B Word

Maria San Filippo has taught film and television studies, and gender and sexuality studies, at MIT, Harvard University, UCLA, and Wellesley College. Her work has appeared in the journals CineAction, Cineaste, English Language Notes, Film History, In Media Res, Journal of Bisexuality, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Senses of Cinema and the anthologies Global Art Cinema and Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema.

Maria San Filippo turns her razor-sharp intellect on the representation of bisexuality in modern media, where it still remains somewhat unspoken, often overshadowed by the hard-won visibility of gays and lesbians. Placing bisexual desire center stage, San Filippo's book is a much-needed addition to the field of queer media studies.(Next Magazine) ...[A] comprehensive, no-holds-barred examination of the portrayal and impact of bisexuality in modern entertainment...Power, privilege, exploitation, the dominance of monosexuality—no permutation goes unexplored, no bisexual presence goes unmentioned...It's a passionate, knowledgeable, educational study, drawing from old and new sources alike.(Publishers Weekly) ...[O]ne of the most compelling and thoughtful academic reads from the first half of 2013.(Slant Magazine) [San Filippo's] study is full of fresh insights about a mostly neglected subject, and she makes good use of a wealth of cultural material.(Gay & Lesbian Review) San Filippo is well-read in feminist and queer theory, and the book is sprinkled with ideas from those fields, which makes this most suitable for graduate-level reading. It can, however, serve as undergraduate coursework for students with a solid background in those subjects. . . . Highly recommended.(Choice) This captivating new study by Maria San Filippo raises numerous persuasive questions about the perspectives that our culture has of bisexuality while it explores the ongoing and, typically, problematic efforts to portray it on screen.(Cinema Journal) For anyone interested in the politics of bisexuality, The B Word should be on your reading list.(Journal of Bisexuality)

• Prologue: Chasing Amy and Bisexual (In)visibilityIntroduction: Binary Trouble and Compulsory Monosexuality1. Unthinking Monosexuality: Bisexual Representability in Art Cinema2. Power Play/s: Bisexuality as Privilege and Pathology in Sexploitation Cinema3. Of Cowboys and Cocksmen: Bisexuality and the Contemporary Hollywood Bromance4. Bisexuality on the Boob TubeConclusion: Queer/ing BisexualityNotesBibliographyIndex