Titelaufnahme

Introduction: making sex public -- Autonomous pleasures: Bardot, Barbarella, and the liberal sexual subject -- Facing the body in 1975: Catherine Breillat and the antinomies of sex -- The form of the social: heterosexuality and homo-aesthetics in Plein Soleil -- Cruising and the fraternal social contract -- Word is out, or queer privacy -- Sex in public: through the window from psycho to shortbus -- Epilogue: postcinematic sexuality

Damon R. Young tracks the emergence of new forms of sexuality in French and American cinema from the 1950s to the present, showing how cinema transformed narratives of sexuality and how women and queers were both agents and objects of that transformation