The Seduction of Space

"The Seduction of Space is brilliantly conceived and fills a clear gap in the field of queer French film studies, namely the priority of sexuality and its links to questions of space and spatiality, relationality, and queer visual cultures more broadly. Stylishly and intelligently written, energetically argued, and eminently readable, this is sophisticated critical work of the highest order and an invaluable contribution to queer film theory and queer critical studies."—David A. Gerstner, author of Queer Imaginings: On Writing and Cinematic Friendship

"Recalling and twisting to perverse effect the title of Henri Lefebvre’s landmark work on the production of space, Jules O’Dwyer’s magnificent The Seduction of Space explores the role of queer sexual desire in the production of spatial relations. O’Dwyer engages intimately with French queer film culture to produce a pioneering book that interweaves French cinema, film theory, queer studies, and spatial thought."—Sarah Cooper, author of Film and the Imagined Image

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 continues to engage with—and contest—this legacy by focusing 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.

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Jules O’Dwyer teaches film studies and French at the University of Cambridge. He is author of Hotels and coeditor of the journal world picture.

Contents

Introduction. Paris’s Cinematic Exploits: From Flânerie to Cruising

1. The Seduction of Space in French Queer Film and Theory

2. Coming and Going in Jacques Nolot’s Cinema

3. Quartiers chauds: Loitering, Queer Zones, and Banlieue Aesthetics

4. A Queer Window onto the World? Vincent Dieutre’s Documentary Frames

5. Sex beyond the City: Alain Guiraudie’s Rural Erotics

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index