Abstract
Many women in prison films are subsets of the sexploitation cycles. Both British and Hollywood cinema contributed examples, and in 1974, The House of Whipcord and Caged Heat appeared. When put side by side, there is a complex interplay between aspects of imprisonment. This includes the licit or illicit nature of punishment (one is set in an official prison, and the other is an illegal private prison) and the return to old-fashioned methods in one and the use of advanced science in another, as well as the contrasting British and American approaches to sexploitation. While the films’ makers exploit sexuality, the characters within them attempt moral reform. They also portray a charged relationship between the redemptive and exploitative, the ecclesiastical and the sexual. Both the Marquis de Sade and Foucault had found the exploitative potential in the monastery and convent as well as the prison. In 1970s exploitation films, the ecclesiastical and the sexual reappear together in sexploitation films showing prison authorities seeking the redemption struggling with the meaning, impact and outcomes of their imprisonment of unruly women.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bouclin, Suzanne. 2009. “Women in Prison Movies as Feminist Jurisprudence.” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 21: 19–34.
Brodie, A. 2014. “The Georgian Prison: Inquisitive and Investigative Tourism.” Prison Service Journal 216: 44–49.
Brombert, Victor H. 2015. The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cecil, Dawn K. 2007. “Looking Beyond Caged Heat: Media Images of Women in Prison.” Feminist Criminology 2, no. 4: 304–326.
Chibnall, Steve. 2001. “A Heritage of Evil: Pete Walker and the Politics of Gothic Revisionism.” In British Horror Cinema, edited by Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley. London: Taylor & Francis.
Ciasullo, Ann. 2008. “Containing ‘Deviant’ Desire: Lesbianism, Heterosexuality, and the Women-in-Prison Narrative.” The Journal of Popular Culture 41, no. 2: 195–223.
Fiddler, Michael. 2007. “Projecting the Uncanny: The Depiction of the Uncanny in The Shawshank Redemption.” Crime, Media and Culture 3, no. 2: 192–206.
Fiddler, Michael. 2011. “A ‘System of Light’ Before Being a Figure of Stone: The Phanstasmagoric Prison.” Crime, Media, Culture 7, no. 1: 83–97.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.
Fryer, Ian. 2017. The British Horror Film: From the Silent to the Multiplex. Stroud: Fonthill Media.
Goffman, Erving. 1968. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Pelican Books.
Hallam, Lindsay Anne. 2014. Screening the Marquis de Sade: Pleasure, Pain and the Transgressive Body in Film. Jefferson, MD: McFarland.
Hunter, I.Q. 1996. “Deadly Manors: The Country House in British Exploitation Films.” In Locating Identity: Essays on Nation, Community and the Self, edited by Paul Cooke, David Sadler, and Nicholas Zurbrugg, 45–55. Leicester: De Montfort University.
Hunter, I.Q. 2007, “A Clockwork Orange, Exploitation and Art Film.” Paper for MeCCSA and AMPE 2007, Coventry University, 11 January 2007.
Hunter, I.Q. 2008. “Take an Easy Ride: Sexploitation in the 1970s.” In Seventies British Cinema, edited by Robert Shail, 3–13. London: Bloomsbury.
Hutchings, Peter. 2009. “‘I’m the Girl He Wants to Kill’: The ‘Women in Peril’ Thriller in 1970s British Film and Television.” Visual Culture in Britain 10, no. 1: 53–69.
Johnston, Norman. 2000. Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture. University of Illinois Press.
Kehrwald, Kevin. 2017. Prison Movies: Cinema Behind Bars. London: Wallflower.
Kozma, Alicia. 2012. “Ilsa and Elsa: Nazisploitation, Mainstream Film and Cinematic Transference.” In Nazisploitation!: The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture, edited by Daniel H. Magilow, Elizabeth Bridges, and Kristin T. Vander Lugt, 55–71. London: A&C Black.
Mason, Paul. 2006. “Lies, Distortion and What Doesn’t Work: Monitoring Prison Stories in the British Media.” Crime, Media, Culture 2, no. 3: 251–267.
McNamara, JoAnn. 1996. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millenia. Harvard University Press.
Moore, Linda, and Phil Scraton. 2016. “Doing Gendered Time: The Harms of Women’s Imprisonment.” In Handbook on Prisons, edited by Yvonne Jewkes, Ben Crewe, and Jamie Bennett, 549–567. Abingdon: Routledge.
Morey, Anne. 1995. “‘The Judge Called Me an Accessory’.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 23, no. 2: 80–87.
Rogers, Katherine. 1985. “Fantasy and Reality in Fictional Convents of the Eighteenth Century.” Comparative Literature Studies 22: 297–316.
Ross, Robert, and Phil Collins. 2002. The Carry on Companion. London: Batsford.
Schaeffer, Neil. 2000. The Marquis de Sade: A Life. Harvard University Press.
Seal, Lizzie. 2012. “Ruth Ellis in the Condemned Cell: Voyeurism and Resistance.” Prison Service Journal 199: 17–20.
Stohr, Mary K., Anthony Walsh, and Craig Hemmens. 2012. Corrections: A Text/Reader. London: Sage.
Wilson, David, and Sean O’Sullivan. 2004. Images of Incarceration: Representations of Prison in Film and Television Drama. Winchester: Waterside Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harmes, M., Harmes, B., Harmes, M. (2020). Let’s Have Redemption! Women, Religion and Sexploitation on Screen. In: Harmes, M., Harmes, M., Harmes, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36059-7_43
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36059-7_43
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36058-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-36059-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)