The Lola film is a distinct subgenre of the woman's film in which woman's claim to pleasure is entertained without recourse to the figure of the femme fatale. Lola embodies a recognizable set of characteristics through which over time a select group of directors, actors, and audiences have responded in ways that do not succumb to the imperatives of gender. There are over thirty-five Lola films, starting with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel: many are German, others are French, American, British, Italian, and Spanish, but her claim has also resonated in Argentina, China, Egypt, Mexico, Thailand, and the Philippines. Lola can be working class, lesbian, transgender, ethnic, suburban, or any combination. This book examines Lola as a specific and enduring aspect of the early twentieth-century "new woman": woman's forthright claim to pleasure on her own terms, liberated, if only as a cinematic fantasy, from the usual constraints of sex and gender.

The technological, economic and social landscape of the consumer society was formed between the 1880s and 1920s. The author of this study shows how cinema played a key role in changing the urban landscape, using Chicago as a model and linking cinema theory with women's studies.

In Recreational Terror, Isabel Cristina Pinedo analyzes how the contemporary horror film produces recreational terror as a pleasurable encounter with violence and danger for female spectators. She challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence, and contends instead that the contemporary horror film speaks to the cultural need to express rage and terror in the midst of social upheaval.

Join Fran's quest for a "normal" sex life - featured in The Guardian's Best Shows of Edinburgh Fringe 2018, written and performed by Fran Bushe. Fran wants to fix sex. No matter how many wonder-cures she tries, how many trips to the doctor or offers of help from friends, she doesn't feel like her fire's been lit. Sometimes it hurts. Join Fran on this 'relentlessly hilarious' (★★★★ Stage) quest, with songs, as she pursues a satisfying sex-life. Expect toe-tapping tunes, a magic penis and a visit to sex camp. Oh, and dolphins. ★★★★ "Relentlessly hilarious" The Stage ★★★★ "Smart and audacious" The Guardian ★★★★★ Londontheatre1 ★★★★★ Arthur's Seat ★★★★★ Fringe Review ★★★★ Theatre Weekly ★★★★ Upper Circle Theatre Performer of the Year - Sexual Freedom Awards 2019 The Guardian's 'Best Shows of the Fringe 2018'

This pioneering collection explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women. Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasizing these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women’s sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure. Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure brings together challenges to these strictures and exclusions from both the South and North of the globe, with examples of activism, advocacy and programming which use pleasure as an entry point. It shows how positive approaches to pleasure and sexuality can enhance equality and empowerment for all.

Since it first appeared in Screen in 1975, Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" has been an enduring point of reference for artists, filmmakers, writers and theorists. Mulvey's compelling polemical analysis of visual pleasure has provoked and encouraged others to take positions, challenge preconceived ideas and produce new works that owe their possibility to the generative qualities of this key essay. In this book, the celebrated New York-based video artist Rachel Rose (born 1986) has produced an innovative work that extends and adds to the essay's frame of reference. Drawing on 18th- and 19th-century fairy tales, and observing how their flat narratives matched the flatness of their depictions, Rose created collages that connect these pre-cinematic illustrations to what Mulvey describes in her essay--cinema flattening sexuality into visuality.

Julia Roberts played a prostitute, famously, in Pretty Woman. So did Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Jane Fonda in Klute, Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie, Greta Garbo in Anna Christie, and Charlize Theron, who won an Academy Award for Monster. This engaging and generously illustrated study explores the depiction of female prostitute characters and prostitution in world cinema, from the silent era to the present-day industry. From the woman with control over her own destiny to the woman who cannot get away from her pimp, Russell Campbell shows the diverse representations of prostitutes in film. Marked Women classifies fifteen recurrent character types and three common narratives, many of them with their roots in male fantasy. The “Happy Hooker,” for example, is the liberated woman whose only goal is to give as much pleasure as she receives, while the “Avenger,” a nightmare of the male imagination, represents the threat of women taking retribution for all the oppression they have suffered at the hands of men. The “Love Story,” a common narrative, represents the prostitute as both heroine and anti-heroine, while “Condemned to Death” allows men to manifest, in imagination only, their hostility toward women by killing off the troubled prostitute in an act of cathartic violence. The figure of the woman whose body is available at a price has fascinated and intrigued filmmakers and filmgoers since the very beginning of cinema, but the manner of representation has also been highly conflicted and fiercely contested. Campbell explores the cinematic prostitute as a figure shaped by both reactionary thought and feminist challenges to the norm, demonstrating how the film industry itself is split by fascinating contradictions.