Beginning in the late 1950s, representations of and narratives about sex proliferated on French and U.S. movie screens. Cinema began to display forms of sexuality that were no longer strictly associated with domesticity nor limited to heterosexual relations between loving couples. Women's bodies and queer sexualities became intensely charged figures of political contestation, aspiration, and allegory, central to new ways of imagining sexuality and to new liberal understandings of individual freedom and social responsibility. In Making Sex Public Damon R. Young tracks the emergence of two conflicting narratives: on the one hand, a new model of sex as harmoniously integrated into civic existence; on the other, an idea of women's and queer sexuality as corrosive to the very fabric of social life. Taking a transatlantic perspective from the late '50s through the present, from And God Created Woman and Barbarella to Cruising and Shortbus, Young argues that cinema participated in the transformation of the sexual subject while showing how women and queers were both agents and objects of that transformation.
By:
Damon R. Young
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 726g
ISBN: 9781478001331
ISBN 10: 147800133X
Series: Theory Q
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 28 December 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Making Sex Public 1 Part I. Women 1. Autonomous Pleasures: Bardot, Barbarella, and the Liberal Sexual Subject 21 2. Facing the Body in 1975: Catherine Breillat and the Antinomies of Sex 54 Part II. Criminals 3. The Form of the Social: Heterosexuality and Homo-aesthetics in Plein soleil 95 4. Cruising and the Fraternal Social Contract 122 Part III. Citizens 5. Word Is Out, or Queer Privacy 159 6. Sex in Public: Through the Window from Psycho to Shortbus 187 Epilogue. Postcinematic Sexuality 215 Notes 239 Bibliography 279 Index 295
Damon R. Young is Assistant Professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley.
Reviews for Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies
Making Sex Public intervenes with insight, eclecticism, and lively erudition into a period often approached through familiar narratives.... Young offers a fresh series of coordinates, widely dispersed yet carefully choreographed. -- Nick Davis * GLQ * Damon R. Young's rigorously researched and beautifully written first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies, is fundamentally a transnational and transatlantic study of how sex became, as the title goes, visible. -- Ricky Varghese * Public * Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies is a vital contribution to queer studies and cinema studies. Young's exquisitely written argument is richly loaded with insight and provocation and is bound to stimulate wide-ranging discussion in the fields with which it engages. -- Guy Davidson * Continuum *