Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression makes the case for a radically recalibrated queer film studies, taking as its starting point those cinematic figures who transgressively exceed a discrete and exclusive gay-straight binary. Attention to what Jacob Engelberg calls cinema's figures of bisexual transgression allows for an approach to reading cinematic sexuality that is sensitive to sexuality's capacity for nonsingularity, mutability, and polysemy.
The book's deployment of transgression resists censures of transgressive images as politically harmful, as it resists blanket celebrations of transgression's subversions. Instead, it understands transgression as a process whereby the structures of rules are made knowable in their being contested. Engelberg traces these across disparate cinematic contexts: vampire film, lesbian cinema, art cinema, and the erotic thriller.
Revivifying the underexploited contributions of bisexual theory, he proposes a bisexual mode of film theorization and analysis that unearths the fecund ground between and beyond ascendent categories of sexual organization, where sexual unpredictability, the allure of the forbidden, and the precarity of sexual signification are illuminated. Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression examines how film has attested to desire's vast potentialities, finding in these figurations of transgressive excess capacious, and often troubling, forms of sexual becoming.
Publisher: Duke University Press / Series: a Camera Obscura book
Release date: 6 January 2026
Illustrations: 60 / Pages: 352
Paper ISBN: 9781478032984 / Hardcover ISBN: 9781478029526 / eISBN: 9781478061731
“Jacob Engelberg addresses an under-researched area in queer cinema studies with an impressive theoretical sophistication. His keen knowledge of film history and generous interventions in queer theory, film theory, and the bisexual film canon make this book the most comprehensive, considered, and thoughtful analysis of bisexuality in visual culture I have encountered. I’m frankly delighted by it.”
— Maria Pramaggiore, co-editor of Film: A Critical Introduction, 4th edition
