Johnson, Merri Lisa

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JOHNSON, Merri Lisa

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Attended Institute de Touraine (Tours, France), 1993; West Georgia College, B.A. (cum laude; English and French), 1994; Ohio University, M.A., 1996; Binghamton University, Ph.D., 2000.

ADDRESSES: Office—Edwards Humanities and Fine Arts 292, Coastal Carolina University, P.O. Box 261954, Conway, SC 29528-6054.

CAREER: State University of West Georgia, Carrollton, visiting assistant professor of English, 1999–2002; Lenoir-Rhyne College, Hickory, NC, visiting assistant professor of literature and communication, 2002–03; Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC, assistant professor of English and journalism, 2003–. Formerly worked as a stripper.

AWARDS, HONORS: Faculty grants, Coastal Carolina University, 2003–04, 2004–05; David Bottoms Distinguished Alumni Award, State University of West Georgia, 2004.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to books by others, including Herspace: Women, Writing, Solitude, edited by Jo Malin and Vicki Boynton, Haworth Press (Binghamton, NY), 2003; Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, edited by Martin Japtok, Africa World Press (Trenton, NJ), 2003; and Narrative Hunger: Essays on Postmodernism in the Works of Carol Shields, edited by Dee Goertz and Edward Eden, Toronto University Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003. Contributor of articles, essays, and poems to periodicals, including Henry James Review, New Orleans Review, Eclectic, Scholar and Feminist, Journal of Mundane Behavior, American Anthropologist, and Inquiry.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Jane Puts It in a Box: Third-Wave Feminist Television Studies and Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance.

SIDELIGHTS: Merri Lisa Johnson is an educator who has written extensively on various aspects of feminism and the sexuality of women. As editor of Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, she argues that contemporary women "live inside the contradiction of a political movement that affirms and encourages expressions of female and/or alternative sexualities, and the 'real world' of workplaces, families, and communities which continue to judge women harshly for speaking of sex, much less expressing one's 'deviant' acts and complex erotic imagination."

The collection's three sections are titled "How to F―in High Heels," "Super Feminist Porno Stars," and "Our Inner Men." In "I Learned from the Best: My Mother Was a High Femme Whore," Paula Austin reveals from whom she learned the art of seduction.

Chris Daley considers how to approach a request for a spanking in "Of the Flesh Fancy: Spanking and the Single Girl." Kirsten Pullen examines the world of prostitution in "Co-Ed Call Girls," and Katherine Frank writes of the complexities of stripping, something Johnson did while working on her doctorate. In "Stripping, Starving, and Other Ambiguous Pleasures," Frank writes how "stripping involves a conscious, creative, and sometimes pleasurable kind of reflexive masquerade, a form of doing and sometimes subverting."

Tracy Moore wrote in a review of Jane Sexes It Up for the Nashville Scene that "while the essays are certainly serious musings on the reclaiming of female sexuality and the politics of desire, they are also witty, bold and at times hilarious." In addition to essays that address the subject of women working out traditional desires and relationships, there are those that delve into self-mutilation, exhibitionism, muscle-building, lesbian sex, masturbation, and the use of devices, as in sex-toy-store owner Sarah Smith's "A Cock of One's Own." Johnson's introduction, "Jane Hocus, Jane Focus," advises the reader to be a sexually confident woman.

Johnson was interviewed by Michelle French for the the Manitoban Online, a publication of the University of Manitoba. French commented that, "as feminists you argue that [women] have become schizophrenic and so 'we are caught between phases of social change launched between liberation and its incomplete execution.'" Johnson responded by saying that "what the whole book is doing is trying to move around inside that suspension between phases of change. Some things have changed, some ideas have changed, some ideas have permeated our culture, but the culture is still a gender hierarchy and given that we have feminist knowledge and unfeminist culture, how do we live between those?"

In reviewing the collection for the Mundane Behavior Web site, Danielle Egan remarked that, in addition to being "refreshing to read, this anthology has uniformly well-written and theoretically complex chapters that avoid easy binaries or sloppy relativism." A contributor to Publishers Weekly reported that the book is "not for the straitlaced, but sex-positive feminists will find this a provocative, important anthology that speaks honestly to the question of pleasure and how to get it."

Alyssa Colton commented in a review of Jane Sexes It Up for WomenWriters.net that "perhaps the most impressive thing about this book is not any one individual voice, but the way all the voices complement each other. The authors draw on different strands in feminism—from French feminism to queer theory—yet come together like pieces in a puzzle, clicking together to form a powerful and colorful narrative about the sheer diversity of sexuality. In acknowledging this diversity, in embracing each of these stories, we come to see not the limits to feminism—but all the possibilities."