At a time when "sexy" can be an adjective for anything, when sexual awareness is declared to be advancing faster in months than in the past half century, and when pundits warn of sexual overload, the actual representation of sex is still deemed confrontational, aggressive, "in your face." While critics accuse the academy of an obsession with sexuality, they also complain that nothing that appears to refer to sex really does.In readings ranging across film, drama, opera, fine art, an...

In this series of provocative essays on culture, art, and film, former Screen editor Mandy Merck explores the paradoxes of sexual representation. Whether writing on romantic fiction or hardcore pornography, on robots or sex goddesses, Radclyffe Hall or the Marquis de Sade, she finds the perversions and deviances. Illustrated.

At a time when the expanded projection of US political, military, economic and cultural power draws intensified global concern, understanding how that country understands itself seems more important than ever.This collection of new critical essays tackles this old problem in a new way, by examining some of the hundreds of US films that announce themselves as titularly 'American'. From early travelogues to contemporary comedies, national nomination has been an abiding characteristic...

The Sexual Subject brings together writing on sexuality which has appeared in ^Screen> over the past two decades. It reflects the journal's continuing engagement with questions of sexuality and signification in the cinema, an engagement which has had a profound influence on the development of the academic study of film and on alternative film and video practice.The collection opens with Laura Mulvey's classic "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" with its conjunction of se...