Overview

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.

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9781478032984

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Reviews

""Jacob Engelberg addresses an under-researched area in queer cinema studies with an impressive theoretical sophistication. His keen knowledge of film history and generous interventions in queer theory, film theory, and the bisexual film canon make this book the most comprehensive, considered, and thoughtful analysis of bisexuality in visual culture I have encountered. I'm frankly delighted by it.""--Maria Pramaggiore, co-editor of, Kylie Minogue: Critical Insights into Pop Music and Media Celebrity

Author Information

Jacob Engelberg is Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Culture at the University of Amsterdam.

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