In Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression, Jacob Engelberg makes the case for radically recalibrating queer film studies, taking as a starting point those cinematic figures who resist categorization within the gay-straight binary. Engelberg’s engagement with bisexual transgression on film illuminates the mutability and instability of sexuality, and of sociocultural structures more broadly by resisting the censure of images as politically harmful as well as the celebration of transgression as inherently subversive. Instead, Engelberg understands bisexual transgression as a process whereby sociocultural rules are made knowable by being contested. From 1970s vampire films to 1990s erotic thrillers, from lesbian imaginings of female bisexuality to European art cinema’s reckonings with HIV/AIDS, bisexual figures on film embody anxieties around the precarity of binary sexuality while revealing the contingencies of sexuality’s cinematic signification. Revivifying the underexploited contributions of bisexual theory, Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression proposes a new mode of film theorization and analysis that examines the rich space between and beyond dominant categories of sexual organization, where sexual unpredictability, the allure of the forbidden, and the precarity of sexual signification are illuminated.

Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.