Works by
Serena Anderlini D'Onofrio
(Writer)
[1954 - ]

Eros: A Journey of Multiple Love ( 2007) -- Finalist 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Awards
This poignant fictionalized memoir chronicles the evolution of an extraordinary life in progress. Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, one of the planet's foremost advocates of bisexual/polyamorous living, takes readers along on her bold journeys away from the mainstream and into the realm of erotic self-discovery, and in the process, offers her irreverent critiques of society, education, theory, sexuality, and epistemology. This reader-friendly book describes the author's early life in Italy in the politically charged 1960s and 1970s and her time in California; her journey over the treacherous path from graduate student to educator; and from a "straight" and monogamous early adulthood to her emergence as a person at all times prepared to defy convention for the sake of integrity--a writer and woman well worth getting to know!

Plural Loves: Designs for Bi and Poly Living (2005)

Women and Bisexuality: A Global Perspective (2003)
Women and Bisexuality: A Global Perspective reflects the growing contribution bisexuals, and especially bisexual women, make to queer culture on an international level. This unique book presents a collection of thoughtful essays, studies, and reviews that combine to help develop a language that reflects the reality of bisexuality from a feminine/feminist viewpoint. Authors map the inroads made by bisexual studies into conventional disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, health, literature, film, history, and biography, and analyze the situations of bisexual women in areas as diverse as France, North America, Germany, Australia, and Africa.

The "Weak" Subject: On Modernity, Eros, and Women' Playwriting (1998)
Focusing on the work of twentieth-century American and European women playwrights, this book recuperates for feminism the notions of realism and mimesis, and proposes new readings of modern women's plays. It claims that modern women playwrights establish a new form of mimesis. Drawing on theories of French feminist Luce Irigaray, the author calls this dramatic structure "labial mimesis," marks its difference from the traditional structure based on a male hero, and emphasizes its hospitality to the representation of trust, love, friendship and erotic intimacy among women. She offers a fresh perspective in the lively debate about the viability of realism for feminist writing. The author's understanding of feminist realism proceeds from her ethical/political model of the "weak" subject and from her superb delineation of the figure of two-in-one. The desires and interrelatedness of this central pair of female characters are the focus of many women's plays. The "Weak" Subject proposes a subtle exploration of the erotic energy and creative intelligence that circulate among female writers, producers, actors, and characters, which complements those found in Tina Chanter's "Ethics of Eros," Laura Doan's "The Lesbian Postmodern," and Terry Castle's "The Apparitional Lesbian."

In delineating the possibility of a bisexual eros that is both feminist and feminine, the author moves the cultural dialogue between the United States and Europe toward a higher awareness of how erotic energy organizes visual, dramatic and narrative representations.

The authors's own intercultural situatedness, her impressive body of research, and her theoretical positions lead to a highly compelling new understanding of female subjectivity and sexual agency, and open new horizons in the debates on gender, performativity, democracy, and civil society in the post-Cold war era.