I’m gonna study everything! - Bisexual Orientations in Dana Terrace’s The Owl House - Issue 20

Aug 22, 2026

The article analyzes a pivotal scene in Dana Terrace’s The Owl House (“The First Day,” season 1, episode 13) to argue that Luz Noceda’s declaration—“I’m gonna study everything!”—activates bisexual coenaesthesia. It links the school’s track-based restrictions and Luz’s multisubject emancipation to bisexual boundary-defying potential. Through cinesthetic theory and sensory-empathic spectatorship, the reading connects embodied experience, remembered affect, and temporal orientation, positioning bisexuality as present-tense lived possibility.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time45 min

AccessFree to download

Argument and scene focus

Luz’s multisubject permission and the issue of choosing

Coenaesthesia, cinesthetic subject, and embodied spectatorship

Sensory cues, bisexual stereotyping, and affect

“I’m gonna study everything!”: Bisexual Orientationsin Dana Terrace’s The Owl House Lindsey Pelucacci DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v20i0.2516 Frames Cinema Journal ISSN 2053-8812 Issue 20 (Winter 2022) This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this licence, visit: [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . “I’m gonna study everything!” Bisexual Orientations in Dana Terrace’s The Owl House Lindsey Pelucacci Figure 1. Luz, allowed to study everything, against a (bisexual) backdrop of blue, purple, and pink. Season 1, Episode 13. When it comes to choosing a line of study, bisexuals apparently can’t choose; and according to Dana Terrace’s The Owl House, they don’t have to. Near the end of “The First Day”(season 1, episode 13), the series’s bisexual protagonist, Luz Noceda, receives permission to study every subject at her new school, Hexside School of Magic and Demonics. This permission was hardwon. In accordance with the stringent Coven System enforced by the magic world’s fascist leader, Emperor Belos, the school had previously restricted students to single lines of study. Students could, for instance, choose the Illusion track (which specializes in deception and showmanship), the Abomination track (which specializes in ooze golems), or the Plant track (which specializes— unsurprisingly—in plants) . Students who dared to mix magic wound up on the detention track. Only after the ever-curious Luz, together with a trio of fellow magic-mixing delinquents, saves the school from a magic-sucking Greater Basilisk does their principal relent, admitting the worthiness of multidisciplinary pursuits. While the other former delinquents select two tracks each, Luz confesses,“I still can’t choose. Maybe it’s crazy, but I wish I could study a little bit of everything”. Her wish comes true. After speaking these words, she finds herself suspended in space; magic adorns her in multicoloured garments, indicative of her intended multitrack endeavours, against an abstract backdrop of blue, purple, and pink—unmistakably, at least for this bisexual viewer, the colour of the bisexual flag. Viewers were still a couple of weeks away from watching the beloved“Enchanting Grom Fright” episode, in which Luz and Amity dance at their school’s version of prom, and from receiving Terrace’s confirmation of Luz’s bisexuality on Twitter.1 Nonetheless, we were already witnessing an unnamed but blatant association of bisexuality with boundarydefying, re-imaginative potential. Blurring the cross-screen border between show and viewer, this association and its possibilities become incarnate before and within us. For Luz, and for us with her, it is a moment of coenaesthesia. Vivian Sobchack defines “coenaesthesia”, in relation to the cinematic experience, as the “potential and perception of one’s whole sensorial being”, or else the “prelogical and nonhierarchical unity of the sensorium that exists as the carnal foundation for the later hierarchical arrangement of the senses achieved through cultural immersion and practice”.2 For Sobchack, coenaesthesia is a key component of the viewer’s status as a “cinesthetic subject”, a neologism that combines the terms “cinema”, “synaesthesia”, and “coenaesthesia”. With the cinesthetic subject, off-screen and on-screen bodies comingle in such a way that “meaning, and where it is made, does not have a discrete origin in either spectators’ bodies or cinematic representation but emerges in their conjunction”.3 In this scene review, I will read the moment of Luz’s ecstatic actualization as a multidisciplinary student as a moment of bisexual coenaesthesia, whe

FAQs

What scene does the article focus on in The Owl House?

It centers on the end of “The First Day” (season 1, episode 13), when Luz receives permission to study every subject at Hexside School.

How does the article use the idea of coenaesthesia?

It treats Luz’s ecstatic multisubject moment as bisexual coenaesthesia, where the viewer perceives whole-sensorial embodied experience as emerging through conjunction of bodies on- and off-screen.

What role does “I still can’t choose” play in the argument?

The line is read as activating a familiar bisexual dilemma in the bisexual viewer—being pressured to choose or pick a side—and evoking remembered shame and constraint.

Aug 22, 2026

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