Hard core and liberation: The transformations of pornographical genre conventions and their impact on the female character in Nagisa Ōshima’s „In the Realm of the Senses”

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the analysis of pornographical genre conventions in Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976). Many of the previous scientific inquiries into this subject emphasized the subversive nature of certain narrative schemes adopted in the film, which disrupted the paradigm of phallic authority, typical for the genre. The author aims to broaden those observations and to answer the following question: can the portrayal of the female protagonist in Ōshima’s film — in the light of contemporary standards of pornography — be viewed as emancipated? In order to resolve this issue, the article concludes with a comparison between In the Realm of the Senses and Anne W. Eaton’s model of a feminist pornographic film.