The Power of the Image. Essays on Representation and Sexuality.

Contents:
1. Living dolls and 'real women' ;
2. Lawless seeing ;
3. Sexual disguise and cinema ;
4. "The Big Sleep": censorship, film text and sexuality ;
5. A moral subject: the VD propaganda feature ;
Notes and references / Further reading / Index.
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[From the "blurb": ]
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In this challenging collection of essays Annette Kuhn analyses a wide range of films and still photographs. She explores and develops ideas on culturally dominant images and how they work. Combining semiotic and Marxist-feminist analysies, cultural studies and historical approaches, she investigates issues around visual representation and sexuality: sexual difference; how femininity and masculinity are constructed; how notions of the moral and the representable are produced through actual images.
The book, which is extensively illustrated, includes essays on 'glamour' and 'documentary' photos of women; on pornography; on crossdressing as a theme in Hollywood cinema. It also discusses censorship and Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, and examines constructs of morality and sexuality in a genre which flourished in the silent era-the 'health propaganda' film.
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The Author
Annette Kuhn is a writer and lecturer in media studies. She has also written scripts for television. Her previous books are Feminism and Materialism (edited with Ann Marie Wolpe; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), Ideology and Cultural Production; edited with Michele Barrett. Philip Corrigan and Janet Wolff; Croom Helm, 1979), and Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982)
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