The Sexual Subject

"The Sexual Subject" brings together writing on sexuality which has appeared in "Screen" over the past two decades. It reflects the journal's continuing engagement with questions of sexuality and signification in the cinema, an engagement which has had a profound influence on the development of academic study of film and on alternative film and video practice.
The collection opens with Laura Mulvey's classic "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" with its conjunction of semiotics and psychoanalysis, the critical approach which is most closely associated with "Screen"'s rise to international prominence. The Reader then goes on to explore the particular questions and debates which that conjunction provoked: arguments around pornography and the representation of the body; questions of the representation of femininity and masculinity, of the female spectator, and of the social subject.
Many of the writings in "The Sexual Subject" have become indispensable texts within the study of film. The purpose of the collection is not only to make the articles available to a wider readership, and to a new generation, but also to pose new conjunctions, making connections between debates and inquiries which spanned two crucial decades of film theory.
"The Sexual Subject" is intended not only for all those with an interest in film and film theory, but for anyone with a commitment to cultural theory, theories of representation, and questions of sexuality and gender.
Contributors: Homi Bhabha, Edward Buscombe, Mary Ann Doane, Richard Dyer, John Ellis, Christine Gledhill, Stephen Heath, Claire Johnston, Annette Kuhn, Alan Lovell, Laura Mulvey, Steve Neale, Claire Pajaczowska, Griselda Pollock, Jackie Stacey, Leslie Stern, Paul Willemen, Christopher Williams, Dugald Williamson.