This book looks closely at Swedish pornography in the 1970s. Mariah Larsson combines contemporary case studies with comprehensive analyses of advertisements, critical responses and censorship records to ask how the small city of Malmö's embrace of the era's sexual liberation was both representative and unique in relation to the rest of Sweden.

Swedish cinema became recognized for daring representations of sexuality with such films as One Summer of Happiness (1951), The Silence (1963), I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and a wave of sex films in the late 1960s and 1970s. The association between Swedish film and sexuality shows up frequently in popular culture. From Taxi Driver (1976) to Mad Men (2007-2015), dirty Swedish movie references abound. Yet the connection has attracted little critical attention. In this collection of new essays, Swedish and American scholars go beyond popular misconceptions to explore the origins, influences and reception of sexuality in Swedish cinema during the "sexual revolution" on both sides of the Atlantic. A broad range of topics are covered, from analyses of key films, to a behind-the-scenes study of the Swedish Film Institute, which played a significant role in opposing Swedish film censorship.

Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media—film and television, recorded sound, and publishing—that provide evidence of the circulation of sex in the public sphere, from the mainstream to the fringe. They discuss art films such as I am Curious (Yellow), mainstream movies including Midnight Cowboy, sexploitation films such as Mantis in Lace, the emergence of erotic film festivals and of gay pornography, the use of multimedia in sex education, and the sexual innuendo of The Love Boat. Scholars of cultural studies, history, and media studies, the contributors bring shared concerns to their diverse topics. They highlight the increasingly fluid divide between public and private, the rise of consumer and therapeutic cultures, and the relationship between identity politics and individual rights. The provocative surveys and case studies in this nuanced cultural history reframe the "sexual revolution" as the mass sexualization of our mediated world. Contributors. Joseph Lam Duong, Jeffrey Escoffier, Kevin M. Flanagan, Elena Gorfinkel, Raymond J. Haberski Jr., Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Eithne Johnson, Arthur Knight, Elana Levine, Christie Milliken, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Jacob Smith, Leigh Ann Wheeler, Linda Williams

After the “digital turn,” expansion of sexual representations has taken shape quantitatively(thanks to the multiplication of production and distribution channels) and qualitatively (giving riseto a plurality of new representational forms). In this context, several social groups – including women and non-normative sexual subcultures – have obtained full citizenship rights within the “pornosphere,” moving beyond their traditional marginalization or, indeed, exclusion. These “nonconventional” pornographies exist in a dialectical relationship with mainstream production in so far as they are at the same time a development and a repudiation of the latter (on an aesthetic, economic and political level).This volume investigates the emergences of alternative pornographies, highlighting theirdiscursive heterogeneity, their cultural status and connections to identities and non-normativepractices, and their role in redefining the very idea of pornography.The publication maps the main areas relating to alternative pornographies, such as alt porn,queer pornography, indie porn, post porn, feminist pornography, and amateur porn.With a foreword by Feona Attwood

From the golden age of comic books in the 1940s and 1950s to the adult film industry's golden decade of the 1970s and up to today, the authors trace porn's transformation--from lurking in the dark alleys of American life to becoming an unapologetic multibillion-dollar industry.

As film and television become ever more focused on the pornographic gaze of the camera, the human body undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming both landscape and building, part of an architectonic design in which the erotics of the body spread beyond the body itself to influence the design of the film or televisual shot. The body becomes the mise-en-scène of contemporary moving imagery. Opening The Space of Sex, Shelton Waldrep sets up some important tropes for the book: the movement between high and low art; the emphasis on the body, looking, and framing; the general intermedial and interdisciplinary methodology of the book as a whole. The Space of Sex's second half focuses on how sex, gender, and sexuality are represented in several recent films, including Paul Schrader's The Canyons (2013), Oliver Stone's Savages (2012), Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike (2012), Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon (2013). Each of these mainstream or independent movies, and several more, are examined for the ways they have attempted to absorb pornography, if not the pornography industry specifically, into their plot. According to Waldrep, the utopian elements of seventies porn get reprocessed in a complex way in the twenty-first century as both a utopian impulse-the desire to have sex on the screen, to re-eroticize sex as something positive and lacking in shame-with a mixed feeling about pornography itself, with an industry that can be seen in a dystopian light. In other words, sex, in our contemporary world, still does not come without compromise.

The best spy story; the worst spy. Save the world? Or save Miss Sweden? It's an easy choice. The LSD is not interested in Agneta Larsson, a former Swedish Miss who'll soon be a formidable Swedish President. The LSD is only interested in some documents in Agneta Larsson's safe. They send Benny, The Runner, to copy these documents and get out. A simple mission; Agneta isn't even at home. Agneta hasn't been at home for a while. Agneta has disappeared. Her sister Frieda is worried. She calls Agneta's phone. Benny picks it up… Why should he help Frieda? Let her call the Stockholm police. He'll lose his job. He might lose his life. The LSD never interferes with foreign politics. Spies follow the rules of logic. Spies follow orders. Real spies are tough. But Benny isn't a real spy. He's just a Runner, and he can't stand a woman crying… Mission «Miss Missing» might mean a miserable, mortal mistake.