Sex Radical Cinema

Carol Siegel

Description

In this provocative study of cinematic and televisual representations of "sex radicalism," Carol Siegel explores how representations of sexually explicit content on film have shaped American cultural visions of sex and sexual politics in the 21st century. Siegel distinguishes between a liberal approach to visual representations, which has over-emphasized normative equal opportunity while undervaluing our distinctive erotic selves, and a radical approach to visual representation, which portrays forbidden sexualities and desires. She illustrates how visual media participates in and even drives political policies related to pedophilia, prostitution, interracial relationships, and war. By examining such popular film and television shows as Mystic River, The Wire, Fifty Shades of Grey, Batman Returns, and the HBO hits, Sex and the City and Girls, Siegel takes the discussion of radical sex in the movies out of the margins of political discussions and puts it in the center, where, she argues, it has belonged all along.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Recent Changes in the Representation of Sex and Politics in American Cinema
1. The Sexuality of Minors: Family Values and Mysteries of Pedophilia
2. Sex Trafficking Films, Or Taken for a Ride
3. Sex and Anti-Militarism
4. Interracial Sex and Architectures of American Horror
5. Tim Burton's Films, Children, and Perversity
Conclusion: The Future, No Future
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Feminist Theory
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• América
• Gender
• Sexuality
• Feminism
• History of film
• American
• Film
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 57
• EAN13: 9780253018113
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Carol Siegel
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Carol Siegel
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Siegel, Carol.
Sex radical cinema / Carol Siegel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01801-4 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01806-9 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01811-3 (eb) 1. Sex in motion pictures. 2. Erotic films-United States-History and criticism. 3. Motion pictures-United States-History and criticism. I. Title.
PN 1995.9. S 45 S 547 2016
791.43 6538-dc23
2015022997
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For Gerhard
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Recent Changes in the Representation of Sex and Politics in American Cinema
1 America s Virginity Fetish and the Mysteries of Child Molestation
2 Sex Trafficking Films, or Taken for a Ride
3 Sex and Antimilitarism
4 Interracial Sex and Architectures of American Horror
5 Tim Burton s Films, Children, and Perversity
Conclusion: The Future, No Future
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
O VER THE TEN years I worked on this book many people have listened to or read my ideas and provided me with helpful suggestions. I am especially grateful to Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, Josh Erdahl, Garry Watson, and, my editor at Indiana University Press, Raina Polivka, for reading and providing detailed comments on the entire manuscript. Jill R. Hughes is my dream copyeditor and Nancy Lightfoot is a truly inspirational production editor and I thank them both. I also thank Robert Richardson, Jorge Guadalupe Liz rraga, Jeffrey Weinstock, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Steffen Silvis, Geoff Cannard, and Amy Kahrmann Huseby for their invaluable help with sections of the book. I will always be grateful for the support and encouragement, as well as useful recommendations provided by Laura Frost, Ellen Berry, Don Anderson, Thabiti Lewis, Gina Hermann, Desiree Hellegers, Chris Tucker, Donyell Roseboro, Kristoffer Forslund, Luz Maria Gordillo, Pavithra Narayanan, Dene Grigar, Terri Geller, Rebecca Gordon and Joe Austin. The insights of anthropologists Jordana Smith and Clare Wilkinson-Weber were also very helpful to me. I thank my great department chair, Todd Butler, for his help in getting me the time and support I needed to finish this manuscript. My gratitude goes out to William Hamlin, our absolutely wonderful director of graduate studies, for his friendship and moral support-and for helping me work with so many brilliant and intellectually stimulating graduate students. I wish my dear friend Peggy McCormack, the former organizer of the American Literature Association panel on film, were still alive to receive my thanks for all her help and love through the years, but I know she will never be forgotten. Our fantastic IT guys, Chris Rhoads and Greg Philbrook, deserve the highest praise for helping me with the book s production, as does Jenna Whittaker at Indiana University Press. And I also thank Lusijah Marx for keeping me at least semi-sane through it all. Gerhard Magnus has earned the most thanks in that regard, however, because as always he makes possible everything good in my life and consistently renews my faith in both sex radicalism and cinema. We saw Derek Jarman s Jubilee on our first date, attended a Russ Meyer film festival at San Francisco s Strand Theater shortly after that, and have shared our love of movies for thirty-five years now. I remain more grateful than I can say for the database he created in which we save our impressions of the thousands of films we see. The Internet Movie Database is a fine source of factual information, but our own personal one serves as a sort of private cinema journal.
And although they are no longer here to read this, I thank my parents, Dave and Marcella Siegel, for their complete lack of any sense of what was suitable for children s viewing, which, along with their eagerness to discuss movies with me, helped make my childhood and adolescence fun. Who thinks James Whale s Frankenstein is appropriate viewing for a three-year-old? Parents of a future film professor who works with horror, that s who!
Washington State University provided me with a semester s sabbatical in fall 2009 to allow me time to finish my initial research for this book and draft two chapters, for which I am thankful.
Part of chapter 1 s discussion of films about the loss of virginity first appeared in my essay Irreconcilable Feminisms and the Construction of a Cultural Memory of Virginity s Loss: ma soeur! and Thirteen , in Virgin Territory , edited by Tamar Jeffers Macdonald (2010). I thank Wayne State University Press for permission to reprint it here.
An essay I previously published, Metaphoric Architecture: Race and Real Estate in Panic Room and The People Under the Stairs , in QRFV 30.1 (2013), forms part of chapter 4 and is reproduced here by permission of Taylor and Francis Group LLC .
I thank Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reprint material from my chapter Tim Burton s Popularization of Perversity: Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Batman Returns , and Corpse Bride , in The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream , edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (2013).

