Review: Carlson, Cindy L., Mazzola, Robert L. and Susan M. Bernardo (eds). Gender Reconstructions - Pornography and Perversion in Literature and Culture.

Abstract

"There are no dirty words. Ever!" Leonard Cohen stated when, before a recording of a reading of his poems in 1965, a sound engineer told him that "dirty words" would be deleted from the tape. The volume Gender Reconstructions - Pornography and Perversion in Literature and Culture [edited by Cindy L. Carlson, Robert L. Mazzola and Susan M. Bernardo] suggests that Cohen's statement is not just the incensed exclamation of an artist faced with the mutilation of his work but also holds true generally for art that represents the pornographic and|or the perverse. The eleven essays published in this volume offer a wide range of voices expressing ideas and perspectives on the current debate on pornography and its relation to power structures and questions of identity. As the title suggests, pornography and perversion are discussed especially with an emphasis on the ability to challenge and break up phallogocentric structures and discourses to re|construct (concepts of) gender. The authors do not only discuss the aesthetics of perversion and pornography in various types of media (such as texts, paintings and installations) but also how, on different levels, a work of art can be connected to these aesthetics: from the content level on the one hand (essays dealing with explicitly "perverse" and "pornographic" art) to a structural level on the other (essays applying a theory of "perversion" to art that isn't necessarily "pornographic" in itself).