As many critics and theorists have noted, non-pornographic films, documentaries, and quality television series have increasingly included explicit sex scenes since the 1990s, some of such scenes featuring the performance of actual sex acts. The incidence of sex in narratively powerful, resonant visual media can no longer be dismissed as a trend. What was once an aesthetic weapon in the arsenal of provocateurs is now frequently integrated seamlessly into the mise-en-scene and exposition of widely viewed and culturally significant films and television series. Intercourse in Television and Film: The Presentation of Explicit Sex Acts analyzes the aesthetic and narrative contexts for the visual media presentation of the sexual act, both those which are non-simulated and those which are explicit to that point that their simulation is brought into question by the viewer. In this book, questions involving the performance choices of actors, the framing and editing of the sex act, and the director's attempts at integrating sexuality into the overall narrative structure as well as their effects are explored.

In the late 1970s, the adult film industry began the transition from celluloid to home video. Smutty Little Movies traces this change and examines the cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate pornography. Drawing on a wide variety of materials, Smutty Little Movies de-centers the film text in favor of industry histories and contexts. In so doing, the book argues that the struggles to contain and regulate pleasure represent a primary starting point for situating adult video's place in a larger history, not just of pornography, but of media history as a whole.

When we think of debates about pornography, what first comes to mind is the question of whether it should be banned or protected. But perhaps we should ask instead what pornography tells us about the way individuals are valued or represented. Combining literary criticism and political theory, Frances Ferguson describes the affinities between pornography and less controversial representations to provide a better understanding of its harms and to demonstrate how it works. Pornography first developed in western Europe during the late eighteenth century in tandem with the rise of utilitarianism, the philosophical position that stresses the importance of something's usefulness over its essence. Through incisive readings of Sade, Flaubert, Lawrence, and Bret Easton Ellis, Ferguson shows how pornography - like utilitarian social structures - diverts our attention from individual identities to actions and renders more clearly the social value of such actions through concrete literary representations. Only when pornography is used to expel individuals from social structures or institutions that promote value, Ferguson argues, is it potentially dangerous. Impassioned, judicious, and deeply informed, Pornography, the Theory will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in literature and its cultural history.

The concept of obscenity is an ancient one. But as Joan DeJean suggests, its modern form, the same version that today's politicians decry and savvy artists exploit, was invented in seventeenth-century France.
"The Reinvention of Obscenity" casts a fresh light on the mythical link between sexual impropriety and things French. Exploring the complicity between censorship, print culture, and obscenity, DeJean argues that mass market printing and the first modern censorial machinery came into being at the very moment that obscenity was being reinvented--that is, transformed from a minor literary phenomenon into a threat to society. DeJean's principal case in this study is the career of Moliere, who cannily exploited the new link between indecency and female genitalia to found his career as a print author; the enormous scandal which followed his play "L'ecole des femmes" made him the first modern writer to have his sex life dissected in the press.
Keenly alert to parallels with the currency of obscenity in contemporary America, "The Reinvention of Obscenity" will concern not only scholars of French history, but anyone interested in the intertwined histories of sex, publishing, and censorship.

By examining the highly contested legal debate about the regulation of pornography through an epistemic lens, this book analyzes competing claims about the proper role of speech in our society, pornography's harm, the relationship between speech and equality, and whether law should regulate and, if so, upon what grounds. In maintaining that inegalitarian pornography generates discursive effects, the book contends that law cannot simply adopt a libertarian approach to free speech. While inegalitarian pornography may not be determinative of gender inequality, it does contribute, reinforce, reflect and help maintain such unfairness. As a result, we can place reasonable gender-based regulations on inegalitarian pornography while upholding our most treasured commitments to dissident speech just as other liberal democracies with strong free speech traditions have done.

When Armando Bo and Isabel Sarli began making sexploitation films together in 1956, they provoked audiences by featuring explicit nudity that would increasingly become more audacious, constantly challenging contemporary norms. Their Argentine films developed a large and international fan base. Analyzing the couple's films and their subsequent censorship, Violated Frames develops a new, roughly constructed, and "bad" archive of relocated materials to debate questions of performance, authorship, stardom, sexuality, and circulation. Victoria Ruetalo situates Bo and Sarli's films amidst the popular culture and sexual norms in post-1955 Argentina, and explores these films through the lens of bodies engaged in labor and leisure in a context of growing censorship. Under Peron, manual labor produced an affect that fixed a specific type of body to the populist movement of Peronism: a type of body that was young, lower-classed, and highly gendered. The excesses of leisure in exhibition, enjoyment, and ecstasy in Bo and Sarli's films interrupted the already fragmented film narratives of the day and created alternative sexual possibilities.

When Armando Bo and Isabel Sarli began making sexploitation films together in 1956, they provoked audiences by featuring explicit nudity that would increasingly become more audacious, constantly challenging contemporary norms. Their Argentine films developed a large and international fan base. Analyzing the couple's films and their subsequent censorship, Violated Frames develops a new, roughly constructed, and "bad" archive of relocated materials to debate questions of performance, authorship, stardom, sexuality, and circulation. Victoria Ruetalo situates Bo and Sarli's films amidst the popular culture and sexual norms in post-1955 Argentina, and explores these films through the lens of bodies engaged in labor and leisure in a context of growing censorship. Under Peron, manual labor produced an affect that fixed a specific type of body to the populist movement of Peronism: a type of body that was young, lower-classed, and highly gendered. The excesses of leisure in exhibition, enjoyment, and ecstasy in Bo and Sarli's films interrupted the already fragmented film narratives of the day and created alternative sexual possibilities.