Sex Slave in Cinema

Aga Skrodzka is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Clemson University. Her research interests include world cinema, feminism, post-socialist cinemas, sexploitation cinema and visual narratives of sex work. She is the author of Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe and the lead editor of The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures. She is a member of the peer-review college for the UK-based journals Studies in European Cinema and Studies in Eastern European Cinemas. Her work has been published in Film Quarterly, Poetry Magazine, Studies in World Cinema and MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsPreface1. Early Cinema, Erotic Spectacle and Sex Slavery2. Sifting through Images: Sex Slave Iconography3. Converging Slaves: The Case of Blaxploitation4. White Slave: The Commodification and Securitization of WhitenessEpilogue: Imagining Away Sex Slavery, toward a Counter-NarrativeBibliographyIndex

Why are audiences seduced by the sex slavery narrative? Digging into the cinematic archeology of the figure of the sex slave, The Sex Slave in Cinema: An Inegalitarian Spectacle offers provocative answers, as it untangles the intersection between foreignness-migration and the phenomenon of sex slavery as hetero-gender violence. Aga Skrodzka looks back at early cinema and its silent spectacle of the Oriental slave, and moves through later examples of racialization, sex trafficking panics, and iconography to give us a feminist analysis that is riveting in its scope and dazzling in its intellectual energy.