The Body's Perilous Pleasures

Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture

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by Michele Aaron

Edinburgh University Press

Due/Published September 2000, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 074860961X

An engagement with the cultural exploitation of the body and its dangerous desires. Focusing on contemporary film and fiction (Dead Ringers, Crash, The Crying Game, Romeo is Bleeding, The Exorcist, Damage, Heavenly Creatures, Sister My Sister, and vampire and cyborg novels), the volume examines the construction of the body within cultural production and as a cultural product itself. It explores the stormy relationship between pleasure and danger--those overlapping forces so prevalent in Western culture, as well as the borders that mark them as distinct.