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Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s

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Abstract

One of the most fascinating phenomena of 1960s film culture is the emergence of American sexploitation films-salacious indies made on the margins of Hollywood. Hundreds of such films were produced and shown on both urban and small-town screens over the course of the decade. Yet despite their vital importance to the film scene, and though they are now understood as a gateway to the emergence of publicly exhibited hardcore pornography in the early 1970s, these films have been largely overlooked by scholars. Defined by low budgets, quick production times, unknown actors, strategic uses of nudity, and a sensationalist obsession with unbridled female sexuality, sexploitation films provide a unique window into a tumultuous period in American culture and sexual politics. In Lewd Looks, Elena Gorfinkel examines the social and legal developments that made sexploitation films possible: their aesthetics, their regulation, and their audiences. Gorfinkel explores the ways sexploitation films changed how spectators encountered and made sense of the sexualized body and set the stage for the adult film industry of today. Lewd Looks recovers a lost chapter in the history of independent cinema and American culture-a subject that will engross readers interested in media, sexuality, gender, and the 1960s. Gorfinkel investigates the films and their contexts with scholarly depth and vivid storytelling, producing a new account of the obscene image, screen sex, and adult film and media. © 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
... El análisis realiza en primer lugar una breve exposición de la trama de estos capítulos en relación con los personajes femeninos implicados, para luego demostrar que la ficción de HBO, a pesar de romper algunos estereotipos y ofrecer más oportunidades a las mujeres que otras producciones contemporáneas, no es capaz de abandonar una perspectiva que la crítica feminista ha identificado como paradigma de sexploitation, entendido como uso de material sexual explícito en películas y discursos mediáticos. Específicamente, el sexploitation cinema (o sex-exploitation film) es una variedad de cine independiente rodado con bajo presupuesto, muy habitual en la década de los sesenta del siglo XX, en el que se exhiben escenas sexuales y desnudos gratuitos; es un subgénero del exploitation film, películas con contenidos pornográficos (Church, 2016;Gorfinkel, 2012Gorfinkel, , 2017Roche, 2015;Schaefer, 2012). En el sexploitation film, el uso del desnudo se emplea para excitar el voyerismo del público. ...
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... Over the past several decades, porn studies has evolved from a focus on the hard-core heterosexual films that were the subject of Williams's book to engage with different porn and porn-adjacent subgenres (Butler 2004;Waugh 1996;Escoffier 2009;Schaefer 1999;Gorfinkel 2017); technological innovations (Alilunas 2016;Heffernan 2015;Attwood 2010;Jacobs 2007), labor and production practices (Miller-Young 2014;Berg 2017), and audiences and spectatorship (Smith 2007;Neville 2018). Researchers have examined pornography's wider contexts of distribution and reception (Delany 1999;Comella 2013), with the goal of studying the "specific places it is produced, distributed, and consumed" (Juffer 1998: 14) in an effort to advance the call for a "porn studies-in-action" (Comella 2014: 69). ...
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... Second, the notion that bisexuality describes a sexuality that is primal, untrammeled by discourse, or unaffected by social convention and categorization will always fail to deliver on its promise-no sexuality in a social, semiotic, and discursive world can evade these contingencies. 9 Instead, what we witness in Nans's narrative journey is a character who, through his relinquishing of homophobic heterosexual 8 Knife+Heart's treatment of sex might equally be said to mirror softcore, a less explicit pornographic esthetic that experienced its heyday in the 1960s (Gorfinkel, 2018). 9 Here, we might remember Butler's (1990Butler's ( /2007 critique of the idea of bisexual primacy: "To presume the primacy of bisexuality…is still not to account of the construction of [this 'primacy']" (p. ...
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