Straight: Constructions of Heterosexuality in the Cinema (Suny Series, Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video) [Hardcover]

Wheeler Winston Dixon (Author)

Book Description

Series: Suny Series, Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video | Publication Date: February 2003

Explores the ways that stereotypes of heterosexuality are portrayed and constructed in film.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Practically all mainstream cinema is "straight," and has been since its inception. In Straight, Wheeler Winston Dixon examines 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 are have been commodified and sold to reinforce existing societal constructs, . The book also explores the various ways in which men and women are "typed" into differing versions of heterosexual performativity. Dixon also documents the recent emergence of "hypermasculinity," a which presents the audience with a series of kinetic and exaggerated performances of "masculinity" to that has been created to counter the more gentle, thoughtful male portrayedsited in such films as While You Were Sleeping, Sleepless in Seattle, and other films contemporary constructions of the male, which that seemingly threaten the established order of patriarchal cinematic discourse."

Product Details

• Hardcover: 204 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (February 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791456234
• ISBN-13: 978-0791456231
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,805,314 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Coordinator of the UNL Film Studies Program, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books include A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010); Film Noir and The Cinema of Paranoia (Rutgers University Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2009); A Short History of Film, written with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, (Rutgers University Press and I.B. Tauris, 2008), which has gone through five printings, was issued in a Spanish translation from Ediciones Robinbook in November, 2009 as Breve historia del cine, and is forthcoming as an audio book from University Press Audiobooks in 2010; Film Talk: Directors at Work (Rutgers University Press, 2007); Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2006); American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers University Press, 2006); and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (Southern Illinois UP, 2005). In 2003, Dixon was honored with a retrospective of his films at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his films were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum, in both print and original format.