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Title details for Candida Royalle & the Sexual Revolution by Jane Kamensky - Available

Candida Royalle & the Sexual Revolution

A History from Below

by Jane Kamensky
Mia Barron
Audiobook
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Acclaimed historian Jane Kamensky chronicles an indelible twentieth-century American life—and offers an entirely new understanding of the so-called sexual revolution.
Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Candice Vadala understood herself as both an artist and an entrepreneur. As Candida Royalle (1950–2015)—underground actress, porn star, producer of adult movies, and staunch feminist—she made a business of pleasure. She helped crystalize the broader hedonistic turn in American life in the second half of the twentieth century: a period when the rules of sex were rewritten; when the white-hot "sex wars" cleaved feminism and realigned American politics; when Big Freud, Big Drugs, and Big Porn all came into looming focus; when the sex industry of the 1970s and '80s radically upended conventional understandings of law, technology, culture, love, and human desire.
The sexual revolution was Royalle's war—even when other avowed feminists exited the field or became her opponents—and pornography emerged as the arena in which she would wage it. With the founding of her adult film company, Femme Productions, in 1984, Royalle became an owner of the means of pornographic production, infusing her sets with the ideals of labor feminism. Onscreen and off-, she was, by turns, exuberant and thoughtful, self-possessed and gleefully shameless. A trailblazer who lived along the cultural fault lines of her generation, she danced at Woodstock, marched for women's liberation, survivedthe AIDS crisis, and became a talk show regular, interviewed by Phil Donahue, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Morton Downey Jr., Jane Pauley, and many others. As a performer, director, producer, and writer, she moved the needle of her industry.
But she never transcended the politics of pleasure.
With full access to Royalle's remarkable archive, historian Jane Kamensky has spent years examining the intersection of Royalle's life with the clashes that have defined her era—and ours. Deeply informed by these never-before-studied materials, Kamensky explodes the conventions of biography, with its assumptions about who makes history and how. Written with cinematic verve, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution evokes Royalle's times in their broadest contours as Kamensky traces the rise of an improbable heroine who broke the mold and was herself broken in turn.
"A riveting, humane, and essential contribution to modern feminist history. Jane Kamensky has written a biography that reads like a novel, an astute intellectual work that recognizes and humanizes the role of sex workers in recent women's movements. Thanks to this book, I am proud to recognize the place of Candida Royalle in my own lineage."—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

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  • Release date

    June 11, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9798892736985
      • File size: 463739 KB
      • Duration: 16:06:06

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 22, 2024
      Harvard historian Kamensky (A Revolution in Color) delivers a powerful portrait of the “profoundly uniquely 20th century life” of erotic film star Candida Royalle (1950–2015), née Candice Vadala. Raised in Riverdale, an upscale Bronx neighborhood, by her father (a sex offender) and stepmother (after her mother abandoned the family), Royalle came of age in the era of the pill, women’s liberation, psychedelics, psychoanalysis, and “the world that made Deep Throat, and that Deep Throat made in turn.” After dropping out of college, she joined a boyfriend in San Francisco, where she “felt herself blossoming into a performer.” She took odd jobs until she discovered nude modeling (and heroin), which led to adult films and a brush with Hollywood as an extra in the orgy scene of Blake Edwards’s feature film 10. In 1980, she married a fellow porn star as the adult film industry took off thanks to the introduction of the VCR and cable TV. Soon after, Royalle’s byline “began appearing in the sex press” and she cofounded Femme Productions, a feminist and sex-positive porn production company. Drawing from Royalle’s private archives at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Kamensky utilizes her subject’s long career in the sex industry, including pioneering work producing erotic safe-sex education videos, as a window into the AIDS epidemic and the feminist movement. It’s a captivating biography of a major figure of the sexual revolution.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

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Languages

  • English

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