Focusing on contemporary film and fiction, this book examines the construction of the body, both within cultural production and as a cultural product itself, and provides a provocative engagement with the cultural representation of the body and its 'dangerous desires'. Transgressive interpretations of conventional imagery merge with critical considerations of subcultural forms. The topics discussed include male erotic objectification; narcissistic masculinity; male to female transvestism; cyborgs and female desire; body piercing; 'demonic' children in film; queer cinema; vampires in women's...

Coined in the early 1990s to describe a burgeoning film movement, "New Queer Cinema" has turned the attention of film theorists, students, and audiences to the proliferation of intelligent, stylish, and daring work by lesbian and gay filmmakers within independent cinema and to the infiltration of "queer" images and themes into the mainstream. Why did this shift take place? Was it political gains, cultural momentum, or market forces that energized the evolution and transformation of this cinematic genre?

New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader provides a definitive and highly readable...

Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying enters the expanding field of Death Studies and connects some of its key interpretive frameworks-such as issues of internment practice, trauma, or end of life care-to visual culture, and, more than that, to visual culture's socio-political, geographic and aesthetic specificities. Where the prevailing picture of death within this field is as a Western experience framed by its denial on one side and its sensationalism on the other, this collection confronts the specifics of death's marginalisation: its experience as local rather than universal, and the...