Feminist Erotica and Agency @ The Love Piece Club

The Love Piece Club is a shop devoted to sex goods for women, located in Tokyo and online at www.lovepiececlub.com. As well as online shopping, the website offers regular columns, articles and photo-essays on subjects related to sexuality and women's lives. The site and shop are managed by Kitahara Minori, a writer, businesswoman and advocate for feminist erotica. This paper explores the Love Piece Club as a discursive site – its potential meanings and its significance as a feminist work in promoting 'active sexuality as a strategy' for enabling women (Wilkins 2004:332). Addressing the online and printed texts of the LPC, I examine the possibilities for feminist agency inherent in the creation of space(s) for feminist erotica. Operating as a virtual site, the LPC can be interpreted as a cyberfeminist space, incorporating (and contributing) to understandings of the ways that internet technology affects gender and identity (Chatterjee 2002:200). My aim here is also to tease out the concept of agency, insofar as it can be applied to the work of the LPC and advocates of feminist erotica like Kitahara.