‘Want’: Gillian Anderson contests cultures of heteronormativity, erasure of female erotic experience

Among the many things the British TV show Sex Education did right was sketching the complexities of the character of Otis’s mum, a sex therapist who has glaring issues with respecting people’s boundaries and privacy needs. These self-contradictions in the character, played by the iconic Gillian Anderson, reveal the fraught ways in which we relate to the world, and indeed, with ourselves. But the YA show is not the only creative project of Anderson’s that engages with these themes; her book Want is also steeped in her enduring engagement with the politics of sexuality.

Want brings together a medley of letters submitted anonymously by women across ethnicities, nationalities, classes, religious and sexual orientations to Anderson’s portal “ Dear Gillian ”, letters which examine an