Introduction

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an academic in want of a definition will invent one on their own. This inclination can generate decades of debate among the cognoscenti, in both productive and redundant directions (see "auteur," or "quality television"). The term "bad object" is a great example, for despite its frequent deployment in a plethora of contexts, its precise meaning has remained a moving target.

Generally speaking, a "bad object" is an artifact that is used in critical analysis with the implicit or explicit acknowledgement of its perceived violations of "good" taste. Those violations can stem from many sources, including a failure to fulfill political, social, or artistic standards as understood by a given audience in a specific time and place. The fact that an object's "badness" is so heavily contingent on the context is part of why the term has been useful in reevaluating previously denigrated texts. Such studies argue that the poor reputation of that object is, upon reconsideration, unmerited. This can be true because of industrial prejudices—for example, against a particular medium or genre—or social, as in the term's use in relation to queer and feminist cinema.¹ Other analyses accept the object's marginalized status while simultaneously demonstrating its merit as an analytical tool in another regard. Pornography is often approached in such a way, with scholars acknowledging both the genre's deviance and its simultaneous exposure of gender dynamics and sexual norms.

The defense of bad objects is a key element of twenty-first-century media studies. Whereas early, literature-based film studies focused on dissecting the composition of a canonical text's superiority, today's field largely embraces the scholarly consideration of all forms of popular entertainment, regardless of their classification as high or low culture, as well as questions those very designations. The formal justification and defense of studying objects more "entertainment" than "art" have been central to the discipline's development into its own, independent area of inquiry, regardless of the skepticism it sometimes engenders.²

As media studies continues to diversify, so too do the applications of the bad object. Indeed, it would be hard to name an object utterly unworthy of recuperative analysis, as most can provide insight into their cultural or artistic environment. In putting together this issue, we hope to generate thoughtful conversation about when and how this term can be put to use.

The six articles and five book reviews that follow cover a wide array of bad objects through many forms of media, points of origin, and methods of analysis. Kyle Christensen's article, "The Reparative Bite of the Zombie Mouth," has the most idiosyncratic object of study in this issue: the Zombie Mouth Fleshlight, a male masturbatory sex toy modeled to resemble the mouth of a zombie. Fleshlights as a product line are frequently dismissed by critics as sexist tools for male gratification. This piece disagrees, arguing that the Zombie Mouth allows for queer-feminist imaginings of sexual representation by blurring the divide between violation and eroticization. Christensen argues that the toy also counters the heterosexism that underlies both male sex toys and Freudian psychoanalytic theory. In order to do this, the author advances his argument through a combination of psychoanalytic analysis of the toy itself and an analysis of the act of the zombie bite in cinema, beginning in the 1968 Night of the Living Dead and its 1990 remake.

Catherine Harrington's "You Already Know: Professionalizing Corrections through Instructional Film, 1976–1981" digs through a mid-1970s set of instructional films for corrections officers. This article explores how the Correctional Officer film series grapples with the professionalization of the titular profession through instructional videos. Harrington explores how those texts directly address issues of sexuality, race, and professional loyalty associated with the position. The connection to bad objects is evident in the choice to analyze nontheatrical, instructional film, frequently considered a genre unworthy of examination.

In "Breaking the Mirror: Hausu and Bad Love Objects," Erin Nunoda uses queer and feminist frameworks to challenge dominant perceptions of the Japanese horror classic Hausu. Nunoda examines the homoerotic relationships between the film's characters...