Description
Book SynopsisBeginning 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,
Trade Review
"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 *
"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 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 *
"Making Sex Public is a deliberate text that carefully controls its scope and claims.… [It] offers an impressive toolkit of critical language and cinematic insights for a wide range of scholars and is a more than deserving entry into the broader canon of writing on screen sex." -- Sam Hunter * Film & History *
"Young’s Making Sex Public is essential reading for those working in queer and feminist cinema studies." -- Haley Hvdson * Synoptique *
"[An] important and original theoretical intervention in queer theory and film studies." -- Nick Rees-Roberts * Journal of the History of Sexuality *
Table of Contents
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
