Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction film and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art politics and popular culture she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging computers and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists filmmakers and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us. Bad Girls and Sick Boys offers a vital and entertaining tour of the current cultural landscape. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollmann; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman s lively interviews with J. G. Ballard David Cronenberg Bob Flanagan and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.