Donna Peberdy – författare

The Sex Scene Volume 1: Space, Place and History complements The Sex Scene Volume 2: Representation, Performance Industry. The volumes are also intended to work as standalone collections, offering a comprehensive yet accessible starting point for students, scholars and researchers exploring representations of sex on screen and its significance in sexual cultures.Collectively, the essays consider histories and controversies (screen, legal, censorial, critical), industrial contexts and labour (writing, directing, performing, editing), the mise-en-scène of the sex scene (content, aesthetics, representation) and temporality and approach (in genres, form and style).

This is the first critical anthology to offer extended analysis of the representation of sexual perversion on screen. Interrogating the recent shift towards the mainstream in the cinematic representation of previously marginalised sexual practices, Tainted Love 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 provocative performances of hysteria and sexual obsession, `everyday' perversion in neoliberal culture, the radical potential of sadomasochism, adolescent sexuality in the films of Larry Clark, intergenerational sex and incestuous relations in French cinema, sexual obsession in gay cinema, the straightness of necrophilia, the presentation of the paedophile, Swedish Erotica's `good sex' and re-imagining the Marquis de Sade from film to slash fiction. 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 perversion on screen.