Transgression in Anglo-American Cinema: Gender, Sex and the Deviant Body ed. by Joel Gwynne (review)

With Darren Kerr and Donna Peberdy's rival anthology Tainted Loved: Screening Sexual Perversion (I.B. Tauris, 2017) covering similar terrain, Joel Gwynne's Transgression in Anglo-American Cinema seeks to distinguish itself by providing a broad introduction to what the editor dubs the "new transgressive cinema" (1). While one may query the banal hyperbole of the adjective ("new"), the essays collected here all interrogate films that "queer and problematize" (2) hegemonic conceptions of desire, sexuality, and bodily normalcy.

As such, Transgression in Anglo-American Cinema critically engages with bodies that exist outside the strictures of the hetero-normative: flesh that is obese, emaciated, and eviscerated; bodies that are elderly, pre-pubescent, and queerly identified. In the introduction, Gwynne enthusiastically avows his interest in uncovering "libertarian articulations" (1) of sex and desire, an unapologetically utopian use of the L-word, which may well raise skeptical eyebrows in some quarters. And rightly so, for Gwynne's telling choice of an adjective is indicative of the ideological assumptions underpinning many of the essays collected herein. For whether implicitly or explicitly, many of the contributors are generally uncritical of the sexual opportunities legitimized by the neo-liberal marketplace, a culture of would-be erotic freedoms eulogized at length by Brian McNair in his thematically twinned books Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire (Routledge, 2002) and Porno? Chic! How Pornography Changed the World and Made It a Better Place (Routledge, 2013).

The key dissenting voice here is that of Mark Featherstone, who offers a polemical overview of erotic pathologies in Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011), Thanatomorphose (Éric Falardeau, 2012), and Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier, 2013). For Featherstone, these neo-Sadean films about late-capitalist dehumanization provide "a dystopian counterpoint to the utopian image of the happy, desiring, sexed subject that represents the dominant ideological text of neo-liberal culture" (26–27). Admittedly, Featherstone's scorched-earth political critique is sometimes as gruelling as a repeat viewing of von Trier's Nymphomaniac. Nevertheless, his argument is forceful and persuasive, and I enjoyed the slyly comic suggestion that Shame is best understood as a ghoulish post-2008 rei-magining of Sex and the City (1998–2004). Featherstone shares ideological ground with Alistair Fox, whose contribution also views a recent cycle of films about sex addiction as symptomatic of the "pornification" of erotic affect under neo-liberal conditions.

Transgression in Anglo-American Cinema then moves beyond straightforwardly sexual terrain. Alice Haylett Bryan critically dissects the gender politics of female surgeons in left-field horror films Excision (Richard Bates Jr., 2012) and American Mary (Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska, 2012) while Niall Richardson engages with fantasies of "feederism" and female obesity in fatsploitation thriller Feed (Brett Leonard, 2005). Conversely, Alison Garden and Tom Steward examine the politics of the emaciated male body. For Steward, the extreme weight loss regimes undertaken by muscular, gym-honed actors in The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004) and Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013) produce atrophied bodies that serve as semiotic registers of social and political discontent. But such bodily metamorphoses also function to reaffirm neo-liberal ideologies of self-regulation, with the neo-anorexic performativity of Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey transforming the actors into celebrated icons of corporeal mastery.

Garden is similarly ambivalent about the meanings attached to Michael Fassbender's skeletal frame in Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008), though her argument is refracted through the dense post-colonial prism of the Irish Republican struggle. Garden argues persuasively that Hunger's fetishistic emphasis on Bobby Sands's (Fassbender) martyred body serves to absolve histories of paramilitary violence. At the same time, however, she is over-reliant on an increasingly creaky theoretical paradigm—Mulvey's "male gaze"—and an anachronistic belief in the subversive potential of the eroticized (read: feminized) male body. If Hunger fails to "sustain genuinely subversive gender politics" (69), I suspect this is more a symptom of scholarly tunnel vision than any...