Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversion

Description

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. Cover Page Author Bio Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: A Prelude to Perversion I Reviled Bodies: Fantasies, Realities and the Boundaries of the Explicit 1 Straight Necrophilia as a Queer Perversion in Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed 2 The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: O Fantasma and Erotomania 3 Perverting the Explicit: Catherine Breillat’s Visual Vocabulary of Desire 4 From Sexual Perversion to Social Trauma: Titillation, Terrorism and Italian Erotic Cinema During the anni di piombo II Too Close for Comfort: Mainstream Perversion, Marginal Tastes 5 A Dangerous Method: Provocative Performances of Perversion 6 Normalising Masochism: Assimilating Sexual Perversion in Secretary 7 Smutty Swedes: Sex Films, Pornography and ‘Good Sex’ 8 ‘Does this look sexual to you?’ Neoliberal Culture and Everyday Perversion in Recent Cinema III Coming of Age: Generational Encounters and Dangerous Liaisons 9 Larry Clark’s Sex Education: Adolescent Sexuality and the Denial of Denial 10 The Age of Perversion: L’ennui, Erotic Combat and Intergenerational Existentialism 11 A Mother’s Love Cannot Be Denied: Ma mère IV Sexual Infidelity: Adapting the Deviant, Re-imagining the Perverse 12 Perverting the Marquis De Sade in Quills 13 ‘Something Sweet’: Little Children, the Sex Offender and Emma Bovary’s Eyes 14 Let the Right One In and the Wrong One Go: Paedophilia and Film Culture Filmography Select Bibliography Contributors Index