“How Could any One Relationship Ever Possibly be Fulfilling?”: Bisexuality, Nonmonogamy, and the Visualization of Desire in the Cinema of Gregg Araki

ABSTRACT

The cinematic oeuvre of Gregg Araki is populated with invocations of bisexuality. Many of Araki's characters desire people of more than one gender and their desires are routinely represented in ways that resist the trend of bisexual erasure within media. This article examines the techniques through which bisexuality is thus rendered intelligible within a fatalistically monosexist signifying economy. This article argues that Araki's cinema often visualizes bisexuality within this economy by yoking bisexual desire to visual representations of nonmonogamy. Although these representations render some images of bisexual desire visible, they also preclude others from visibility and buttress bisexual stereotypes related to fulfilment, infidelity, and excess. Although the yearning for representation, like many of Araki's characters, may be inexorably doomed, this article concludes that the techniques through which Araki invokes bisexuality are indicative of the manifold ways in which monosexuality's sovereignty in the visual thwarts bisexuality's cinematic intelligibility.

KEYWORDS:

• bisexuality
• infidelity
• polyamory
• promiscuity
• queer
• queer theory
• relationships
• tropes
• film
• critical theory

Note

Acknowledgments

There are many people without whom this article would not have come into fruition. I would like to thank Samuel Solomon, John David Rhodes, Michael Lawrence, Rachel O'Connell, Cynthia Weber, Olga Kourelou, Blanka Nyklová, Paul Boyce, Clare Hemmings, Maria Pramaggiore, Orashia Edwards, Vienna Brown, Tom Houlton, George Mind, Diarmuid Hester, Jo Ronan, Caroline Walters, Èmiel Maliepaard, Tilly Scantlebury, Celia Mae Jones, Catherine O'Sullivan, Kate Wood, Sarah Liewehr, Jo Waghorn, Jonathan Hyde, Felicity Beckett, Chloe Charles, Barbara-Anne Walker, Paul Devlin, Lesley Marks, Jackie Engelberg, and Gregg Araki.

Notes

1. Araki himself has notably had relationships with men and women and has described his sexuality in a variety of ways over the last 20 years. The director's sexuality may be of interest in the context of queer auteurist filmmaking, a concept with which Araki has aligned himself (1992).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacob Engelberg

Jacob Engelberg, is an independent scholar from the United Kingdom, currently living in Brighton. He has a BA in English Literature and Film and an MA in Sexual Dissidence from the University of Sussex. His academic interests include bisexual and queer theories, film studies, critical race theory, and animal studies. He currently works in cinema marketing and runs Eyes Wide Open Cinema, a regular queer film program based in southeast England.