This is the first critical anthology to offer extended analysis of the representation of sexual perversion on screen. Interrogating the recent shift towards the mainstream in the cinematic representation of previously marginalised sexual practices, Tainted Love challenges the discourses and debates around sexual taboo, moral panics, degeneracy, deviance and disease, which present those who enact such sexualities as modern folk devils.
This timely collection brings together leading scholars who draw on a variety of critical approaches including adaptation, performance, cultural studies, queer theory, feminism and philosophy to examine screen representations of controversial sexualities from the weird and wonderful to the debased and debauched. Chapters explore provocative performances of hysteria and sexual obsession, `everyday' perversion in neoliberal culture, the radical potential of sadomasochism, adolescent sexuality in the films of Larry Clark, intergenerational sex and incestuous relations in French cinema, sexual obsession in gay cinema, the straightness of necrophilia, the presentation of the paedophile, Swedish Erotica's `good sex' and re-imagining the Marquis de Sade from film to slash fiction. In order to move past binary distinctions of good and bad, normal and abnormal, moral and immoral, Tainted Love seeks to critically interrogate perverse sexualities and sexual perversion on screen.
Industry Reviews
'In the present media moment, sexual difference and deviance are respectively celebrated and vilified like never before. This volume, appearing at such a critical juncture with a laudable international and historical purview, approaches its noisy subject soberly and intelligently.' - Mattias Frey, University of Kent; author of Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture, 'Fearless, unnerving and provocative, Tainted Love is every cinephile's dream guide to the perverse politics of some of the most transgressive films ever made.' - I. Q. Hunter, De Montfort University; author of Cult Film as a Guide to Film and British Trash Cinema, 'This new collection of essays on screening sexual perversion examines the cinematic representation of perverse sexual desire with the intent of illuminating how film culture negotiates and illuminates sexual transgression. It will be essential reading for researchers and students of sexual representation in contemporary film culture.' - Brian McNair, Queensland University of Technology; author of Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire and Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture