Abstinence Cinema

Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film

Author: Casey Ryan Kelly
ISBN: 9780813575100

From the perspective of cultural conservatives, Hollywood movies are cesspools of vice, exposing impressionable viewers to pernicious sexually-permissive messages. Offering a groundbreaking study of Hollywood films produced since 2000, Abstinence Cinema comes to a very different conclusion, finding echoes of the evangelical movement's abstinence-only rhetoric in everything from Easy A to Taken.   Casey Ryan Kelly tracks the surprising sex-negative turn that Hollywood films have taken, associating premarital sex with shame and degradation, while romanticizing traditional nuclear families, courtship rituals, and gender roles. As he demonstrates, these movies are particularly disempowering for young women, concocting plots in which the decision to refrain from sex until marriage is the young woman's primary source of agency and arbiter of moral worth. Locating these regressive sexual politics not only in expected sites, like the Twilight films, but surprising ones, like the raunchy comed

Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publish Date: 2016

Subjects: Performing Arts / Film / History & Criticism

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Womyn (WMYN))