Content area
Full Text
Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film by Casey Ryan Kelly. Rutgers University Press. 2016. $26.95 paperback; $15.95 e-book. 210 pages.
Casey Ryan Kelly's Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film explores the proliferation of youth-oriented plots about abstinence in contemporary cinema, arguing that such films make up a broader popular media phenomenon that reflects cultural anxieties about the legacies of feminism and sexual liberation. The case studies analyzed in each chapter cover "abstinence cinema," what Kelly defines as an "emerging constellation of disparate film texts from 2000 to the present that collectively articulate circumscribed meanings of sexuality, gender, and family within the symbolic and discursive repertoire of the abstinence movement."1 Kelly argues that different facets of neoconservative politics and evangelical Christianity are reflected and refracted in diverse contemporary feature films ranging from straight-to-DVD teen comedies to globally distributed action films. Working within a cultural studies interpretive framework, the author understands contemporary movies as privileged "site [sj of ideological contestation" that engage in a "cultural proxy war over what kind of sexual morality should govern public and private life."2 Through the interpretive protocols of ideological critique and textual analysis, Kelly uncovers the conservative ideological dimensions of current films that engage, on textual and subtextual levels, youth sexuality and virginity loss. Kelly argues that these filmic discourses emerge from the rhetoric of contemporary evangelical purity teachings and resonate with the sex-negative politics of the religious Right. As a result, abstinence cinema registers conservative cultural attitudes that valorize female purity, heteronormative masculinity, and traditional coupling.
Abstinence Cinema shows how a corpus of film texts refracts the sexual and gender politics of contemporary American evangelical Christianity. Establishing the tenets of abstinence culture in the book's introduction, Kelly explains that abstinence outside of wedlock is a core biblical value, and one recently enjoying mainstream visibility, as illustrated in the popularity of abstinence organizations such as True Love Waits and the Silver Ring Thing and through high-profile celebrities, notably Selena Gomez, who previously publicly discussed purity-ring ceremonies and abstinence pledges.3 Of course, the abstinence movement has made gains in public policy as well. As Kelly shows, abstinence-only sex education in public schools was promoted in the 1980s by the Christian...