Summary: Elena Gorfinkel on Sexploitation of the 1960s
On Thursday, March 3, Elena Gorfinkel (University of Wisconsin – Madison) presented her talk, “’The Gawker in the Text’: Allegories of Reception in 1960s Sexploitation Film” at the Chicago Film Seminar. Jeffrey Sconce of Northwestern provided the response. In this talk, Gorfinkel discusses the reflexive, self-referential nature of sexploitation films, particularly around the generic problem of ‘consuming sex’, to better understand the specific conditions of reception of adult films and sexualized media in the public culture of the 1960s. Gorfinkel notes that sexploitation films of the 1960s, refracting the era’s contentious sexual politics, frequently retained a dystopian tenor, in which sexual activity and exchange often came at a grave narrative cost. The paradox of sexploitation films, she argues, is the that the expanding sexual marketplace is both exploited economically and aesthetically and disdained rhetorically, negotiating the tensions between strategies of display and denial....