InBIsiblebisexual erasure and bisexual narratives in contemporary U.S. Cinema

Abstract

The project is divided into four main chapters. The first chapter of the thesis provides a statistical analysis of the percentages of lesbian, gay, bisexual and heterosexual characters present in the highest grossing films in the United States from the year 2000 to 2019. It also briefly examines the representation of lesbians and gays within that corpus in order to establish a clear context of what will be analyzed later. Focusing only on those films in the corpus that include bisexual characters, the second chapter deals with the different factors that must be taken into account in order to understand bisexual visibility in Hollywood film. The third chapter deals with the ethics behind cultural representations of queer subjectivities within a neoliberal context in which queer identities have been commodified. It places special emphasis on the relationship between the notion of queerbaiting and bisexuality. The last chapter studies three different films - Stage Beauty (2004), Moonlight (2016) and Disobedience (2017) – so as to present alternative examples of bisexual representation that differ from what has been studied in the previous chapters. The aim of this last part is to also analyze in what ways bisexuality challenges certain binaries that conform our way of understanding the world.