Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below

FAIN: FZ-287076-22

Jane Kamensky
President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)

Research and writing of a history of the sexual revolution told through the life of Candice Vadala (1950-2015), American adult film performer, director, and producer.

Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution is both an uncomfortably intimate biography and an epic history of the late twentieth century United States, tracing the political economy of the postwar period and the attendant restructuring of families, gender roles, and sexuality; the rise of Big Freud and the dawn of Big Porn; and the relationships of law and culture, high and low, self and society in a period of sweeping transformation.

Associated Products

Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below (Book)
Title: Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below
Author: Jane Kamensky
Editor: Melanie Tortoroli
Abstract: A portrait of an indelible twentieth-century American life—and a wholly new take on the pleasures and dangers of the so-called sexual revolution. Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Candice Vadala (1950–2015) understood herself both as an artist and entrepreneur. As Candida Royalle—underground actress, porn star, producer of adult content, and staunch feminist—she made a business of pleasure, her life and work crystalizing the broader hedonistic turn in American life in the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing extensively from never-before-studied diaries, letters, photographs, films, and art documenting Royalle’s private and professional life, historian Jane Kamensky expands and explodes the conventions of biography. Readers witness the lives of ordinary women from the inside-out during a period of seismic change, including the postwar restructuring of gender roles, the growing popularity of psychoanalysis, and the mass-marketing of pornography. Written with cinematic verve, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution evocatively examines the rise and ambiguous successes of a heroine who broke the mold and was herself broken in turn.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002086
Primary URL Description: Norton catalogue page
Access Model: Trade book for purchase
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-324-0020
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---