Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822356422 ISBN 13: 9780822356424

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2014

Synopsis

Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media—film and television, recorded sound, and publishing—that provide evidence of the circulation of sex in the public sphere, from the mainstream to the fringe. They discuss art films such as I am Curious (Yellow), mainstream movies including Midnight Cowboy, sexploitation films such as Mantis in Lace, the emergence of erotic film festivals and of gay pornography, the use of multimedia in sex education, and the sexual innuendo of The Love Boat. Scholars of cultural studies, history, and media studies, the contributors bring shared concerns to their diverse topics. They highlight the increasingly fluid divide between public and private, the rise of consumer and therapeutic cultures, and the relationship between identity politics and individual rights. The provocative surveys and case studies in this nuanced cultural history reframe the "sexual revolution" as the mass sexualization of our mediated world.

Contributors. Joseph Lam Duong, Jeffrey Escoffier, Kevin M. Flanagan, Elena Gorfinkel, Raymond J. Haberski Jr., Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Eithne Johnson, Arthur Knight, Elana Levine, Christie Milliken, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Jacob Smith, Leigh Ann Wheeler, Linda Williams
 

About this title

About the Author

Eric Schaefer is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. He is the author of "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!" A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959, also published by Duke University Press.

Review

"In 1968 researchers at the National Sex Forum said it was time to say yes to sex. Decades later, researchers in Sex Scene say it is time to say yes to the study of sex media. Finally! The strikingly original essays in this wide-ranging collection boldly argue that the sexual revolution needs to be understood as the mass mediated affair that gave rise to our current debates about privacy, policy, and technology. The books, magazines, newspapers, movies, TV programs, and Broadway shows of 1968, and even Lyndon Johnson's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, took such a prurient interest in sex that they gave prurience a good name, inciting that cultural move—from sex in the bedroom to sex in public—known as the sexual revolution. Sex Scene will make us all a lot smarter on the complex and controversial relation of sex and media as we teach, debate, and legislate it." (Constance Penley, author of NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America)

"Focusing on a wide range of topics and media, Eric Schaefer’s anthology Sex Scene offers a complex and comprehensive history of the sexual revolution. The collection is a massive contribution to the study of sexual representation in the 1960s and 1970s." (Jon Lewis, author of Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry)

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0822356422
• ISBN 13: 9780822356424
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 456
• Editor: Schaefer Eric