Jacob F. Engelberg

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.