"Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression makes the case for a radically recalibrated queer film studies, taking as its starting point those cinematic figures who transgressively exceed a discrete and exclusive gay-straight binary. Attention to what Jacob Engelberg calls cinema's figures of bisexual transgression allows for an approach to reading cinematic sexuality that is sensitive to sexuality's capacity for nonsingularity, mutability, and polysemy. The book's deployment of transgression resists censures of transgressive images as politically harmful, as it resists blanket celebrations of transgression's subversions. Instead, it understands transgression as a process whereby the structures of rules are made knowable in their being contested. Engelberg tracesthese across disparate cinematic contexts: vampire film, lesbian cinema, art cinema, and the erotic thriller. Revivifying the underexploited contributions of bisexual theory, he proposes a bisexual mode of film theorization and analysis that unearths thefecund ground between and beyond ascendent categories of sexual organization, where sexual unpredictability, the allure of the forbidden, and the precarity of sexual signification are illuminated. Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression examines how film has attested to desire's vast potentialities, finding in these figurations of transgressive excess capacious, and often troubling, forms of sexual becoming"--
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.
In Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression, Jacob Engelberg calls for a bisexual reimagining of queer film studies, using transgressive cinematic figures to challenge binary modes of thinking about sexuality and reveal how social structures are exposed and unsettled through their contestation.
