Bisexuality in Cinema
Jacob Engelberg on sexual transgressors, queer approaches to film, and bisexual theory.
Jacob Engelberg is a doctoral candidate in Film Studies at King's College London. He has written about bisexuality throughout his academic career from his undergraduate degree in English Literature and Film, to his Masters in Sexual Dissidence, to the current research project for his PhD. He has also published work in the Journal of Bisexuality and Porn Studies.
He has written about Bisexual erotics, Tumblr’s counterhegemonic pornographies, and bisexuality, nonmonogamy, and the visualization of desire in cinema. Jacob is part of the Bisexual Research Group.
Why are you interested in research on bisexuality?
Focusing on bisexuality enables us to explore aspects of sexuality that have not always been prioritised in academic study: the dominance of the monosexual binary, compulsory monogamy, and notions of sexual development or temporality being just some examples. Bisexuality complicates many of the ways in which sexuality is popularly conceptualised, and this complication is a productive one.
What does your research explore?
My current research makes a bisexual theoretical intervention in queer approaches to film by considering the constructions and functions of cinematic figurations of transgressive bisexuality. My doctoral dissertation explores cinematic figurations of bisexual transgression from the 1970s to the 1990s.
My doctoral thesis aims to reveal the usefulness of cinema's bisexual transgressors in understanding sexual signification.
I created the Wikipedia page for bisexual theory, an approach I am passionate in promulgating. I endeavour to continue and complicate the crucial work bisexual theory inaugurated in the 1990s, specifically vis-à-vis film studies.
How do you define bisexuality?
In my personal life, I am a fan of Robyn Ochs's definition of bisexuality as "desire towards people of more than one gender. Not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, not necessarily to the same degree." In my academic work, however, my use of bisexuality is strategically more capacious. I like to turn it around and think about times when monosexuality fails, when monosexuality is exceeded, how the possibility of desire beyond monosexuality makes itself known.
3 things you wish everyone knew about bisexuality?
Bisexual politics has a rich, decades-long history. This politics has overlapped historically with gay liberation, feminist, lesbian feminist, and trans movements, but also has unique features of its own that we can learn from today.
There is such a thing as bisexual theory. Already in the first half of the 1990s, when queer theory was just emerging, scholars were offering theoretical models that considered bisexuality in a similar poststructuralist fashion. My keenness for others to be aware of bisexual theory led me to propose a bisexual theory Wikipedia page, to which I have contributed.
Bisexuality is not transhistorical, nor is it an "originary" state. I follow the theoretical tradition of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler in understanding sexualities to be the products of discourse. This is not to say that, throughout history, there haven't been people who desired people of more than one gender. What this acknowledges, however, is that the very notions of "gender" and "sexuality" are contingent upon social, cultural, and discursive contexts.
What are the most pressing concerns within the bisexual community in 2020?
Treatment of bisexual asylum seekers across the globe is of paramount importance to me. This issue makes clear the real, and sometimes deadly, effects of compulsory monosexuality.
Disproportionate rate of sexual violence experienced by bisexual people. The fact that experiences of sexual violence are so widespread among bisexual people, twinned with the barriers existing to us accessing crisis services, makes for a dire status quo.
I think that bisexual activists could sometimes be more judicious in the way they engage with media representations, seeking insights from those of us who have studied media. Too often the phase "negative stereotype" is used in ways that fail to account for the impossibility of defining this and the normalising assumptions therein.
There can be a tendency to take as a given the formula: media representation I deem bad = people believe this about bisexuals = worse lives for bisexuals. These processes are, in fact, much more nuanced. I believe it would be useful for us all to start at the question "How is bisexuality in media made recognisable in the first place?"
What bi research would you like people to know about?
My favourite writing on bisexuality comes from Clare Hemmings, Jo Eadie, and Merl Storr. Without their perspicuity, my work would be seriously impoverished.
In my field, film studies, three scholars who have been instrumental in thinking through the relation between bisexuality and cinema are Maria Pramaggiore, Maria San Fillipo and Beth Carol Roberts. Pramaggiore's chapter "Straddling the Screen" (in the book 'Representing Bisexualities') is instructive in its insights around bisexuality and film spectatorship. San Fillipo's book 'The B Word' is a must for anyone considering bisexuality and film, as is Roberts's doctoral dissertation "Neither Fish nor Fowl" and her article for the Journal of Bisexuality, "Muddy Waters".
Getting more personal…
Are you bi? Yes!
Does being bisexual change how you approach your work?
I think my understanding of my own bisexuality has made me particularly attuned to discerning the bisexual potentials in film. It is said that scholars' academic endeavours often involve working through very personal issues and, for me, I feel there is a symbiotic relationship between my research and my understanding of my own desires.
Can you tell me a bit about your experience?
I was aware of my desires towards people of more than one gender since a very early age. I remember hearing the term "bisexual" for the first time as a child and feeling like it fit me. Despite this, I remained closeted for my childhood and adolescence and did not come out until I was nineteen.
I wanted to come out when I felt that, first, I would not endanger myself by doing so and, second, that I would be believed (not dismissed as a gay man in denial).
While it is a shame I was not able to come out earlier, I think I made the right decision to come out when I would have the most support and understanding around me. Most people in my life know that I'm bisexual and one of the great things about doing bisexual research is that it can be shorthand for coming out as bi. I once joked with a gay friend of mine who was doing bisexual research that he was the only person in history to have been incorrectly assumed to be bi!
More about Jacob Engelberg’s work here: jacobengelberg.com
Twitter: @criticalprvrsn