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

by Linda S. Kauffman

Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us.

Bad Girls and Sick Boys offers a vital and entertaining tour of the current cultural landscape. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollmann; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

324 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hey, it's my professor! You know the people they like to ban from Art museums? Well, this book chronicles most of them. From Orlan to scatologists, this is an intersting foray into what is deemed Art.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bad Girls and Sick Boys. Over the years I have read chapters here and there as they related to my undergraduate degree. Now, in Post-Grad I set myself the task of reading it front to cover to better understand the abject, gender, violence, sexuality, and pornography as it appears in various aspects of art culture - film, art, literature. And what a journey it was. Although removed from my own project, themes that Kauffman explores such as the violence we perform on our own bodies, and the taboo processes such as the practice of, and recovery from plastic surgery are prominent in my research.

Kauffman creates herself the arduous task of presenting the book in lay terms to be accessible to a wider, more mainstream audience, and in doing so she fails. She assumes her readers will be familiar with Guy Debord, Julie Kristeva, Laura Mulvey, Lacan, and others. As a visual arts undergrad reading her book I often tuned out of some of the denser theory. It is only now coming back to it with a much stronger sense of the sociological and philosophical theories interrogated by Kauffman that I am better able to engage with her arguments - even without at times being familiar with the works that she interrogates (I strongly recommend reading her piece on America Psycho, and also My Own Private Idaho).

Kauffman demonstrates how to write academically for an art audience. Her references are from across the board, and her comparisons are always right on point. Her analysis never misses, and is strongly supported by ideas and scaffolded throughout the book - constantly referencing back to the art and artists discussed. New ideas are only presented as they are needed. Examples are always provided with careful explanation and analysis. Amaze