Carole Vance states in the introduction to Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, “Sex is a social construction, articulated at many points with the economic, social, and political structures of the material world….Although sexuality… is grounded in the body, the body’s structure, physiology, and functioning do not directly or simply determine the configuration or meaning of sexuality….” (111). Taking as given that eroticism and sexuality are socially constructed, and that those social constructions form an episteme through which women’s bodies are understood, this project attempts to explore the ambiguous meaning of female sexuality in feminist theoretical discourse as it is tied to the development of agency as well as the libidinal economy of patriarchy. To do this, I view the bodies of women within this system of meaning as texts through a wide variety of literary and cultural mediums.