[ecrea] Sexography - Nicholas de Villiers

A new publication from University of Minnesota Press

Free postage to UK customers

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/sexography

**

*Sexography***

*Sex Work in Documentary***

/Nicholas de Villiers///

"Nicholas de Villiers’s deeply felt and sharply focused transcultural 
purview of documentary representations of sex work is all the more 
urgent at a historical moment that threatens to close down not only 
desire and difference but also documentary’s historical aspirations 
toward democracy and social justice. The critical questions he raises 
extend far beyond the narrow bounds of the selected films as he behooves 
us to join him in trying to answer them."—Thomas Waugh, Concordia University

"Unlike former work focusing on prostitutes as characters in film, 
Nicholas de Villiers launches an entirely new discourse around the 
motivations, inventions, and methods of sex worker cinema in this 
groundbreaking book. His integration of perspectives of both 
non-sex-worker filmmakers and films made by sex workers is absolutely 
crucial. In a book that's been a long time coming, de Villiers embraces 
the 'whore’s eye view' of experiential makers and presents an inquiry 
that is central to investigations of politics, political art, and 
empowerment."—Carol Leigh, producer of /Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes/

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an eruption of 
nonfiction films on sex work. The first book to examine a cross-section 
of this diverse and transnational body of work, /Sexography/ confronts 
the ethical questions raised by ethnographic documentary and interviews 
with sexually marginalized subjects. Nicholas de Villiers argues that 
carnal and cultural knowledge are inextricably entangled in ethnographic 
sex work documentaries.

De Villiers offers a reading of cinema as a technology of truth and 
advances a theory of confessional and counterconfessional performance by 
the interviewed subject who must negotiate both loaded questions and 
stigma. He pays special attention to the tactical negotiation of power 
in these films and how cultural and geopolitical shifts have affected 
sex work and sex workers. Throughout, /Sexography/ analyzes the films of 
a range of non–sex-worker filmmakers, including Jennie Livingston, Pier 
Paolo Pasolini, Shohini Ghosh, and Cui Zi’en, as well as films produced 
by sex workers. In addition, it identifies important parallels and 
intersections between queer and sex worker rights activist movements and 
their documentary historiography.

De Villiers ultimately demonstrates how commercial sex is intertwined 
with culture and power. He advocates shifting our approach from 
scrutinizing the motives of those who sell sex to examining the motives 
and roles of the filmmakers and transnational audiences creating and 
consuming films about sex work.

*Nicholas de Villiers*is associate professor of English and film at the 
University of North Florida. He is the author of /Opacity and the 
Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol/ (Minnesota, 2012).

University of Minnesota Press | March 2017| 288pp | 9781517900151 | PB | 
£24.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL317SWID**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.

Author and independent bookshop blog - Bookscombined.com 
<https://bookscombined.com/>


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