INTRODUCTION
Recent Changes in the Representation of Sex and Politics in American Cinema
T HIS BOOK BEGAN several years ago when I was asked via a telephone political poll, Do you identify as a liberal or a conservative? I was shocked by the pollster s annoyed response when I said, neither-I m a radical. He informed me that he could not continue the survey unless I chose one or the other position. Subsequent calls during voting seasons have led me to realize that I no longer have a position within the American political spectrum that is recognized by those who analyze Americans investments in politics. Relying entirely on call screening to avoid being polled seemed one way for me to deal with how much this unsettled me. Because my politics lean much more toward the collectivist than the individualist, which is part of what radical means to me, writing a book to clarify what radicalism might mean in my field, cinema studies, seemed a better way to go. And in any case, I am not just a radical; I am a sex radical, a position that generates even more confusion, not just when trying to have my opinions included in political polls but also when trying to explain the reasons I value some films more than others for reasons directly determined by my politics. However, the point of this book is not to make me personally more politically comprehensible, but rather to bring a new perspective to the ways politics that are left of center relate to cinematic representations of sexuality. I am particularly interested in articulating what it means for a film to be pro-sex and at the same time supportive of gender and sexual equality, which is precisely what the term sex radical cinema means to me and to many other feminist, gender, and queer studies scholars.
The difficulty of articulating a comprehensible politically radical position on sex in cinema is not merely personal; it is a problem for everyone concerned with the politics of sex, gender, and cinema, as well as with the ways they intersect with American constructions of race and the mappings that place us in our rapidly deteriorating physical world. Such issues are intricately tangled up with each other, as this book will show. All discussions of the representation of sexuality in film include analysis of the films politics, and most of them center on those politics. But the most typical method of relying on sexual conservatism and sexual liberalism as contrasting categories blurs the significant line between liberal and radical sexual politics. This tendency in film analysis may seem necessary in our times, because political polarization has resulted in popular media frequently collapsing every political position other than conservatism into liberalism. Still, an approach that seeks to define film depictions of sexuality as either conservative or liberal is limited in the extent to which it can support the sex radical aims of contemporary feminist, gender, and queer studies. This book does something different through focusing on distinguishing between what is liberal and what is radical in cinematic representations of sexuality.
In each chapter the discussions of what I deem sex radical cinema (and what I do not) comprise an effort to address this problem by bringing to bear on cinema a sex radical feminist vision that can renew our sense of what radicalism is and can be, and to differentiate it from a liberalism that merely solidifies the very systems of gender binarity and sexual prejudice that spoil many efforts at progress toward a more just society. The representation of sexualities on film concerns more than how sexual desires, object choices, and acts are depicted. It also concerns how these depictions fit into a