Call For Papers

Tainted Love - Screening Sexual Perversities

Original proposals are sought for an edited collection on the representation of 
sexual perversities on screen. The screen has a long history of providing a 
space in which taboo sexual practices and perversions have been played out 
in multiple and diverse ways. Matters of taboo and perversity are too often 
located within discourses of moral panic, degeneracy, deviance and disease, 
which present those who enact such sexualities as modern folk devils. The 
contemporary screen has explicitly and expressively interacted with such 
discourses and debates. 

The representation of paedophilia, incest, necrophilia, zoophilia, 
intergenerational relationships, sadism, masochism, bondage, domination, kink 
and fetish, and themes of obsession, addiction, and erotomania have been 
foregrounded on screen. While the expectation may be that such social, 
cultural and/or legal transgressions would be the exclusive terrain of art and 
alternative cinemas, a significant move towards the mainstream is evident in 
examples such as HBO’s Six Feet Under (2001-2005), Andrew Jarecki’s 
documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Nicole Kassell’s independent film 
The Woodsman (2004), and Lee Daniels’ recent Oscar winner Precious (2009).

The screen is yet to be acknowledged and fully explored for its engagement 
with such topics. Just as the screen is offering more challenging and thought-
provoking approaches, critical studies needs to interrogate this area and 
provide a coherent account of cinematic and televisual representations. The 
aim of this collection is to explore the “perverse” beyond the limited and 
negative semantic and discursive fields that constrict both meaning and 
understanding. In order to move past binary distinctions of good and bad, 
normal and abnormal, moral and immoral, Tainted Love seeks to critically 
interrogate perverse sexualities and sexual perversities on screen that range 
from condemnation and demonisation to representations that offer alternatives 
to pathologising such sexualities.

Proposals are welcomed on, but not limited to, the following topics:
 
• socio-cultural/historical approaches
• critical/theoretical debates
• industry/institutional approaches: Hollywood, independent, television, world 
and European cinemas, art, alternative and the mainstream
• genre: horror, comedy, documentary, pornography
• gender, sexuality and sexual deviance
• the eroticisation and sexualisation of childhood
• censorship and coding
• adapting the perverse from literature to film
• ethics and morality
• audiences and spectatorship
• authorship, stardom and performance
• the representation of paedophilia, incest, necrophilia, zoophilia, 
intergenerational relationships, BDSM
• themes of sexual obsession, addiction and erotomania

Please send proposals of 250-300 words and a short biography to: 
Darren Kerr [log in to unmask] 
and 
Donna Peberdy [log in to unmask] 
by 1st June 2010

Darren Kerr is a Senior Lecturer in film and television at Southampton Solent 
University. He has published articles on screen violence, adaptation and sex 
on screen. He is the co-editor of Hard to Swallow: Hard-core Pornography on 
Screen (Wallflower Press forthcoming).

Donna Peberdy is a Senior Lecturer in film and television at Southampton 
Solent University. Her research and publications focus on masculinity, 
sexuality and performance in American cinema.

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