The Body S Perilous Pleasures

Drawing upon contemporary film and fiction, The Body's Perilous Pleasures is an investigation of the nature of the body and the manner in which it figures in transvestism, cyborgs and female desire, body piercing, AIDS and reincarnation.

Rather, it was constructed by the film text. Over time, though, understanding of that position has changed. Now, the male spectator has begun to be conceived of as an actual male in the audience.

Knowledge about carnality and its limits provides the agenda for much of the fiction written for adolescent readers today, yet there exists little critical engagement with the ways in which it has been represented in the young adult novel in either discursive, ideological, or rhetorical forms. Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature is a pioneering study that addresses these methodological and contextual gaps. Focusing on texts produced since the late-1980s, and drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Kathryn James shows how representations of death in young adult literature are invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Under particular scrutiny are the trope of woman/death, the eroticizing and sexualizing of death, and the ways in which the gendered subject is represented in dialogue with the processes of death, dying, and grief. Through close readings of historical literature, fantasy fictions, realistic novels, dead-narrator tales, and texts from genres including Gothic, horror, and post-disaster, James reveals not only how cultural discourses influence and are influenced by literary works, but how relevant the study of death is to adolescent fiction--the literature of "becoming."

From Tattoo to Saw, this book considers mainstream cinema's representation of the viscerally dominated and marked body. Examining a shift in the late twentieth century to narratives that highlight subjection, endurance and willed-acquiescence, it probes the confluence of pain, pleasure and consent to analyse the implications of the change.

This fascinating collection explores the growing range of body modification practices such as piercing, tattooing, branding, cutting and inserting implants, which have sprung up recently in the West. It asks whether this implies that we are returning to traditional tribal practices of inscribing identities onto bodies on the part of ′modern primitives′, or is body modification better understood as purely cosmetic and decorative with body markings merely temporary signs of transferable loyalties?

Michele Aaron cuts a lucid path through the dense undergrowth of the debate on spectatorship. She revisits the classics of Hollywood and explores films from beyond the mainstream, such as 'Dogme 95' to explore the nature of seeing and spectatorship.

The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012). Contents Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic Chapter 1 – Splatterpunk Chapter 2 – Body Horror Chapter 3 – The New Avant-Pulp Chapter 4 – The Slaughterhouse Novel Chapter 5 – Torture Porn Chapter 6 – Surgical Horror Conclusion: The Gothic and the Body Notes Works Cited Filmography

Based on a fifteen year longitudinal cross-cultural analysis on the role of the body in identity construction process around the world, this analysis provides readers with a comparative theoretical exploration of piercing and other forms of body modification that international communities of defiance use to express their identity.