Let’s Have Redemption! Women, Religion and Sexploitation on Screen

Let’s Have Redemption! Women, Religion and Sexploitation on Screen

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.

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