Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (Paperback)

~ (Author) "June 27, 1995, Washington, D.C.: The Christian Action Network (CAN) stages a "degenerate art" exhibition in the Rayburn Building, sponsored by Rep. Robert Dornan, to..." (more)
Key Phrases: new psychopathology, atrocity exhibition, porno industry, Bob Flanagan, New York, American Psycho (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us.
Bad Girls and Sick Boys offers a vital and entertaining tour of the current cultural landscape. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollmann; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.

From the Inside Flap

"Bad Girls and Sick Boys is an exhilarating rollercoaster ride, a superb piece of cultural investigation that skillfully anatomies some of the most deviant imaginations at work today."--J. G. Ballard

"Linda Kauffman is the perfect guide through the troubling, erotically charged cultural environment she maps in Bad Girls and Sick Boys. She handles popular culture with sophistication and intelligence and addresses academic subjects with an engaging flair. Kauffman is alert, informed, clear-eyed, and most of all, entirely free of cant."--Anthony De Curtis

"Linda Kauffman is one of our most brilliant, savvy, and exciting observers of contemporary life. Bad Girls and Sick Boys is both tremendously entertaining and disturbing. Linda Kauffman's meditations on art, pornography, cinema, and literature fly powerfully against the grain of convention."--Howard Norman

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Product Details

• Paperback: 324 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520210328
• ISBN-13: 978-0520210325
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #650,477 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars too credulous but not bad, July 1, 2004

By A Customer

I looked forward to reading this, and it starts well but then becomes bogged down in lionizing unskeptically such performance artists as Orlan, the woman who continues to have plastic surgery as her "transgressive" "art," and stories of the dated antics of Carolee Schneeman. It's nice that the author doesn't much care for Andrea Dworkin, but she goes head over heels for Bret Easton Ellis and Kathy Acker, whose literary accomplishments I think have been hit and miss at best. The best thing in the book is the attention paid to David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard, including interviews with each.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An open-minded summary of a controversial topic., July 23, 1999

By A Customer

Linda Kauffman's book would shock an academic or one who reads for pleasurer during a quick browse. But upon closer examination, one finds that Kauffman's research presents a solid argument for the anti-censorship stance in the most reliable way possible--through undeniable facts. This books allows radical feminists to be seen in a different light, one that has been shadowed by hypocrisy for too many years.