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.

What are the consequences of how Jews are depicted in movies and television series? Drawing on a host of movies and television series from the 1970s to present day, Jews in Contemporary Visual Entertainment explores how the media sexualize and racialize American Jews. Race and sexuality frequently intersect in the depiction of Jewish characters in such shows as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, UnREAL, The Expanse, and Breaking Bad, and in films such as Hester Street, Once Upon a Time in America, Casino, Radio Days, Inglourious Basterds, and Barton Fink. When they do, American sexual norms are invariably challenged or outright broken by these anti-Semitic representations of Jewishness. Insightful and provocative, Jews in Contemporary Visual Entertainment disturbingly reveals the far-reaching influence of popular visual media in shaping how American Jews are perceived today.

What are the consequences of how Jews are depicted in movies and television series? Drawing on a host of movies and television series from the 1970s to present day, Jews in Contemporary Visual Entertainment explores how the media sexualize and racialize American Jews. Race and sexuality frequently intersect in the depiction of Jewish characters in such shows as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, UnREAL, The Expanse, and Breaking Bad, and in films such as Hester Street, Once Upon a Time in America, Casino, Radio Days, Inglourious Basterds, and Barton Fink. When they do, American sexual norms are invariably challenged or outright broken by these anti-Semitic representations of Jewishness. Insightful and provocative, Jews in Contemporary Visual Entertainment disturbingly reveals the far-reaching influence of popular visual media in shaping how American Jews are perceived today.

"A welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Queer Studies."
-- "Journal of Homosexuality"

Queer theory arose as a challenge to the stability of sexual categories. But is queer theory in the 1990s in danger of becoming just another category of theoretical inquiry and just another academic discipline? As queer studies is being legitimated within American universities, what dangers and opportunities arise from the process of legitimation?

The essays in The Gay '90s address these questions in two distinct ways. The first section of the book, "Disciplinary Reflections," reflects upon the process of disciplinary formation as it affects lesbian and gay studies in the academy, contrasting older academic disciplines with newer, identity-based areas of study. The second section, "Interdisciplinary Readings," demonstrates the extent to which contemporary queer studies involves practices of interdisciplinary reading and analysis. Contributors include Dennis Allen, John Champagne, Myriam J. A. Chancy, Gabrielle N. Dean, Leigh Gilmore, Calvin Thomas, Elayne Tobin, Robyn Wiegman, and Thomas Yingling.

The feminist pornography debates are centered around the opposition between pro-censorship factions and the pro-sex radicals or sex positives. But what exactly is the relationship between these debates and postmodern theories of reading and performativity? What happens to these debates when they are placed in the context of colonial or U.S. racial histories? What is the history behind today's sexual radicalism? How radical is it?

In the first section of Sex Positives?, Nicola Pitchford, Naomi Morgenstern, Victoria L. Smith, and Gabrielle N. Dean focus on the recent sex wars in U.S. feminism, especially within lesbian culture. Elissa J. Rashkin, Gaurav Desai, and James Smalls broaden the terms of the sex wars debates in the second section to include sexualized racial and colonial representations, from Chicana, African, and African-American perspectives. Finally, Sander L. Gilman, Laura Ciolkowski, and Laura Frost explore a variety of historical contexts for understanding contemporary forms of sexual representation and the repression of such representations.

"Forming and Reforming Identity" exposes the historical sites of identity formation and seeks to define the mechanisms of modern-day gender ideologies. Illuminating the power of the family and state in shaping gender identities, the book also examines the constitution of these identities. Each chapter reveals the complexities and contradictions that inevitably accompany the formation of any new category of identity, whether they are deliberately restrictive or intended as a reformation of the old.

The volume moves, as gender construction does, across a field of different media: novels, plays, teleplays, films, official documents, political theory, and advertisements. Four sections--REMOLDING WOMAN; REBELLING MAN; HOMEMADE IDENTITIES; and FEMINISMS THAT MAKE (A) DIFFERENCE--address such subjects as the representation of American women in the 1950s; nationalism and respectable sexuality in India; women, Hollywood cinema, and World War II; compulsory heterophobia; and the televising of AIDS.
go to the Genders website ]

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.

What do narratives by British suffragettes of being forcibly fed have in common with the representation of indigenous women in Canadian police archives? How are literary representations of domestic violence related to the use of silence as a strategy of resistance in African American women's writing? How are modernist fictions of gay male desire connected with ambiguous sexual performances in rock music or with images of Vietnam veterans in American horror movies? What does a narrative of women's participation in Bengali national resistance movements share with an ethnographic study of prostitution in Papua New Guinea?

These are the some of the specific questions raised by the essays in this volume, which examines a wide variety of historical and cultural locations where differently sexed, gendered, and racialized bodies have been constructed. More generally, this volume addresses theoretical debates over whether embodiment is best understood through representations or performances. Are bodies written or enacted? The different answers to these questions have important consequences for how we understand the inscription of bodies with systems of power and the possibilities that exist for resisting those systems.

go to the Genders website ]

Sexual confessions on television talk shows. Gender and medical discourse in colonial India. River Phoenix in "My Own Private Idaho." White women in a German colony. Henry James' thwarted love. What do these seemingly diverse subjects have in common?

All address, in different ways, social and cultural attempts to contain eroticism by delineating the perimeters of genders. They scrutinize the political investments in the construction of gender in such disparate locations as contemporary Hollywood, Renaissance England, colonial India and Africa, and in modern and contemporary homosexual discourse communities and in Freud's sessions with Dora.

