San Antonio College Library

In this unprecedented and brilliant study, Linda Williams moves beyond the impasse of anti-porn/anti-censorship position-taking to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does--as a genre with a history, as a specific cinematic form, and as part of contemporary discourse on sexuality. Working against tendencies to oversimplify hard core--either as pure abusive power or pure liberatory pleasure--Williams sees the form as inherently contradictory....

Set in 19th century Korea, this version also tells the tale of treachery, lust and sacrifice. Elegant, courtly and sexually voracious young Lord Jo-won's public life of idle nobility masks a not-so-private life of unending sexual conquest. Challenged by his equally debauched cousin Lady Cho to seduce a teen-aged virgin threatens Cho's household kingdom. Jo-won accepts on condition that Cho surrender herself to him if he succeeds. But the real target...

"What have we learned (and what might we have forgotten) from history's bloody backwash? Guilt, love, and history are three skeins, woven together to create human beings or, alternately, human monsters. The question of wartime culpability undergirds the May-December romance in postwar Berlin between Hanna, a weary-looking, sexually rapacious streetcar ticket-taker and Michael, a young schoolboy whom she seduces, ravenously and to his great delight....