Jacob F. Engelberg

In Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression, Jacob Engelberg makes the case for radically recalibrating queer film studies, taking as a starting point those cinematic figures who resist categorization within the gay-straight binary. Engelberg’s engagement with bisexual transgression on film illuminates the mutability and instability of sexuality, and of sociocultural structures more broadly by resisting the censure of images as politically harmful as well as the celebration of transgression as inherently subversive. Instead, Engelberg understands bisexual transgression as a process whereby sociocultural rules are made knowable by being contested. From 1970s vampire films to 1990s erotic thrillers, from lesbian imaginings of female bisexuality to European art cinema’s reckonings with HIV/AIDS, bisexual figures on film embody anxieties around the precarity of binary sexuality while revealing the contingencies of sexuality’s cinematic signification. Revivifying the underexploited contributions of bisexual theory, Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression proposes a new mode of film theorization and analysis that examines the rich space between and beyond dominant categories of sexual organization, where sexual unpredictability, the allure of the forbidden, and the precarity of sexual signification are illuminated.

This chapter focuses on three aspects of Ansikte mot ansikte's engagement with bisexuality: the bisexual nature of Jenny's encounters with psychological turmoil; the bisexuality of the neurotic Tomas; and the desires of Tomas to relocate to the Caribbean, a place he imagines to be a bisexual paradise. Across Ansikte mot ansikte 's engagements with bisexuality, we can discern a recurrent struggle in which figures come into conflict with the rules of social reality –which stipulate one be either heterosexual or homosexual –and look, instead, to unreality, to fantasy, as a means of imagining bisexual possibility.

For a number of gay critics, one of Call Me by Your Name's most troubling features was its purportedly explicit depiction of sex between men and women, and its alleged concealment of sex between men. For D. A. Miller among others, this phenomenon is symptomatic of a closeting of homosex and an appeal to the sensibilities of a heterosexual audience. These critics, however, miss the bisexual character of the film's engagement with Elio and Oliver's desires, which cannot be discerned by the monosexual hermeneutic to which they are wedded. We can also observe these critics' valuing of anal sex as queer sex par excellence, and their critical frustration around polysemous significations. I conclude that such approaches limit queer film studies' scope, and that attention to queer yet nongay cinematic spaces — like those of Call Me by Your Name — widen the scope of what queer film might be.

This article proposes a theoretical account of pornographic spectatorship that attends to the abundance, mutability, and unpredictability of the desirous and identificatory potentialities that constitute pornographic fantasy. In its privileging of multitude over singularity, and transformability over stasis, pornographic spectatorship has meaningful connections to bisexuality and transness, taken to be capacious modes of sexual desiring and gendered identification that refuse notions of sexual immutability. In certain psychoanalytic formulations of spectatorship in film theory, we find an insistence on the spectator’s sexual unfixity. These are put in dialogue with bisexual and trans media theories that stress the import of spectatorial unfixity qua bisexuality and transness themselves. In pornographic media’s metatextual appeals for a spectator to desire and identify, these dynamics are heightened. Although individual experiences of pornographic spectatorship are unpredictable, it persists nevertheless as a process that is affirming of transformational sexual potentialities, wherein bisexual and transgender possibilities might be forged.

The cinematic oeuvre of Gregg Araki is populated with invocations of bisexuality. Many of Araki's characters desire people of more than one gender and their desires are routinely represented in ways that resist the trend of bisexual erasure within media. This article examines the techniques through which bisexuality is thus rendered intelligible within a fatalistically monosexist signifying economy. This article argues that Araki's cinema often visualizes bisexuality within this economy by yoking bisexual desire to visual representations of nonmonogamy. Although these representations render some images of bisexual desire visible, they also preclude others from visibility and buttress bisexual stereotypes related to fulfilment, infidelity, and excess. Although the yearning for representation, like many of Araki's characters, may be inexorably doomed, this article concludes that the techniques through which Araki invokes bisexuality are indicative of the manifold ways in which monosexuality's sovereignty in the visual thwarts bisexuality's cinematic intelligibility.