“Soft in the Middle is an important new reading of a neglected but hugely significant area of contemporary film culture: the softcore feature film. David Andrews combines exhaustive research into a relatively unmined seam of film history with an energetically witty and lucid style. Whether formulating definitions of the ‘middlebrow,’ or presenting models for understanding taste hierarchies, or grappling with judgments of ‘indecency,’ or exploring softcore’s uneasy relationship with feminist politics, Andrews sets his lively textual material squarely in the context of key debates in film studies today. Soft in the Middle is both eminently readable and historically detailed, tracking the highs and lows and prehistories of a prodigious film form, which Andrews shows to be both vulnerable and tenacious. This meticulous study of a significant strand of recent U.S. visual and sexual culture will appeal as much to the general reader and viewer of contemporary and cult cinema as it will to the specialist scholar. An outstanding achievement of analysis and scholarship, Soft in the Middle establishes David Andrews as an academic star writer in the making.”
—Linda Ruth Williams, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Southampton, UK, and author of The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema
“Soft in the Middle is highly original and compelling. Dave Andrews does for softcore what Linda Williams did for hardcore, what Janice Radway did for the romance novel, and what Eric Schaefer did for exploitation film. It is well-researched and beautifully written, a model of film and media scholarship.”
—Constance Penley, a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies