ABSTRACT
Bisexuality as identity formation, representational trope and theoretical concept has re-emerged with renewed force in twenty-first-century cultural discourse. Representations of bisexuality are effaced not only by the mandate to explicitly speak the B-word and by compulsory monosexuality but also by compulsory monogamy, heteronormative and homonormative inducement to reproduce the privatised, domesticised couple. As in commodity advertising and music videos that exude homoerotic suggestiveness, cinematic bisexuality emerges out of the impulse to connote, yet disguise, same-sex desire behind the smokescreen of one woman's fantasy identification with another. Pathological mimicry and other associations of bisexuality with the perverse stem from psychoanalytic diagnoses of fluid desire, such as gender 'inversion', as psychically debilitating. Art cinema, more than other cinematic modes, yields bisexual representability on account of its penchant for ambiguity, nuance and sexual frankness. But with more characterisations and narrative articulations of desire's complexity and contingency, the imperative to instrumentalise bisexual representation gives way to an ultimately more liberating recognition of sexual fluidity.
