The Body’s Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture

Focusing on contemporary film and fiction, this work examines the construction of the body, both within cultural production and as a cultural product itself. It also provides an 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 fiction; the cannibal film; cyborgs and necrophiliac desire; AIDS; and reincarnation films. Films discussed include Videodrome , Dead Ringers , M. Butterfly , The Crying Game , Romeo is Bleeding , The Omen , Heavenly Creatures , Sister My Sister , Silence of the Lambs and Delicatessen .