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95 Even more open – effusively so – to erotic explicitness and excess than art cinema, sexploitation films use the titillation of female bisexual desire as a primary narrative conceit. As a mode of filmmaking ,sexploitationtraverseshistoricaleras,nationalcinemas,genres, aesthetic movements, and even industrial sectors. Historically, exploitation cinema refers to low-budget, independently produced features which compensate for their lack of brand-name talent and production value with sensational subject matter, attention-grabbing promotions, and saturation booking intended to generate profit in a quick theatrical run. This strategy’s success was noted, and duly exploited, by major studioshopingtoattractyouthfulaudiencesduringthelate-1960sdownturn , when soft-core European and Japanese imports and subsequently their American knockoffs proved consistently appealing to art house and cult audiences looking for occasionally high-minded yet more often prurientthrills.Sexploitationisoftenmalignedasartcinema’sunrefined cousin and seen as one step away from hardcore pornography, and for a brief time in the 1960s and 1970s, these three overlapping modes–art cinema, exploitation cinema, and pornography–even shared exhibition venues;the“arthouse”andthe“grindhouse”occupiedthesamephysical and cultural space. As is inevitably the case with oppositional binaries, highbrow art cinema and lowbrow sexploitation turn out to have quite a bit in common–not least in their propensity for establishing bisexual spaces, in which bisexuality acquires legibility even as it continues to be displayed as an exoticized, eroticized spectacle of social deviance and sexual decadence. Since the brief craze for porn in the mainstream, sextwo Power Play/s: Bisexuality as Privilege and Pathology in Sexploitation Cinema 96 The B Word ploitationtropeshavemigratedintothebig-budgeteroticthrillerspopulated by what Lynda Hart calls the “fatal women” and Chris Holmlund terms the “deadly (lesbian) dolls” of contemporary Hollywood.1 But sexploitation films continue to inhabit diverse formal and commercial realms, encompassing what’s left of “official” sexploitation, from bigbudget Hollywood productions like Basic Instinct to European art films like Swimming Pool to U.S. “indie” films like Wild Things, all discussed in this chapter. Such films regularly receive straight-to-video sequels and knockoffs that, freed from the restrictions associated with mainstream theatrical distribution, substitute cut-rate actors for the original cast and up the ante on nudity and sex.2 As indicated by Holmlund’s use of parentheses around “lesbian,” the tantalizing promise that sexploitation offers up is more precisely “girl-on-girl” eroticism, and such films rarely articulate any well-rounded (much less politicized) lesbian orientation. Rather, as we will see, female same-sex desire is first spectacularized and then “spectralized,” or obscured–though telltale traces remain, as ever, (in)visible. All’s Fair in Bisexuality: Rich Bitches, Dependent Doubles, and Triangular Desire I never thought of Catherine as bisexual or even sexual. Sex is just the currency she uses to get what she wants. Sharon Stone on her character in Basic Instinct, Catherine Tramell Sexploitation films often construct dual discourses on privilege–socioeconomic and bisexual–whose simultaneous negotiation at the narrative level implies a relationship between them. This bi-textual form of narration repeatedly enacts a power play of alternating dominant and submissive roles between an independent(ly) wealthy female character whom I call the rich bitch and her disadvantaged female dependent double (again lesbian desire proves admissible where male same-sex desire does not). Bisexuality operates as the primary weapon of the characters ’ dual (and dueling) economic and sexual showdown, wielded on one hand as a spoil of affluence by the rich bitch and on the other as a leveraging device for socioeconomic empowerment by her dependent 3.135.202.224] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 04:51 GMT) Power Play/s 97 double. This bi-textual mode compulsively reproduces a metaphor of class privilege under perceived threat to allay those anxieties provoked by economically (and thus sexually) self-sufficient women and opportunistic , “two faced” bisexuals by relating them to and negotiating them through other, class-related anxieties: paranoia about the disruption of moneyed complacency versus frustration about class immobility and conspicuous consumption. Thus the resultant insight to arise from this metaphorconcernsthatoftheelsewheredisavowedconnectionbetween sexuality and (late) capitalism. Relationships and scenes presenting female same-sex desire in sexploitationfilmsareinfusedwithaneroticismofaggression ,competition, envy, and personal gain–gender-unspecific significations that invoke bi-stereotypes of predatory opportunism and selfishness. This section considers how a number of sexploitation films negotiate the rich bitch’s bisexual and bi-textual significations, asking how these films take up the stereotype of “bisexual privilege” and whether their narratives work to containorpromotefemalesocial-sexualagency.WhatIaimultimatelyto determineisthedegreetowhicheachfilmendorsesorresistshegemonic strictures on gender roles and sexuality, and in so doing maintains or disrupts the discursive masking, through the concept of...

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