Making sex public, and other cinematic fantasies /
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 bodie...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Durham, North Carolina :
Duke University Press,
[2018]
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| Series: | Theory Q.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 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 this book, the author tracks the emergence of two conflicting narratives. On the one hand, a new model of sex as harmoniously integrated into civic existence, while 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 1950s through the present, from "And God Created Woman" and "Barbarella" to "Cruising" and "Shortbus," the author 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. |
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| Physical Description: | xii, 301 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781478001331 147800133X 9781478001676 1478001674 |