UCLA Center for the Study of Women

When asked for a description of my dissertation project, I say that it is about representations of bisexuality in film. The most popular reply—proffered with considerable regularity by people from diverse areas of my life—has been “You mean like Chasing Amy?” This 1997 independent film written and directed by Kevin Smith, about a self-proclaimed lesbian who is forced to question her sexual identity after meeting and falling for a man, clearly occupies a prominent place in cultural consciousness around bisexuality. (For better or worse, the other recurring response has been “You mean like Basic Instinct?”) In beginning to think about why Chasing Amy should summon this nearly metonymic association with cinematic bisexuality, I recognized several ways in which this film provides an apt entry into many of the points I take up in my dissertation. To start with, Chasing Amy’s female lead, Alyssa Jones ( Joey Lauren Adams), noticeably embodies a trope that I explore at length: bisexual (in)visibility. In choosing to cast a petite blonde with a Minnie Mouse voice and decidedly femme stylings, Chasing Amy’s creators could be accused of complicity in dominant cinema’s reliance on safely genderconforming depictions of queer women. But Alyssa’s femme appearance also serves to contradict cultural assumptions about what queer women look like. Indeed, it is the fact that Alyssa is not “visibly queer” (whatever that means) that allows for the film’s first act revelation on the part of lovelorn Holden (Ben Affleck), his sidekick Banky (Jason Lee), and presumably a substantial number of spectators who would not have surmised Alyssa’s sexual preference from the fairly vague hints given in the film’s trailer (“She just needs the right guy”) and tagline (“It’s not who you love. It’s how”). Whatever the filmmakers’ intention, this casting decision serves to foreground what is a recurring issue of (in)visibility both in queer media representation and in the everyday experiences of many bisexual/queer women. Indeed, Chasing Amy engages with a number of similar identity struggles faced by bisexuals: the widespread belief that bisexuality is “just a phase” or “the easy way out,” biphobia on the part of both heterosexual- and homosexual-identified individuals (“Another one bites the dust,” Alyssa’s lesbian friends say upon hearing she is dating a man), combating the stereotype of the promiscuous bisexual, and so on.