Laura Helen Marks
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042140
- eISBN:
- 9780252050886
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042140.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but ...
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This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but also transformative, and preoccupied with gender, sexuality, race, and time. Pornographic films enthusiastically expose the perceived hypocrisy of this Victorianness, rhetorically equating it with mainstream, legitimate culture, as a way of staging pornography’s alleged sexual authenticity and transgressive nature. Through an analysis of porn set during the nineteenth century and porn adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this book shows how these adaptations expose the implicit pornographic aspects of “legitimate” culture while also revealing the extent to which “high” and “low” genres rely on each other for self-definition. In the process, neo-Victorian pornographies draw on Gothic spaces and icons in order to situate itself as this Gothic other, utilizing the Gothic and the monstrous to craft a transformative, pornographic space. These neo-Victorian Gothic pornographies expose the way the genre as a whole emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates gender, sexuality, and race through the lens of history and legacy.Less
This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but also transformative, and preoccupied with gender, sexuality, race, and time. Pornographic films enthusiastically expose the perceived hypocrisy of this Victorianness, rhetorically equating it with mainstream, legitimate culture, as a way of staging pornography’s alleged sexual authenticity and transgressive nature. Through an analysis of porn set during the nineteenth century and porn adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this book shows how these adaptations expose the implicit pornographic aspects of “legitimate” culture while also revealing the extent to which “high” and “low” genres rely on each other for self-definition. In the process, neo-Victorian pornographies draw on Gothic spaces and icons in order to situate itself as this Gothic other, utilizing the Gothic and the monstrous to craft a transformative, pornographic space. These neo-Victorian Gothic pornographies expose the way the genre as a whole emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates gender, sexuality, and race through the lens of history and legacy.
Cáel M. Keegan
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042126
- eISBN:
- 9780252050879
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042126.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book analyzes the filmmaking careers of Lana and Lilly Wachowski as the world’s most influential transgender media producers. Situated at the intersection of trans* studies and black feminist ...
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This book analyzes the filmmaking careers of Lana and Lilly Wachowski as the world’s most influential transgender media producers. Situated at the intersection of trans* studies and black feminist film studies, it argues that the Wachowskis’ cinema has been co-constitutive with the historical appearance of transgender, tracing how their work invents a trans* aesthetics of sensation that has disrupted conventional schemas of race, gender, space, and time. Offering new readings of the Wachowskis’ films and television, it illustrates the previously unsensed presence of transgender in the subtext of queer cinema, in the design of digital video, and in the emergence of a twenty-first-century global cinematic imaginary. It is in the Wachowskis’ art, the author argues, that transgender cultural production most centrally confronts cinema’s construction of reality, and in which white, Western transgender subjectivity most directly impacts global visual culture. Thus, the Wachowskis’ cinema is an inescapable archive for sensing the politics of race and gender in the present moment.Less
This book analyzes the filmmaking careers of Lana and Lilly Wachowski as the world’s most influential transgender media producers. Situated at the intersection of trans* studies and black feminist film studies, it argues that the Wachowskis’ cinema has been co-constitutive with the historical appearance of transgender, tracing how their work invents a trans* aesthetics of sensation that has disrupted conventional schemas of race, gender, space, and time. Offering new readings of the Wachowskis’ films and television, it illustrates the previously unsensed presence of transgender in the subtext of queer cinema, in the design of digital video, and in the emergence of a twenty-first-century global cinematic imaginary. It is in the Wachowskis’ art, the author argues, that transgender cultural production most centrally confronts cinema’s construction of reality, and in which white, Western transgender subjectivity most directly impacts global visual culture. Thus, the Wachowskis’ cinema is an inescapable archive for sensing the politics of race and gender in the present moment.
