Bad Girls and Sick Boys Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture [Paperback]

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 inBad Girls and Sick Boysare 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 Boysoffers 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. Kauffmanis Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author ofDiscourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions(1986);Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction(1992); and editor of three collections of feminist essays, includingAmerican Feminist Thought at Century's End(1993).

Bad Girls and Sick Boysis an exhilarating rollercoaster ride, a superb piece of cultural investigation that skillfully anatomies some of the most deviant imaginations at work today. J. G. Ballard

Linda Kauffman is the perfect guide through the l3$