Bisexuality and Queer Theory

Intersections, Connections and Challenges

Jonathan Alexander, Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, Jonathan Alexander, Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415686716
• eBook ISBN: 9781317995548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

According to David Halperin, sexuality in our time is typified by a "crisis in contemporary sexual definition". What is sexuality? What does it mean to have a sexual identity or orientation? What is the relationship between sexuality as a knowledge construct, on one hand, and the often messy flows of desire and practices of love, on the other? How and why are some sexual, erotic, and intimate practices normalized and others marginalized?

Queer Theory has emerged in the West as one of the most provocative analytical tools in the humanities and social sciences. It scrutinizes identity and social structures that take heteronormativity for granted – that do not question the social construction of heterosexuality as normative in relation to its oppositional binary, homosexuality. At the same time, bisexuality is a practice, identity, and orientation that challenges the binary logic around which cultural notions of sexuality are organized. It is a portal to the imagination of a world of amorous expression beyond that divide.

This provocative collection presents bisexuality and queer theory as two parallel thought collectives that have made significant contributions to cultural discourses about sexual and amorous practices since the onset of the AIDS era, and explores the ideas that circulate in these thought collectives today. We learn much about the construction and experience of sexuality, and the power it still holds throughout the contemporary Western world to shape identities and practices. This volume challenges our understanding of what it means to be sexual, to have a sexual identity, and to practise the arts of loving.

This book was orginally published as a special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality.

BISEXUALITY AND QUEER THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION

Jonathan Alexander

University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, PR

According to David Halperin (chapter 13 in this volume), sexuality in our time is typified by a “crisis in contemporary sexual definition” (p. 262). What is sexuality? What does it mean to have a sexual identity or orientation? What is the relationship between sexuality as a knowledge construct, on one hand, and the often messy flows of desire and practices of love, on the other? How and why are some sexual, erotic, and intimate practices normalized and others marginalized? To answer such questions, queer theory has emerged in the West as one of the most provocative analytical tools in the humanities and social sciences. It has responded to the call to scrutinize identity and social structures that take heteronormativity for granted—that do not question the social construction of heterosexuality as normative in relation to its oppositional binary, homosexuality. At the same time, bisexuality is a practice, identity, and orientation that also challenges the binary logic around which modern cultural notions of sexuality are organized, particularly the homo/hetero divide that structures heteronormativity. It can be considered a portal to the imagination of a world of amorous expression beyond that divide.

Bisexuality and Queer Theory explores the potentially rich intersection between a critical examination of bisexuality and queer theory. Specifically, the chapters in this collection present bisexuality and queer theory as two parallel thought collectives that have made significant contributions to cultural discourses about sexual and amorous practices, at least since the onset of the AIDS era. The collection offers a way to compare notes about the ideas that circulate in these thought collectives today¹.

We have launched this project at a critical time in global and human history, when practicing love may be more useful as a way to care for than to multiply our species. The two constructs we engage are quite significant. As a practice of plural loves, bisexuality transgresses heteronormative mandates for gender and intimacy. Queer theory proposes a theoretical inquiry and intervention into heteronormativity. We and our contributors to this volume ask what both constructs can tell us about contemporary arts of loving and the possibilities for thinking the expression of intimacy as both personal and political activity beyond the restrictions of heteronormativity. Indeed as understood today in the West, and in particular in the queer subcultures where it is practiced and openly admitted, bisexuality is often a gateway to erotic pleasures and ecstatic communions beyond sexual functionalism, and the middle ground that deconstructs the binarisms of identity (masculinity/femininity, straight/gay) that the project of queer theory sought to at least blur. Once this middle ground is allowed to become the epistemic portal it has the potential to be, the arts of loving, governed by eros, or desire that engenders itself from within, might replace sexuality and its focus on identities and the constraints of identity politics.

Bisexuality has had an important role in bringing about this awareness, even as bisexuality as a term and a way of knowing has often been elided or ignored by academics, historians, and various queer communities. To trace both this role and this elision, it is worth going back to the 1970s, when many of today’s epistemic paradigms were instituted. In 1973, the practice of sexual love between persons of the same gender, commonly known as “homosexuality,” was officially removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II; American Psychiatric Association, 1974), the main book used by the medical profession to diagnose mental illnesses in the United States and its territories. This significant step toward equality in sexual diversity was achieved largely through the multilateral action of the women’s and the gay and lesbian sexual liberation movements, with the latter best remembered for its igniting event, the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City (Faderman, 1992). However, many militants and activists in these movements actually were neither gay nor lesbian per se. They would have more accurately been described as bisexual and/or transgender people (Angelides, 2001, pp. 107–131). They were not exclusively identified as gay, but rather advocated for the essential bisexuality and polymorphous perversity of all people. They fought to resist what scholar and poet Adrienne Rich (1993) called a regime of “compulsory heterosexuality.”

