WRITER • EDITOR • SCHOLAR
DESIRAE EMBREE
ABOUT ME
For more than a decade, I’ve been writing and speaking about culture, sexuality, and cinema—though, I don’t think they’re altogether different things. Our identities and desires are shaped by our culture, and film is one of the ways that culture talks to itself about itself. We’re caught in the middle of that web—made by it, really—and untangling it is both important and thrilling.
I’ve been published in print and online, in both popular publications and peer-reviewed academic journals. I’ve conducted interviews with showrunners and also documented the oral histories of little-known feminist filmmaking pioneers. I’ve had the pleasure of sharing my work at major academic conferences, as well as on podcasts and public radio.
I grew up all over the U.S. “bread basket,” spent enough years in Texas for “y’all” to become my preferred third-person plural pronoun, and am now based in Los Angeles, California. I’m passionate about L.A. history and preserving it, women’s boxing, dry martinis in dark bars, and most of all—my two cats.
Let’s talk.
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"A Different Kind of Holiday Affair: Carol at 10" in Little White Lies
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"Private Pleasures" in Screening Adult Cinema
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"Remembering Deborah Sundahl" in Autostraddle
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"The Feminist Uses of Pornography" in Synoptique
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Screening Adult Cinema, co-edited with Farrah Freibert and Peter Alilunas
UPCOMING WORK
“Carol” in Screening American Cinema, ed. Gary Needham and Nessa Johnston. Routledge, 2026.
Expected in late 2026, Screening American Cinema is a collection of fifty essays, each dealing with a specific American film of historic or artistic importance.
My chapter on Carol (directed by Todd Haynes, 2015), a period drama about two women in love overcoming the many obstacles to their relationship, within a broader history of women in Hollywood. It looks at how Carol explicitly evokes the studio-era “woman’s film “while revising the labor conditions under which it was historically made—namely, the systemic exclusion of women from all but a few production roles. It also places Carol in more recent history, reevaluating the optimism that defined its reception 2015 and considering what Carol will continue to teach us as we face ever evolving and uncertain futures both within and without the film industry.
Screening Adult Cinema, ed. Farrah Freibert, Peter Alilunas, and Desirae Embree (Routledge, 2025)
Screening Adult Cinema is a robust collection of essays meant to accompany screenings of 39 adult films that span historical eras, cultural contexts, formats, and genres. The diverse films represented in these essays share an address to an imagined audience of adults both interested in cinematic treatments of sex and, theoretically, mature enough to be entrusted with them.
Throughout history and across global cultures, “adult” films have existed at the uneasy intersections of legitimacy/illegitimacy, social transgression/control, and fantasy/reality. The essays in this volume each focus on a single adult film, providing insight into its historical context, production, and content. Together, they show how modern cultures have constructed, appealed to, and policed both sexuality and film consumption.
Screening Adult Cinema demonstrates the breadth and diversity of adult cinema, paying particular attention to regions and films that have been underrepresented within existing adult film scholarship. While a focus on underrepresented adult cinemas encourages much-needed scholarship on marginal film cultures and texts, this volume also expands the corpus of teachable films beyond established canons. This introduction explains the anti-canonical rationale of the collection, while simultaneously historicizing and denaturalizing the “adult” in adult cinema.
