Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema / Edition 1

by Janet Staiger

Overview

Charts the cultural tensions played out on-screen in early American cinema.

It was a new age, and on movie screens the American middle class presented its visions of sexual morality, with definitions of good women and bad. Bad Women takes us back to this time of massive social, cultural, and economic change to show us how American cinema gave women and women’s sexuality images useful to the new consumer culture of the early 1900s and its exploitation of sexual pleasure.

Although aimed at producing a certain kind of woman, these new images did manage to put discussions of women and their sexuality on America’s agenda. Charting the resulting cultural tensions as they played out in movie regulation, Janet Staiger shows us how representations and their endless permutations enacted conflicts over women’s public and private behaviors. Rich in historical detail and theoretical insight, this book offers an original depiction of a culture in transition, a sexual sensibility in the making, and film’s participation in the change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816626250
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	08/08/1995
Series:	Contradictions of Modernity; 4
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Janet Staiger is professor of radio, television, and film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (1992).

Editorial Reviews

Based on videotaping of 28 families with infants in their homes and extensive interviews with the parents, Geiger (educational psychology and statistics, State U. of New York-Albany) documents changing practices of child care in the US. In half of the families, the father had become the primary caregiver, and proved to be as nurturing and competent as mothers, though with some differences in style. In the other families too she found that childcare is now negotiated within an assumption of shared responsibility. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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