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Lady Chatterley's
Legacy in the Movies
Price: $24.95
Subtitle: Sex,
Brains, and Body Guys
Authors:
Peter Lehman and
Susan Hunt
Subject: Film,
Gender Studies
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4802-9
Pages:
210 pages
Publication Date: October 2010
Praise:
"A valuable resource for those working in gender studies and masculinity in the cinema. Highly Recommended."
—Choice, April 2011
"An important, definitive book! Insightfully analyzing the "body
guy" genre, the authors persuasively demonstrate the need for and value
of a radical reassessment of the discourses previously used to talk
about male and female sexual power and pleasure and their
representation in film."—Robert Eberwein, author of Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in
the American War Film
"Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt have forcefully and brilliantly
focused on a genre of film that desperately needed to be yanked out of
the shadows into light."—Zalman King, filmmaker
"Lehman and Hunt brilliantly track the legacy of Lady Chatterley's
fondness for the 'body guy' at the expense of the intellectual male in
images of (improbable) penile penetration on film. In arguing that
non-genital sexualities (and brains) offer better models than violent
body masculinities, they productively challenge the
anti-intellectualism of much visual culture today."—E. Ann Kaplan, author of
Trauma
Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature
Description:
Titanic. Two Moon Junction. A Night in Heaven. Sirens. Henry & June. 9 Songs. Lady Chatterley. And more. A new
“body guy” genre has emerged in film during the last twenty years—a
working-class man of the earth or bohemian artist awakens and fulfills
the sexuality of a beautiful, intelligent woman frequently married or
engaged to a sexually incompetent, educated, upper-class man. This body
guy exhibits a masterful athletic, penile-centered sexual performance
that enlivens and transforms the previously discontented woman’s life.
Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt relate a host of wide-ranging films to a
literary tradition dating back to D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and an
emerging body culture of our time. Through an engaging and compelling
narrative, they argue that the hero’s body, lovemaking style, and
penis—revealed through extensive male nudity—celebrate conformity to
norms of masculinity and male sexuality. Simultaneously, these films
denigrate the vital, creative, erotic world of the mind. Just when
women began to successfully compete with men in the workplace, these
movies, if you will, unzip the penis as the one thing women do not have
but want and need for their fulfillment.
But Lehman and Hunt also find signs of a yearning for alternative forms
of sexual and erotic pleasure in film, embracing diverse bodies and
vibrant minds. Lady
Chatterley’s Legacy in the
Movies shows how filmmakers, spectators, and all of us can be
empowered to dethrone the body guy, his privileged body, and preferred
style of lovemaking, replacing it with a wide range of alternatives.
About the Author:
PETER LEHMAN is the director of the Center for Film, Media
and Popular Culture at Arizona State University. He is the author of
numerous books, including Running
Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body
and Roy Orbison: The Invention of an
Alternative Rock Masculinity, and is the editor of Pornography: Film and Culture
(Rutgers University Press).
SUSAN HUNT teaches film studies at Santa Monica and Pasadena City
Colleges. She has coauthored numerous articles on film and sexuality
for many journals and anthologies.
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Price: $24.95
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