The Sexual Subject

The Sexual Subject brings together writing on sexuality which has appeared in Screen over the past two decades. It reflects the journal’s continuing engagement with quesitons of sexuality and signification in the cinema, an engagement which has had a profound influence on the development of the academic study of film and on alternative film and video. The collection opens with Laura Mulvey’s classic “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” with its conjunction of semiotics and psychoanalysis, the critical approach which is most closely associated with Screen ‘s rise to international prominence. The Reader then goes on to explore the particular questions and debates which that conjunction provoked: arguments around pornography and the representation of the body; questions of the representation of femininity and masuclinity, of the female spectator, and of the social subject. Many of the writings in this Reader have become indispensable texts within the study of film.
The purpose of the Reader is not only to make the articles available to a wider readership, and to a new generation, but also to pose new conjunctions, making connections in one volume between debates and inquiries which spanned two crucial decades of film theory. The Sexual Subject is intended not only for all those with a particular interest in film and film theory, but for anyone with a serious commitment to cultural theory, theories of representation, and questions of sexuality and gender.