| This dissertation investigates how bisexuality is represented in the cinema. Its key components include a genealogy of critical and theoretical discourses in the field and a discourse analysis of selected film texts and their critical reception. Based on this research, I argue that the coding of bisexuality depends not only on the ordering of same- and other-sex attractions, but also on their frequency and duration. That is, the medium is as important as the form to the legibility of bisexuality in the movies. For just as narratives activate (or negate) spatio-temporal configurations of bisexuality, expressing it as the coincidence or coexistence of hetero- and homosexual activities, so too does the time/space continuum of the cinema arbitrate the ways viewers read those events. What is at work here is not simply a coding, which transfers a set of meanings from text to text regardless of its formal architecture, but rather three kinds of codes (sexuality, narrative, cinema) that cascade in ways that have both ideological and epistemological implications.;In its deconstruction of this coding, the dissertation finds methodologies centered on the issues of representation and visibility inadequate, as they tend not to explore the contingencies of discursive formations and systems of knowledge. The semiotic approach I propose allows us to intervene in critical and theoretical discourses that, often to the detriment of bisexuality, leave unexamined the relation between texts and contexts, artifacts and documents. Finally, the codes at work in its imaging still limit and delimit how we see and know bisexuality in the movies, but these constraints are instructive for those of us in bisexual studies. Perhaps we should focus less on the possibilities of an inscrutable future than on the challenges of a complicated past. For it is in the way we cherish our sexual histories, composed as they are of events and experiences that may no longer bear any obvious relation to our present selves, that makes bisexual people neither straight nor gay. |
