The Seduction of Space

A bold and far-reaching new study of French queer cinema reimagines the relationship between sexuality and space

Spatiality has long been a crucial and potent lens for understanding French culture and aesthetics. While canonical greats of French cinema such as Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, and Louis Malle invoked the notion of flânerie to explore ideas of modernism, spatial exploration, and urban sociality, Jules O’Dwyer demonstrates how a more recent generation of French queer filmmakers continue to engage with—and contest—this legacy by focusing their attention on the cognate practice of cruising.

Through the work of Jacques Nolot, Sébastien Lifshitz, Christophe Honoré, Vincent Dieutre, Alain Guiraudie, and others, The Seduction of Space draws film theory, queer studies, and spatial inquiry into close proximity to examine the politics of cruising and the gendering of space. Making the case that cinema not only documents the queer spaces of the past but continues to produce them, O’Dwyer maps the relationships between sex and spatiality as he takes up such varied topics as public sex in the porn theater, racial eroticization in the banlieue, and the ecocritical valences of rural cruising.

Foregrounding the crucial role that spatiality plays in shaping the parameters of France’s visual cultures and political imaginary, The Seduction of Space is both an urgent queer reconceptualization of this tradition and a clarion call for film scholars to tarry with the politics of sexuality in all its messiness.

Jules O’Dwyer is a research fellow in film and French studies at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. He is author of Hotels, and his work has been published in Screen, Discourse, and Studies in French Cinema. He is coeditor of the journal world picture.