But whether the gendering of the subject follows the dictates of conservative politics or the radical agenda of a marginalized interest, the essays reveal the erotic overflow--the flood--that cannot be contained within any one gender identity. In examining how the erotic escapes containment, this work discloses problems inherent in the intersections of gender and desire.

go to the Genders website ]

Carol Siegel challenges the standard representation of Lawrence in feminist criticism and places his work in the context of women's literary traditions.

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 Goth s Dark Empire cultural historian Carol Siegel provides a fascinating look at Goth, a subculture among Western youth. It came to prominence with punk performers such as Marilyn Manson and was made infamous when it was linked (erroneously) to the Columbine High School murders. While the fortunes of Goth culture form a portion of this book s story, Carol Siegel is more interested in pursuing Goth as a means of resisting regimes of sexual normalcy, especially in its celebration of sadomasochism (S/M). The world of Goth can appear wide-ranging: from films such as Edward Scissorhands and The Crow to popular fiction such as Anne Rice s "vampire" novels to rock bands such as Nine Inch Nails. But for Siegel, Goth appears as a mode of being sexually undead and loving it. What was Goth and what happened to it? In this book, Siegel tracks Goth down, reveals the sources of its darkness, and shows that Goth as a response to the modern world has not disappeared but only escaped underground."

"A welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Queer Studies."
-- "Journal of Homosexuality"

Queer theory arose as a challenge to the stability of sexual categories. But is queer theory in the 1990s in danger of becoming just another category of theoretical inquiry and just another academic discipline? As queer studies is being legitimated within American universities, what dangers and opportunities arise from the process of legitimation?

The essays in The Gay '90s address these questions in two distinct ways. The first section of the book, "Disciplinary Reflections," reflects upon the process of disciplinary formation as it affects lesbian and gay studies in the academy, contrasting older academic disciplines with newer, identity-based areas of study. The second section, "Interdisciplinary Readings," demonstrates the extent to which contemporary queer studies involves practices of interdisciplinary reading and analysis. Contributors include Dennis Allen, John Champagne, Myriam J. A. Chancy, Gabrielle N. Dean, Leigh Gilmore, Calvin Thomas, Elayne Tobin, Robyn Wiegman, and Thomas Yingling.

The feminist pornography debates are centered around the opposition between pro-censorship factions and the pro-sex radicals or sex positives. But what exactly is the relationship between these debates and postmodern theories of reading and performativity? What happens to these debates when they are placed in the context of colonial or U.S. racial histories? What is the history behind today's sexual radicalism? How radical is it?

In the first section of Sex Positives?, Nicola Pitchford, Naomi Morgenstern, Victoria L. Smith, and Gabrielle N. Dean focus on the recent sex wars in U.S. feminism, especially within lesbian culture. Elissa J. Rashkin, Gaurav Desai, and James Smalls broaden the terms of the sex wars debates in the second section to include sexualized racial and colonial representations, from Chicana, African, and African-American perspectives. Finally, Sander L. Gilman, Laura Ciolkowski, and Laura Frost explore a variety of historical contexts for understanding contemporary forms of sexual representation and the repression of such representations.

"Forming and Reforming Identity" exposes the historical sites of identity formation and seeks to define the mechanisms of modern-day gender ideologies. Illuminating the power of the family and state in shaping gender identities, the book also examines the constitution of these identities. Each chapter reveals the complexities and contradictions that inevitably accompany the formation of any new category of identity, whether they are deliberately restrictive or intended as a reformation of the old.

The volume moves, as gender construction does, across a field of different media: novels, plays, teleplays, films, official documents, political theory, and advertisements. Four sections--REMOLDING WOMAN; REBELLING MAN; HOMEMADE IDENTITIES; and FEMINISMS THAT MAKE (A) DIFFERENCE--address such subjects as the representation of American women in the 1950s; nationalism and respectable sexuality in India; women, Hollywood cinema, and World War II; compulsory heterophobia; and the televising of AIDS.
go to the Genders website ]

What do narratives by British suffragettes of being forcibly fed have in common with the representation of indigenous women in Canadian police archives? How are literary representations of domestic violence related to the use of silence as a strategy of resistance in African American women's writing? How are modernist fictions of gay male desire connected with ambiguous sexual performances in rock music or with images of Vietnam veterans in American horror movies? What does a narrative of women's participation in Bengali national resistance movements share with an ethnographic study of prostitution in Papua New Guinea?

These are the some of the specific questions raised by the essays in this volume, which examines a wide variety of historical and cultural locations where differently sexed, gendered, and racialized bodies have been constructed. More generally, this volume addresses theoretical debates over whether embodiment is best understood through representations or performances. Are bodies written or enacted? The different answers to these questions have important consequences for how we understand the inscription of bodies with systems of power and the possibilities that exist for resisting those systems.

go to the Genders website ]

Sexual confessions on television talk shows. Gender and medical discourse in colonial India. River Phoenix in "My Own Private Idaho," White women in a German colony. Henry James' thwarted love. What do these seemingly diverse subjects have in common?

All address, in different ways, social and cultural attempts to contain eroticism by delineating the perimeters of genders. They scrutinize the political investments in the construction of gender in such disparate locations as contemporary Hollywood, Renaissance England, colonial India and Africa, and in modern and contemporary homosexual discourse communities and in Freud's sessions with Dora.

But whether the gendering of the subject follows the dictates of conservative politics or the radical agenda of a marginalized interest, the essays reveal the erotic overflow--the flood--that cannot be contained within any one gender identity. In examining how the erotic escapes containment, this work discloses problems inherent in the intersections of gender and desire.>[ go to the Genders website ]