Tainted Love

Tainted Love is the first critical anthology to offer extended analysis of the representation of sexual perversities on screen. Interrogating the recent shift towards the mainstream in the cinematic representation of previously marginalised sexual practices, it 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 the shame of masturbation in mainstream cinema, teenage sexuality in the films of Larry Clark, intergenerational sex and incestuous relations in French cinema, sexual obsession in gay cinema, 'everyday' perversion in neoliberal culture, the straightness of necrophilia, imaging and re-imagining the Marquis de Sade from film to slash fiction and the performance and presentation of the paedophile. 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 perversities on screen.