Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies

“Damon R. Young's beautifully written book shows how we might find the visual economy of neoliberalism compressed into the sexual charge of films from the 1950s to the present. This is a gorgeous book of queer theory and film criticism that tracks the wayward travels of sexual difference and neoliberal sexuality through a wide range of visual works. Extravagant and precise, this book is indispensable reading for our times.” - Judith Butler

"In prose as stylish as the cinema history he reveals anew, Damon R. Young flips the script on the sexual revolution of our times. Making Sex Public shows how the sleaziest sexploitation film models the modern liberal subject in all her contradiction, and re-views the French New Wave through a queer and feminist optic. Taking feminine jouissance and homosexual desire as central to how sex was made public in France and the United States since the Sixties, Young vindicates the perverse aims and liberatory intentions of queer theory at its finest. Sacred cows will explode, sacre bleu!" - Tavia Nyong’o, author of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

"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