Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn

Whether in mainstream or independent films, depictions of female prostitution and promiscuity are complicated by their intersection with male fantasies. In such films, issues of exploitation, fidelity, and profitability are often introduced into the narrative, where sex and power become commodities traded between men and women.

In Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn, Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Catriona McAvoy have assembled essays that explore the representation of women and sexual transactions in film and television. Included in these discussions are the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Eyes Wide Shut, L.A. Confidential, Pandora’s Box, and Shame and such programs as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gigolos. By exploring the themes of class differences and female economic independence, the chapters go beyond textual analysis and consider politics, censorship, social trends, laws, race, and technology, as well as sexual and gender stereotypes.

By exploring this complex subject, Selling Sex on Screen offers a spectrum of representations of desire and sexuality through the moving image. This volume will be of interest not only to students and scholars of film but also researchers in gender studies, women’s studies, criminology, sociology, film studies, adaptation studies, and popular culture.

Karen A. Ritzenhoff is professor in the Department of Communication at Central Connecticut State University. Ritzenhoff is the coeditor of Heroism and Gender in War Films (2014) with Jakub Kazecki; Border Visions: Diaspora and Identity in Film (2013) with Jakub Kazecki and Cynthia J. Miller; Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro- Horror to American Cinema (2012) with Karen Randell; and Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World (2009) with Katherine Hermes. In 2011, she also coedited a special media journal, Augenblick: Images of the Iraq War (with Angela Krewani). Catriona McAvoy is a filmmaker based in London. She runs a digital onset and lab services company, First-Light.tv. She wrote a chapter in the book Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives (2015) and interviews with cast and crew in Studies in the Horror Film: The Shining Vol. 1 & 2 (2015), as well as an article in the forthcoming ＂Kubrick and Adaptation＂ special issue in the journal Adaptation (2015).