The “Other” Dreamgirl
Female Bisexuality As the “Dark Secret” of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12759386 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maria San Filippo (0000-0002-6655-4159, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 13-49 |
| Publication date | 2007-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Bisexuality (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1529-9716 • E-ISSN: 1529-9724 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1300/j159v07n01_03 |
| OpenAlex | W2147462971 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 3 |
The author contemplates the (in)visibility of female bisex-uality as a structuring absence in Western narrative cinema and screen studies through a symptomatic reading of David Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Drive and its accompanying critical scholarship, demonstrating the extent to which both remain entrenched within the monosexual paradigm yet indicating our present engagement with a bisexual logic of subjectivity and desire. Asking what further meanings can be obtained by approaching Mulholland Drive bisexually, this essay redirects interpretative emphasis towards the bisexual Rita/Camilla (Laura Elena Harring), whose Latina identity functions to “bi-textually” negotiate narrative and cultural anxieties about female bisexuality through an analogous discourse of racial/ethnic transgression. In so doing, Mulholland Drive intriguingly, if precariously, navigates the slippery terrain of bisexual representation via its metaphorical associations of female bisexuality with capriciousness, passing, mutability, role-playing, split identity, and opportunism. As receptacle for cultural associations/anxieties around female bisexuality, Rita/Camilla bears the intertextual legacy of other bi-suggestive “dreamgirls” in post-1960 Euro-American cinema, engendered within an uncanny narrative realm where fantasy and reality are inextricably linked and performance is foregrounded. The revelatory effect, illustrative of Judith Butler's theories, defamiliarizes social constructions of racial and sexual Otherness in order to reveal their performative instability and slippages left in between oppressively binary systems of subjectivity and desire
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Fantasy · Identity (music · Literature · Movie theater · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Realm · Sociology · Subjectivity · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2011 - 2013 (3) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |