Since the inception of the moving picture, sex and screen have been inextricably linked. Today's media - from film and TV to virtual reality and interactive online communication - create an elaborate matrix where new ideas and forms of sexuality, identity and the self are formed and performed.

In her characteristically thoughtful, thoroughly immediate style, Barbara Creed examines popular culture, film and old and new media. She explores the changes brought about by new forms of representation and reality, and questions the media's ambiguous relationship to radical change in the way sexuality appears on screen.

Has reality TV affected the way viewers think about sex and relationships? Now that pornography has entered the mainstream, can we still say porn offers an alternative view of sex? Does 'Sex and the City' really challenge every taboo known to society? Why do women enjoy writing slash fiction? From Breillat's film Romance to Harlequin romances, crisis TV to cyberporn, celebrity to censorship, queer media to Clinton and Lewinsky, Media Matrix explores the breakdown between public and private and asks us to consider the representation of sexuality and the self in the new global public domain.

Media Matrix is essential reading for anyone interested in the dramatic changes in our perceptions of sex, self and the new global media.lores the breakdown between public and private and asks us to consider the representation of sexuality and the self in the new public domain.

Essential reading for anyone interested in the dramatic changes in our perceptions of the future world of sex, self and the new global media.

Barbara Creed is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. A well-known film critic and media commentator, she has been the Age film reviewer for 3 years and an ABC (3LO + 3RN) film critic for the past decade. She is the author of The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993) and co-editor of both Don't Shoot Darling! Women's Independent Filmmaking in Australia (Greenhouse Press, 1987) and 'Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and

Colonialism in the Pacific' (Pluto + Routledge 2001). She has published widely in international journals such as Screen, New Formations, and Camera Obscura and her writings have been translated into German,

Swedish, Polish, Japanese and Italian.