Two recent scholarly works are changing how educators, critics, and audiences think about LGBTQ+ screen culture. Laura Horak’s Trans Cinema and Jacob Engelberg’s Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression each ask readers to stop treating representation as simply good or bad and instead to analyze the formal, political, and ethical work these films perform. Both books employ rigorous film theory while centering media that scholarship has too often sidelined: films created by trans people and cinematic figures that stage bisexual ambivalence or rule-breaking.
Rather than offering a moral checklist, the two authors model analytic practices that emphasize complexity, context, and collaboration. Horak focuses her attention on productions where trans people are behind the camera, asking how such works imagine alternative lives and communal forms. Engelberg proposes a bisexual-inflected hermeneutic that treats on-screen ambiguity as a site of political and aesthetic possibility. Together, these volumes encourage readers to make different choices about what counts as central evidence in queer film studies.
Laura Horak: centering trans-made media
Laura Horak, a Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the Transgender Media Lab and the Transgender Media Portal, builds a case for treating trans-directed work as primary material for study. Her central question—what do films made by trans people actually do—leads to an argument that such art can produce new worlds of possibility and new social forms. Horak maps histories of representation across different platforms: mainstream outlets, independent production, web series, animation, and the festival circuit. The book is organized into two parts—Foundations and Key Themes—so readers move from historical context to deep thematic readings of topics like community, desire, embodiment, and memory.
Ethics, labor, and accountability in research
A striking element of Horak’s practice is methodological transparency. She writes about hiring trans and BIPOC researchers, documenting goals, and including an accountability audit by a research assistant, which signals an attempt to align scholarly method with social justice commitments. This emphasis on ethical labor and citation practices is presented as part of a larger claim: building a robust trans audiovisual ecosystem requires not only better distribution and funding but also more ethically grounded scholarship that honors the creators whose work it analyzes.
Jacob Engelberg: reading bisexual transgression
Jacob Engelberg, Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, argues that bisexuality deserves a central analytical role in queer cinema studies. He develops the notion of bisexual capacity—an open receptivity to desire that resists alignment with a single gender—as a tool for destabilizing the long-standing heterosexual/homosexual binary. Engelberg’s readings range widely in tone and object: he examines 1970s exploitation cinema, controversial thrillers, European art films, and lesbian narrative films from the late twentieth century to show how figures who transgress sexual norms can unsettle cinematic form and social imaginaries.
Provocation and historical range
Engelberg does not shy away from violent or troubling imagery; rather, he insists on taking such images seriously because they reveal how cinema can represent desire beyond fixed categories. He names a persistent cultural attitude—what he calls bi-exclusionary lesbian ethics—that treats bisexuality as suspect within certain feminist and lesbian contexts, and he shows how filmic portrayals interact with those politics. His case studies include controversial popular films and cult cinema, each re-read to reveal bisexual possibility in scenes and figures that often appear hostile or sensational.
What both books invite us to do
Taken together, Horak and Engelberg push scholars and viewers to broaden their evidence base and to adopt analytical tools that capture ambiguity and invention. Their shared refusal of a reductive good/bad representational frame encourages practices that combine archival work, close reading, and ethical collaboration. Both books also make practical demands: better support for trans filmmakers, wider circulation of marginalized works, and more teaching strategies that bring these films into classrooms. In short, they ask us to watch differently, to teach differently, and to advocate for infrastructural change so that more people can see and study the media the authors champion.
For readers in film studies, gender studies, and cultural criticism, these volumes offer complementary interventions. Horak supplies an empirically rich map of trans audiovisual production and a roadmap for accountable research; Engelberg supplies a theoretical lens that foregrounds bisexual ambivalence as a productive object of study. Combined, they help remake the field by centering creators and figures whose work complicates familiar narratives and by urging us to imagine more inclusive scholarly practices and media ecosystems.