Representing Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire

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Donald E. Hall, Maria Pramaggiore
NYU Press, 1996 - Health & Fitness - 305 pages

Is bisexuality coming out in America? Bisexual characters are surfacing on popular television shows and in film. Newsweek proclaims that a new sexual identity is emerging. But amidst this burgeoning acknowledgment of bisexuality, is there an understanding of what it means to be bisexual in a monosexual culture?
RePresenting Bisexualities seeks to answer these questions, integrating a recognition of bisexual desire with new theories of gender and sexuality. Despite the breakthroughs in gender studies and queer studies of recent years, bisexuality has remained largely unexamined. Problematic sexual images are usually attributed either to homosexual or heterosexual desire while bisexual readings remain unexplored. The essays found in RePresenting Bisexualities discuss fluid sexualities through a variety of readings from the fence, covering texts from Emily Dickinson to Nine Inch Nails. Each author contributes to the collection a unique view of sexual fluidity and transgressive desire. Taken together, these essays provide the most comprehensive bisexual theory reader to date.

 

Contents

Epistemologies of the Fence
8
Blatantly Bisexual
19
Do Bats Eat Cats?
55
Toward
70
Graphic Sexuality and the Erasure
99
Reading Bisexuality
165
The Politics of Masculinity
180
Perspectives on Bisexual Visual Culture
205
Bisexual Spectatorship
272
Index
301
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About the author (1996)

Donald E. Hall is Jackson Family Distinguished Chair in the Department of English at West Virginia University and the author of Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists, also from NYU Press. Maria Pramaggiore is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University.

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