Annamarie Jagose

Annamarie Jagose is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. Internationally known as a scholar in feminist studies, lesbian/gay studies, and queer theory, she has published four monographs: Orgasmology (2013); Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (2002); Introduction to Queer Theory (1998), and Lesbian Utopics (1994). She co-edited the Routledge Queer Studies Reader (2013) with Donald E. Hall.

Professor Jagose has previously held research fellowships at Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, and the University of Manchester. From 2003-2011, she co-edited the leading humanities sexuality studies journal, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies with Ann Cvetkovich. She is an editorial board member of a number of international journals in gender studies and sexuality studies. She is also an award-winning novelist.

Since the late 1990s, a new set of conventions for representing sexual activity has emerged in cinema: specifically, the inclusion of scenes of unsimulated sex. Quickly dubbed ‘real sex’ cinema, the phenomenon brings together a diverse group of more than 50 films that otherwise have little in common in terms of genre, budget, modes of production, or national censorship systems.

For this project, the new explicit cinema is not a fully fledged film genre, nor the culmination of earlier cinematic traditions for representing the erotic or obscene, but rather an historically specific aesthetic phenomenon that reflects and responds to the range of meanings of sex under the compromised conditions of late modernity. This conceptual framing allows me to pursue the idea that the new explicit cinema offers significant insights into the sexualization of contemporary visual cultures, and transformations in sexuality that are central to the experience of modern identity and gendered selfhood.