual identity, and I propose that the way to understand how sex works in modernist novels is to focus on the representational strategies and discursive techniques through which it is manifested. By applying Foucault's theories to these texts, I propose a way of reading the representations of sex and sexuality in modernism that does not rely on the categories of desire, obscenity, pornography, or identity to make sex in these texts intelligible.