InBIsibility: Bisexual Erasure and Bisexual Narratives in Contemporary Cinema

Belén Martín Lucas (Co-dirección con Andrea Ruthven, Universitat de les Illes Balears)

This dissertation examines the representation of bisexuality in contemporary cinema, with a focus on mainstream US film. Divided into four chapters, the first one provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of lesbian, gay and bisexual representation in Hollywood from 2000 to 2019, highlighting the most prominent and stereotypical problems inherent in representation in mainstream American film. The second chapter gives a more detailed look at those films from the corpus studied in Chapter 1 that include bisexual characters, discussing matters such as representability, readability, stereotypes and how gender informs depictions of bisexuality. Chapter 3 explores the ways in which neoliberal ideology and the market affect queer representation, what the ethical questions are behind cultural representations of queer subjectivities in the context of neoliberalism and the commodification of queerness, and how these matters affect bisexual visibility specifically. The final chapter presents analyses of Stage Beauty (2004), Moonlight (2016) and Disobedience (2017), three films whose narratives allow us to discuss different matters related to the notion of bisexuality; namely, how it challenges dominant discussions around the gender/sex binary and compulsory heterosexuality, and its relationship with religion, class and race.