Screening Sex

Abstract

This book is about a basic paradox of movies: on one hand, we screen moving images to lose ourselves vicariously in the bigger, more glamorous, more vivid world we see and hear on the screen; on the other hand, we screen moving images to reencounter our own immediate sensuality in that more vivid world.Much has been written about the way we lose ourselves or identify with those glorious, magnified images of human bodies in movement on the "silver" screen; much less has been written about the ways we reencounter our own bodies, and our own sensuality, in that process.Though it has recently become possible to speak of the sensuous pleasures of embodied viewing and of the shock of cinematic "attractions, " it has not been easy to understand the sensual experiences of cinema outside the often crude parameters of the vocabulary of shock and sensation.This has been especially the case when the shock and sensation are caused by moving images of sex.Movies move us, often powerfully.Sex in movies is especially volatile: it can arouse, fascinate, disgust, bore, instruct, and incite.Yet it also distances us from the immediate, prox-

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