Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture - Hardcover

Turning the tables on the pornography debate, this is an analysis of taboo-shattering fiction, film and performance art. The book investigates the role of fantasy in art, politics and popular culture and shows how technological advances in medicine and science have altered our concepts of the human body. It offers a tour of the cultural landscape and connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic convention. Writers such as John Hawkes, Robert Coover and Kathy Acker, filmmakers such as Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien, and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle are examined.

"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 inBad 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