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

Linda S. Kauffman

University of California Press, Nov 15, 2023 - Performing Arts - 324 pages

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.


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 adv

Contents

• Contemporary Art Exhibitionists: 19
• Cutups in Beauty School: 50
• VISCERAL CINEMA: 81
• Impolitic Bodies Race and Desire: 83
• Sex Work Producing Porn: 101
• David Cronenbergs Surreal Abjection: 115
• ARRESTING FICTION: 147
• J G Ballards Atrocity Exhibitions: 149
• Criminal Writing John Hawkes and Robert Coover: 193
• New Inquisitions Kathy Acker and William Vollman: 208
• Masked Passions Meese Mercy and American Psycho: 228
• Epilogue: 261
• Notes: 271
• Index: 303

About the author

Linda S. Kauffman is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions (1986); Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992); and editor of three collections of feminist essays, including American Feminist Thought at Century's End (1993).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture
• Author: Linda S. Kauffman
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: University of California Press, 2023
• ISBN: 0520919718, 9780520919716
• Length: 324 pages
• Subjects: Art / Digital; Performing Arts / Film / General; Social Science / Popular Culture