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Document Type

Review Essay

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Wheeler Winston Dixon's Straight is an odd book. An interesting book, to be sure, but one that falls short of its promise or, rather, its many promises. While its title, especially the definite article in its subtitle, would seem to suggest a rather abstract and general treatment of constructions of heterosexuality in "the cinema," a cinema somehow constructed as a totality, the book is both inspiring and frustrating in its unsystematic approach to its object(s). "Object(s)" because it would be difficult, even without raising any objections to the construction of the cinema as a singular totality, not to recognize on the pages of Straight the very multiplicity of cinemas that the title withholds. This is all the more puzzling because the scope of Dixon's effort, the heterogeneity of his objects and approaches, is at the same time the book's greatest asset. As Steven Shaviro puts it in a review reproduced on the books' back cover, Dixon has "a vast knowledge of Hollywood, international, and alternative cinemas". Shaviro is justified in using the plural and so would have been Dixon.

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