Movies changed the way people view sexuality. Now social media is doing the same.

The plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope is disturbing: Two men strangle a former classmate in their shared apartment. They then invite guests – including the victim’s family – to dinner. They want to prove their superiority with the “perfect murder”.

Although the killers – Brandon and Phillip – live together, it is never publicly admitted that they are a couple. (At the time, the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited the depiction of “Sexual perversion”, which also included homosexuality, on the big screen.)

It is a classic example of how homosexuality is “portrayed” in film by characters who do not come out publicly, said Damon Young, a Associate Professor of Film and Media, and one in which the “transgression” of homosexuality is shifted to the transgression of murder.

Young is the author of Making sex public and other cinematic fantasies, a 2018 book that examines how the representation of queer sexuality and female sexuality in film began to change in the United States and France in the 1960s and 1970s. Because film had a powerful influence on society’s ideas about gender, these changes altered attitudes about who was allowed to express their sexuality in public and how. Today, he said, similar changes are taking place in the dominant cultural medium of our time: social media.

In this Q&A, Young discusses the power of new media—film in the 20th century and social media today—to influence our ideas, fantasies and fears about gender and sexuality. Text has been edited for length and clarity.

Berkeley News: In Making sex public and other cinematic fantasiesexamine the representation of female and queer sexuality in film and how its portrayal changed society’s ideas about it. Did film as a medium influence people’s perceptions in ways that other media did not at the time?

Damon Young: Part of the book’s argument is that cinema was the most influential medium on our ideas, fantasies, and fears about gender in the 20th century.^th Century.

Susan Sontag, a critical essayist and novelist, called the 20^th Century was the “century of cinema”, while in the 19th century^th In the 19th century, the novel was arguably the dominant medium of cultural imagination. When you think about the extent to which feature films rely on conveying ideals about gender roles – with their stories of romance, desire and heterosexuality, their fantasies about masculinity, nationality and race – it’s clear that what is and isn’t depicted in cinema plays a huge role in shaping our ideas about female sexuality and queer sexualities during this period.

What are some examples of films you have studied?

I tried to select films from a wide range of genres – popular, like Barbarella (1968); experimental, such as Agnès Varda’s Women respond (1975); Documentary, for example Word has spread (1977); and those like minibus (2006), which expands the boundaries of cinematic representation of sex.

How was female and queer sexuality portrayed in film before the 1960s and 1970s? And how has it broadly expanded and changed in the US and France over this period?

That’s a big question, but as you know, the 1960s and 1970s were the era of what was called “women’s liberation,” with the question of what “liberation” actually meant being a central one. This was followed by the emergence of a public movement for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. It was also, of course, the era of enormous successes for the civil rights movement and black radicalism, as well as the global critique of capitalism and colonialism.

My book is about gender and sexuality, which of course are not separate from these other struggles but arise from and alongside them. At the risk of oversimplification, we could say that before these movements, homosexuality was not allowed to be shown or even imagined in film at all. As “love that dare not speak its name,” as Oscar Wilde once quipped, it could only be mentioned indirectly. In fact, this ban was included in the Motion Picture Production Code, which was in force from roughly 1930 to 1960.

Female sexuality was portrayed in a much wider range of representations, given the charged nature of earlier figures, such as the femme fatale of 1940s film noir or the strikingly independent women of 1920s silent cinema. Yet the ideal that shaped most representations of female sexuality was one that dictated that its proper place was the home, inseparable from motherhood and always in relation to heterosexual male desire.

In the 1960s and 1970s, women were increasingly portrayed as autonomous sexual beings whose sexuality was not dependent on men and was separate from domesticity and motherhood.

Before the 1960s, in films like Hitchcock’s Rope and the French Nouvelle Vague film from 1960, Purple MoonYou say we are witnessing the shift of unnamed homosexual desire into murder or criminality. How did this begin to change in the 1960s?

Homosexuality became imaginable and representable, but it was still associated with murder and crime, as in Cruise, the (truly amazing) 1980 film with Al Pacino.

My argument, however, is not to simply say that these films are homophobic – they are, quite clearly, in the truest sense of the word. Perhaps more interestingly, they depict the contradictions and anxieties of a normative masculinity that defines itself as white and heterosexual, even when this is punishable by death.

These seemingly homophobic films tell us something about the contradictions of masculinity in our culture, a topic that I would like to address in relation to the present in one of my next books.

In the book you talk about the 1977 documentary It is known, and how radical it was to show queer people in their traditionally private environment – ​​in their homes, with their families. Why?

This film was shown on public television and therefore reached many people who had perhaps never previously thought about the existence of gays and lesbians. It is often seen as part of a conservative turn in queer politics, indeed as the beginning of the movement that attempted to present an image of gays as “respectable” and “normal”.

Activism in the preceding Stonewall era, which began in 1969 after a police raid on a gay club in New York City, emphasized more obviously radical visions of queer difference, often in the community and public rather than in the domestic setting.

The film’s gesture is radical in that it questions the implicit heterosexuality, the ideology of gender difference that shapes the liberal concept of privacy, and thus calls into question this basic assumption of the social order. And it does this on television, and in a second sense, it invades one’s own four walls.

You said that in writing Making sex public They wanted to understand the antecedents of the fears and fantasies that animate contemporary politics and that continue to be battlegrounds in an ongoing culture war. How do these fears and fantasies manifest in and shape the politics of the contemporary culture war against women and LGBTQ+ communities?

Given the widespread attacks on abortion rights today, women remain a central battleground in contemporary politics when it comes to the idea of ​​autonomy: who controls women’s bodies and who has what rights over them?

This question of autonomy, in the specific sense of consent, was also fundamental to the emergence of the #MeToo movement, which made visible the everyday, taken-for-granted forms of sexual harassment and prejudice that have shaped the norms of many institutions, such as Hollywood cinema and educational institutions. These are both forms of “publicizing” sex, that is, both making it visible and bringing it into the framework of politics, from which it was traditionally excluded in the liberal tradition that considered sexuality “private.” Now it is no longer so private.

The fears and fantasies are very complex, but ultimately it is about power – who has it and who wants to keep it. The attacks on trans rights and so-called “gender ideology” around the world today are a response to a threat to traditional power holders and seek to exploit the pre-existing fears around gender and sexuality that I analyze in the book.

They are working on a new book project, Century of the selfie, about how people use digital media to market and brand themselves. How is today’s social media similar or different from the films of the 60s and 70s in its ability to change society and perceptions of sexuality?

If the 20th century was the century of cinema and cinema was thus the dominant cultural medium, then the 21st century is the century of the network.

Connected life – our permanent connection to connected and portable media, and thus our subjective experience, is stronger than ever – is an inescapable condition of modern life. This means that “representation” in the sense of depicting things, say in a novel or a film, is no longer the primary way in which media shapes our experiences of gender and sexuality. Our experiences are mediated from the start, so the influence – more than an influence, a co-creation – is profound.

One of the functions of social media is to connect us with others. Indeed, being “connected” is a contemporary imperative.

While this has a social function in a positive sense, it also generates a whole series of other affective and psychological dispositions, such as FOMO, anxiety, self-esteem issues, the pursuit of likes, retweets, views, etc., the quantification of everything, including the number of “friends”, and thus the transformation of all experiences, even the most intimate, into data. This set of conditions – good and bad, or neither good nor bad, but real – is what I examine in my book.