FROM THE PUBLISHER

Bad Girls and Sick Boys turns the pornography debate on its head by posing new questions: What is fantasy? What fantasies circulate throughout popular culture, in the media, and on the Right? What function does the avant-garde have in a culture that co-opts every subversive act? How are novelists, filmmakers, and performance artists using technology and the human body to map the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us?

FROM THE CRITICS

Dennis Cooper

At a time when cultural studies are so often fatally sidelined by trouble-free arguments for or against total artistic freedom, Kauffman's Bad Girls and Sick Boys constitutes a one-book crusade for the value of treating the passionate with a personalized passion. -- Bookforum

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

An exhilarating rollercoaster ride, a superb piece of cultural investigation that skillfully anatomies some of the most deviant imaginations at work today. — J.G. Ballard