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This thesis makes a bisexual theoretical intervention in film studies that foregrounds the centrality of transgression in figuring bisexuality on screen. Cinema's bisexual transgressors are mutable and persistent figures appearing across disparate contexts. Although their prevalence on film has been noted in some bisexual criticism, these have often been limited to censures of 'bad bisexual representation'. Alternatively, I follow the lines of critical bisexual thought proposed by Maria Pramaggiore, Jo Eadie, Beth Carol Roberts, and Maria San Filippo, which interrogate the relationship between bisexuality and cinema's structures of sexual signification. My intervention in this dialogue stresses transgression as a central component in conveying screen bisexualities, which are regularly figured through violations of social, political, ethical, and aesthetic rules. I make the case for bisexual transgression's importance in theorising screen sexuality with attention to four cinematic contexts between the 1970s and 1990s, and close readings of four films herein. I consider 'Vampyres' (José Ramón Larraz, 1974) in relation to 1970s les(bi)an vampire film; 'She Must Be Seeing Things' (Sheila McLaughlin, 1987) in relation to 1980s and 1990s lesbian feminist narrative cinema; 'Savage Nights' (Cyril Collard, 1992) in relation to male bisexuality in European art cinema in the context of HIV/AIDS; and 'Basic Instinct' (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) in relation to Hollywood and direct-to-video erotic thrillers from the 1980s and 1990s. Despite these contexts' various dissimilarities, all share an investment in the bisexual as a figure in whom tensions around sexual taxonomy are broached. These figures' sexual transgressions are often multiplied in their alignment with or metaphorisation through other forms of social, political, or ethical forms of transgression. Further, insofar as monosexuality (attraction towards people of a single gender) is naturalised on film through formal conventions, bisexual figuration often involves attendant formal transgressions. To this end, I interrogate the interrelation between bisexual figuration and systems of cinematic temporality, space, and mise-en-scène. My analysis also considers these cinemas' historical contexts and their interactions with the proliferation of bisexuality as a discursive, social, and political formation between the 1970s and the 1990s. Histories of genre, activism, (geo)politics, and theory are drawn upon to identify these cinemas' historical import with specificity. Throughout the thesis, I engage with the contributions of feminist and queer theory to film studies, while stressing the enduring relevance of bisexual theory, which provides rich yet underexploited frameworks through which to approach the sexual politics of cinema. Bisexual figures of transgression populate critical bisexual writing and, by transposing these ideas to the realm of film studies, I consider how bisexuality's troubling of dominant notions of sexual epistemology is figured cinematically. My thesis thus contends that queer film studies is fundamentally impoverished without attention to cinema's bisexual transgressors. These figures-in whom sexuality's potential for mutability, the allure of the forbidden, and the precarity of sexual signification are illuminated-beckon a radically recalibrated mode of enquiry into cinematic sexuality.

Accounts of US censorship in the twentieth century paint an era dominated by the proliferation of sexual imagery. Against this trajectory of broadening acceptance, however, queer- focused studies have pointed to the regulatory interest paid to different forms of sexual expression to illuminate what Whitney Strub describes as 'a deeply entrenched aversion to homosexuality' in US law. This thesis analyses the work and receptions of William S. Burroughs and John Waters to examine how forms of non-normative sexuality or queerness are made significant as obscene exceptions. Despite research in English literary studies unpicking the purportedly transgressive sexual politics of the 'obscene' modernist novel, queer authors deemed obscene have offered ways to reimagine sexual identity and desire. Besides this, Film and Pornography Studies have shown how obscenity law was used to censor non-normative sexual expression and police the cinema as a site of queer gathering. I build from this disciplinary intersection to theorise Burroughs and Waters as practitioners of a specifically queer form of obscenity that asks us to attend to the historical conditions of possibility that determine both what can be said and the legibility of different meanings. Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' and Waters' 'trash trilogy' films - 'Pink Flamingos', 1972, 'Female Trouble', 1974, and 'Desperate Living', 1977 - have been positioned as obscene by courtrooms, censor boards, college campuses, critics, and the gay community. Examining the works through their encounters with censorship, I position these works as cultural objects that speak to the entanglement of obscenity and queerness in the US legal system and cultural imagination. I focus on the Boston trial of 'Naked Lunch' alongside the recurring attempts to suppress Waters' 'trash trilogy' by the Maryland State Board of Censors to illuminate the unresolved contradictions of mid-century obscenity law. Reading the works and their receptions as sites where the definition of obscenity has been repeatedly tested, this thesis analyses the work that the obscene has been made to do at different times by different groups with different access to power. I trace the cultural circulation of the works to illuminate how the obscene has been made to function in simultaneous and contradictory ways, as legal threshold for unconstitutional speech, transgressive signifier for counter-cultural value appropriations, and colloquial shorthand for material deemed either harmful, sexually arousing, or in poor taste. This thesis, then, investigates how the 'confused and shifting concept' of obscenity was applied to and appropriated as queerness in the USA post-1945. My analysis is structured along four defining facets of mid-century obscenity law. I use the first, 'redeeming social significance', in Chapter One to show how obscenity law structured the legibility of queer meaning in Burroughs and Waters' works. The second, 'artistic merit', underpins my consideration of the recurring emphasis on formal failure in disparagements of Burroughs and Waters in Chapter Two. Chapter Three focuses on the 'stirring of sexual interest' to examine how viscerally feeling bodies are put to work in assertions of obscenity. And my final chapter analyses how Burroughs and Waters both evoked and exploited fears of deviant sexual interest through the legal concept of 'prurient appeal to the average reader'. Comparing Burroughs and Waters' articulations of sexual identity and desire by examining the historical conditions of the sayable that shape and re- shape the meanings of their works, I identify the possibility for a particular form of queer legibility that is, perhaps unexpectedly, staged and contested through the attribution of obscenity.