Fluid movements : representing bisexuality in world literature, film, and new media

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to address the gap in existing studies on bisexual world literature, film, and new media. Previously, comparative analysis and critique within queer theory and the fields of Western and East Asian literature, film, and new media have remained largely separated as field formations. Through the selection of world texts and narratives, this thesis traces a lineage of bisexuality while exploring futures that uphold bisexual agency. This thesis coins the term “bisexual commodification” to show how bisexual commodification predicates the removal of agency from the bisexual person, character, or subject, and their narrative serves only to further late-capitalistic agendas and/or state and social subjugation. This thesis conjoins this framework of agency with Marjorie Garber’s notion of the “bierotic” to displace the “homoerotic” narrative, a term that implicitly erases fluid possibilities while reinforcing the hetero/homo-binary matrix. This thesis employs a “bierotic lens” to queer previously held understandings of gender and sexuality, revealing non-normative explorations of relationship dynamics that do not hinge on Eurocentric concepts of identity. This thesis thus explores the ways in which bisexual characters, narratives, and works may reproduce typecasts based on stigma, and are contingent on producers and contexts of production. Overall, a framework of bieroticism and critique of bisexual commodification offer alternative fluid movements of genders, sexualities, and post-capitalist desires.