The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television

by Maria San Filippo

In The B Word, Maria San Filippo explores the ways bisexual fantasy opens a space for “bi-curious” engagement, creating a fluid range of identifications and pleasures. In films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain, The Wedding Crashers, Persona, Chasing Amy, and Mulholland Drive, San Filippo finds that bisexual tropes reveal the workings of our culture’s logic of desire. Viewing these and other films with an eye for bisexual “missed moments” of malleable subjectivity and eroticism, The B Word transforms understandings of films previously read exclusively as either homosexual or heterosexual. As San Filippo’s analysis of the promotion and popular reception of these films demonstrates, the entertainment industry both exploits and effaces bisexuality in its appeal to diverse audiences.