Bad Girls and Sick Boys

"Bad Girls and Sick Boys is an exhilarating rollercoaster ride, a superb piece of cultural investigation that skillfully anatomies some of the most deviant imaginations at work today."—J. G. Ballard

"Linda Kauffman is the perfect guide through the troubling, erotically charged cultural environment she maps in Bad Girls and Sick Boys. She handles popular culture with sophistication and intelligence and addresses academic subjects with an engaging flair. Kauffman is alert, informed, clear-eyed, and most of all, entirely free of cant."—Anthony De Curtis

"Linda Kauffman is one of our most brilliant, savvy, and exciting observers of contemporary life. Bad Girls and Sick Boys is both tremendously entertaining and disturbing. Linda Kauffman's meditations on art, pornography, cinema, and literature fly powerfully against the grain of convention."—Howard Norman

List of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue

PART ONE
PERFORMANCE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

1 Contemporary Art Exhibitionists
2 Cutups in Beauty School

PART TWO
VISCERAL CINEMA

3 Impolitic Bodies: Race and Desire
4 Sex Work: Producing Porn
s David Cronenberg's Surreal Abjection

PART THREE
ARRESTING FICTION

6 J.G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibitions
7 Criminal Writing: John Hawkes and
Robert Coover
8 New Inquisitions: Kathy Acker and
William Vollmann
9 Masked Passions: Meese, Mercy, and
American Psycho

Epilogue
Notes
Index

About the author

Linda S. Kauffman is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions (1986); Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992); and editor of three collections of feminist essays, including American Feminist Thought at Century's End (1993).

Summary

Turning the tables on the pornography debate, this is an analysis of taboo-shattering fiction, film and performance art. It investigates the role of fantasy in art, politics and popular culture and shows how technological advances in science and medicine have altered concepts of the human body.

Product details

• Authors: Linda S. Kauffman, Kauffman Linda S., Linda S Kaufman
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 17.09.1998
• EAN: 9780520210325
• ISBN: 978-0-520-21032-5
• No. of pages: 324
• Dimensions: 154 mm x 230 mm x 25 mm
• Subjects: Education and learning > Teaching preparation > Vocational needs; Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries; Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, POLITICAL SCIENCE / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, ART / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, ART / Digital, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Films, cinema, Politics and government, Sex and sexuality, social aspects, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / General, Ethical issues and debates, Digital, video and new media arts, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Sexuality, Dance & Other Performing Arts