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A new publication from Indiana University Press
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Descended from Hercules
Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen
Robert A. Rushing
"A pleasure to read, cover to cover. This book is smartly conceived, and written with elegant and persuasive prose." — David A. Gerstner, author of
Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic
Muscles, six-pack abs, skin, and sweat fill the screen in the tawdry and tantalizing peplum films associated with epic Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.Using techniques like slow motion
and stopped time, these films instill the hero’s vitality with timeless admiration and immerse the hero’s body in a world that is lavishly eroticized but without sexual desire. These"sword and sandal" films represent a century-long cinematic biopolitical intervention
that offers the spectator an imagined form of the male body—one free of illness, degeneracy, and the burdens of poverty—that defends goodness with brute strength and perseverance, and serves as a model of ideal citizenry.Robert A. Rushing traces these epic
heroes from Maciste in Cabiria in the early silent era to contemporary transnational figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian, and to films such as Zach Snyder’s 300.Rushing explores how the very tactile modes of representation cement the
genre’s ideological grip on the viewer.
Robert A. Rushing is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
where he also holds affiliate appointments in Media and Cinema Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is author of
Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture and co-editor of
Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s.
Indiana University Press | New Directions in National Cinemas | October 2016 | 230pp | 20 b&w illus. | 9780253022509 |
Paperback | £21.99*
20% discount with this code: CSL217DFHL**
*Price subject to change.
**Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.
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