"She's Gotta Have It", "The Bisexual" & "High Fidelity": An Analysis of Representations of Desire for Bisexual BIPOC Female Characters

Throughout queer movements and media history, BIPOC women have consistently led the way in offering complex representations of queerness, bisexuality and pansexuality. In spite of this, mass media, specifically television, has continually exploited bisexual BIPOC women in developing problematic, flat characters that circumscribe their experiences and identities. Historically, hegemonic representations have positioned BIPOC bisexual female characters as hyper-sexual, exoticized social “Others,” who ultimately cannot be trusted due to their “illusory” bisexual identities. However, challenging this history, contemporary BIPOC bisexual female characters now offer more complex, political empowering representations. Unlike their predecessors, contemporary bisexual BIPOC female characters engage in forms of anti-hegemonic desire, anti-hegemonic desire defined as political acts that explicitly oppose hegemonic notions of what is “desirable”, such as whiteness, notions of dominant masculinity, and heterosexuality. Engaging examples from extant television, this paper will examine how the lead characters in “She’s Gotta Have It” (2017), “The Bisexual” (2018), and “High Fidelity” (2020) engage monologue, dialogue and narrative control in exercising anti-hegemonic desire and contesting the violent envy imposed upon them by an oppressive political order.