Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression

“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 Film: A Critical Introduction, 4th edition

“Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression revitalizes bisexuality screen scholarship by bringing critically deft, contextually rich, politically attuned evidence of its enduring indispensability and expanding urgency for queer media studies. Through incisive, elegant analysis of bisexual transgressors from ‘les(bi)an vampires’ to those of Basic Instinct and beyond, Engelberg deepens our understandings of bisexuality’s disruptive power and imaginative potential, while simultaneously staking out innovative theoretical-philosophical pathways and invaluable alliances with feminist, trans, and critical race studies.” - Maria San Filippo, author of The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television

“In this compelling account of cinematic exteriority, Jacob Engelberg lets the sexual body breathe. Starting with the premise that, on screen, sexual position is construed through generic convention, rather than anything immanently available to a body, Engelberg then focuses his gaze to assess film at the scale of genre itself, and discovers there a pliable set of categories for understanding the neoliberal period’s emerging sexual and social norms. Delivering new insights into the erotic life of mass culture, this book also reconceives bisexuality—for so long scorned and (less commonly) defended as a pedantic enumeration of the two-and-no-more-ness of sexual orientation—as a tenacious sign of the unknowability of the bodies we crave and those we inhabit, on screen and off. This is a richly textured, subtle, and erudite engagement with the mass cultural archive, and a promising debut from an emerging critical voice, that resounds with a particular clarity and a rangy ambition.” - Grace E. Lavery, author of Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom

"Taken together, both Trans Cinema and Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression remake the field of queer and trans film studies. Each book not only expands the central objects of study; they also call upon LGBTQ+ media scholars to shift our focus to forms of queerness underrepresented in our scholarship. Looking more closely at trans-made media and bisexuality on screen allows us to challenge the dominance of cisgender, monosexual ways of seeing the world around us and invites us to imagine it otherwise." - Lauren Herold, Autostraddle