Straight
Constructions of Heterosexuality in the Cinema
Average rating:
0 | rating | ![]() |
0 | rating | ![]() |
0 | rating | ![]() |
0 | rating | ![]() |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
Explores the ways that stereotypes of heterosexuality are portrayed and constructed in film.
straight / 'strāt (adj.) . . . without curves . . . correct . . . honest . . . not deviating from the normal . . . conventional . . . Heterosexual
Practically all mainstream cinema is "straight," and has been since its inception. In Straight, Wheeler Winston Dixon explores how heterosexual performativity has been constructed in film, from early cinema to the present day. In addition to discussing how cinematic visions of masculine and feminine desire have been commodified and sold to reinforce existing societal constructs, Dixon also documents the recent emergence of "hypermasculinity," a kinetic and exaggerated masculinity that has been created to counter the more gentle, thoughtful male portrayed in While You Were Sleeping, Sleepless in Seattle, and other films that seemingly threaten the established order of patriarchal cinematic discourse.
About the Author:
Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, coeditor in chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and chairperson of the Film Studies Program at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. His many books include The Second Century of Cinema: The Past and Future of the Moving Image; The Films of Jean-Luc Godard; and The Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image, all published by SUNY Press; and Collected Interviews: Voices from Twentieth-Century Cinema.
See the publisher website: State University of New York Press
> From the same author:
A Short History of Film (2018)
by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Subject: History of Cinema
Death of the Moguls (2012)
The End of Classical Hollywood
21st-Century Hollywood (2011)
Movies in the Era of Transformation
by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Subject: Economics
Visions of Paradise (2006)
Images of Eden in the Cinema
Experimental Cinema, The Film Reader (2002)
Dir. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Wheeler Winston Dixon
Subject: Genre > Experimental
The Exploding Eye (1997)
A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema
Subject: Genre > Experimental
> On a related topic:
Consent Culture and Teen Films (2023)
Adolescent Sexuality in Us Movies
by Michele Meek
Subject: Sociology
America on Film (2021)
Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, 3rd Edition
by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Subject: Sociology
Gay Men at the Movies (2016)
Cinema, Memory and the History of a Gay Male Community
Subject: Sociology
Reversing the Lens (2003)
Ethnicity, Race, Gender, and Sexuality through Film
Dir. Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi
Subject: Sociology
Bollywood Travels (2014)
Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema
In the Name of National Security (1993)
Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America
Subject: Director > Alfred Hitchcock