The B Word
Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Often disguised in public discourse by terms like "gay," "homoerotic," "homosocial," or "queer," bisexuality is strangely absent from queer studies and virtually untreated in film and media criticism. Maria San Filippo aims to explore the central role bisexuality plays in contemporary screen culture, establishing its importance in representation, marketing, and spectatorship. By examining a variety of media genres including art cinema, sexploitation cinema and vampire films, "bromances," and series television, San Filippo discovers "missed moments" where bisexual readings of these texts reveal a more malleable notion of subjectivity and eroticism. San Filippo's work moves beyond the subject of heteronormativity and responds to "compulsory monosexuality," where it's not necessarily a couple's gender that is at issue, but rather that an individual chooses one or the other. The B Word transcends dominant relational formation (gay, straight, or otherwise) and brings a discursive voice to the field of queer and film studies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
San Filippo a multidisciplinary scholar of film, television, sexuality, and gender studies draws on all of those sources for this comprehensive, no-holds-barred examination of the portrayal and impact of bisexuality in modern entertainment. Touching on cultural milestones such as Brokeback Mountain, Mulholland Drive, Chasing Amy, A Shot of Love, and hundreds more, she tackles a wide range of topics. Power, privilege, exploitation, the dominance of monosexuality no permutation goes unexplored, no bisexual presence goes unmentioned. Both male and female bisexuality gets covered, as San Filippo examines how the various tropes have infiltrated the entertainment industry. It's a passionate, knowledgeable, educational study, drawing from old and new sources alike. Unfortunately, the author often resorts to 10-dollar words, resulting in an academically impenetrable wall of text, enough to fend off the more casual reader. "It is precisely bisexuality's epistemological and textual polysemy that generates its subversive potential to lay bare the mutability, contingency, and inherent transgressiveness of desire," is both one of the most profound and alienating passages to be found here. Get through that, and a treasure trove of information is unlocked. San Filippo seeks to redefine our perception of bisexuality; in this study, she's off to a good start.
