The Sex Slave in Cinema

An Inegalitarian Spectacle

Dr Aga Skrodzka

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English

Edinburgh University Press
31 March 2025

Film theory & criticism

This book examines the visual politics of the cinematic figure of the 'sex slave' from its origins in silent film to its iterations in blaxploitation cinema, European art cinema, Nollywood, and, in its most concentrated form, the Hollywood blockbuster thriller.

Through close analysis of several film texts that is informed by feminist theory, visual studies, critical race studies, and the political economy of sex work, this book argues that the sex slave has long functioned as a disciplinary spectacle that simultaneously commodifies and punishes female flesh. The sex slave is used to 'sell' a libidinal fantasy of rescue, not of the trafficked woman or child, but of the very economic and social order that exploits them.

By: Dr Aga Skrodzka
Imprint: Edinburgh University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781399508247
ISBN 10: 1399508245
Pages: 212
Publication Date: 31 March 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for The Sex Slave in Cinema: An Inegalitarian Spectacle

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.-- ""Katarzyna Marciniak, Occidental College""