Tainted Love ─ Screening Sexual Perversion

This is the first critical anthology to offer extended analysis of the representation of sexual perversions 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, teenage 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 imaging 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 perversions on screen.

Darren Kerr ia a senior lecturerer in film and television at Southampton Solent University, UK. He is also the co-editor of Hard to Swallow: Hard-core Pornography on Screen (2012) and he has published articles on sex, horror, violence and adaptation.Donna Peberdy is a senior lecturerer of film and television at Southampton Solent University, UK. She is the author of Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema (2011) and her research and publications focus on acting, performance, sex and gender.