Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture

By Linda S. Kauffman

Book Overview

Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us. Bad Girls and Sick Boys offers a vital and entertaining tour of the current cultural landscape. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollmann; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520210328
• ISBN13: 9780520210325
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An open-minded summary of a controversial topic.

Linda Kauffman's book would shock an academic or one who reads for pleasurer during a quick browse. But upon closer examination, one finds that Kauffman's research presents a solid argument for the anti-censorship stance in the most reliable way possible--through undeniable facts. This books allows radical feminists to be seen in a different light, one that has been shadowed by hypocrisy for too many years.