I. B. Tauris & Company Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversion (International Library of the Moving Image)

Product Description Tainted Love is the first critical anthology to offer extended analysis of the representation of sexual perversities on screen. Interrogating the recent shift towards the mainstream in the cinematic representation of previously marginalised sexual practices, it 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 the shame of masturbation in mainstream cinema, teenage sexuality in the films of Larry Clark, intergenerational sex and incestuous relations in French cinema, sexual obsession in gay cinema, 'everyday' perversion in neoliberal culture, the straightness of necrophilia, imaging and re-imagining the Marquis de Sade from film to slash fiction and the performance and presentation of the paedophile. 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 perversities on screen. Review '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 About the Author Darren Kerr and Donna Peberdy are Senior Lecturers in Film and Television Studies at Southampton Solent University (UK)