In the legal and juridico-medical literature of the time, however, the emphasis seemed to be on depathologizing and decriminalizing homosexuality as opposed to promoting bisexuality. During the years of the sexual liberation movement, the DSM that had heretofore constructed “homosexuality” as a certifiable mental disease replaced this construct with intermediate categories, including “sexual orientation disturbance,” and “ego-dystonic homosexuality.” The presumptive disease was finally eliminated from the manual in 1987 (Spitzer, 1981; Bohemer, 2002). The removal of the disease was frequently accompanied by the much desirable decriminalization of practices of love between people of the same gender. Throughout this transitional period, claiming a bisexual identity could have been politically dangerous to the movement in that it would have been subject to being interpreted as an admission that the desire to love those of the same gender was somewhat “curable.” Indeed, if it could have been shown that all homosexualities are somehow reducible to some form of bisexuality—that no form of same-sex desire is significant per se, or exclusive—then the decriminalization of homosexuality implied in the removal of the disease would have been a more tenuous imperative or a lower priority for the movement as a whole. In such a climate, pro-homosexual scholars and activists increasingly felt it best to keep the focus on homosexuality and ignore bisexuality.

Such downplaying or elision of bisexuality occurred on multiple other fronts throughout the late 20^th century. In relation to the women’s movements, and the role of women in cultural discourse, we are reminded of how lesbian feminist critics have variously accused first the lesbian and gay movement and then queer theory of focusing too much on gay male sexuality, while by and large feminism itself has had a vexed history in relation to the “lavender menace” and what Adrienne Rich calls the “lesbian continuum” (Jay, 1999; Rich, 1993). In the 1980s, this concept helped to unify women on both ends of the straight/queer divide. Yet when Rich emphasized the concept of a “continuum,” that continuum was marked as “lesbian”—not bisexual—even as it could not be concretely imagined without the inclusion of bi-erotic behavior, feelings, and subjectivities. Little room existed for a consideration of bisexual possibilities. From a behavioral science perspective, the history of sexual activity, as reported from Kinsey all the way to the present day, includes a significant amount of intimate and erotic interaction between men and women, between men and men, and between women and women—all at the same time (Hite, 1976/2003; Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953; Klein, 1993; Masters & Johnson, 1979). There is a wide variety of evidence that straight-identifying men and women engage members of their own sex erotically in a variety of ways, even if they do not label their activity as erotic or sexual or intimate. Gay and lesbians themselves are not without their own self-reported erotic and intimate investments in members of the opposite sex. At the same time, very few people use the term bisexual, and within gay and lesbian communities bisexuality is often figured as a “phase” or “cover” for a “truer” gay or lesbian identity.

Indeed, the elision of bisexual and bisexuality as discursive terms plays itself out in a variety of contexts shaping how individuals and groups imagine themselves and interact with one another. In a recent digital art piece, co-editor Jonathan Alexander attempted to provoke discussion of this complex state of erotic affairs by pairing eroticized clothing ads from Abercrombie and Fitch with Craigslist personals from straight-identifying men looking for “down low” sexual activity with other men. The piece, titled “dis|orientation: a straight closet,” underscores the gap in our culture between our sexual and intimate actions and the rather limited languages that we use to describe such actions. It also points out the disparity between action and identification; we often engage in bi-erotic behavior, engaging members of both sexes, while asserting a sexual identity oriented toward one sex or the other—not both².

However, many participants in various sexual rights movement, as well as many sexual players at large whose interests lay in the formation of societies more capable of accepting diversity in the practices and styles of love, eventually felt the need to be recognized by the movement for what they really were (Hutchins & Kaahumanu, 1991). In the late 1980s, the fear of AIDS grew strong in these communities, and bisexuals were often perceived as cause for special concern based on their alleged “promiscuity” (Lever, Kanouse, Rogers, Carson, & Hertz, 1992). The collusion of these enhanced fears and the sense of being excluded from queer communities propelled many bisexuals to agitate for a “movement.” Along with transgender people, bisexual people applied pressure toward inclusivity within gay and lesbian communities. As more bisexuals demanded to be acknowledged as part of these communities, the bisexual movement became an important force of change within them, with epicenters in metropolitan areas where the range of sexual diversities was already quite significant (Hemmings, 2002). This produced the new, more inclusive acronym LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) to which we are accustomed today.

Such “name games” signaled complex alliances and sometimes uneasy negotiations, but also a shared sense of lying outside normative, heterosexual culture—outside of what came to be described as heteronormativity, with its emphasis on monogamy and on viewing sexuality as necessarily a private and primarily reproductive function. In this context, the use of the word queer resurfaced as a potential way to mark LGBT people as sharing a common antipathy toward, or at least critique of, the heteronormative imperative. The adjective queer connotes what comes across as odd, unconventional, curious. It had historically been used as a slur to demean those whose practices of love were suspected of not conforming to established rules. At this time, in the early 1990s, it was resurrected by LGBT people as a descriptor they could all share. A former insult was taken on with pride, as often happens in identity politics. This also produced a change in academic discourses; what had been constituted as Gay and Lesbian Studies, a field whose methodology had prioritized history and historicity, was complemented by a new, more theoretically inclined field—“queer theory.”

The project of queer theory, inspired in large part by Michel Foucault’s (1990) historicizing of sexuality and Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) understanding of performativity, de-naturalizes the sexual subject and sexual subjectivity. It offers us a rich entry into understanding the performativity of identity as it is often based on and conflated with sexuality. At the same time, queer theory’s emphasis on theory as opposed to history has resulted in the marginalization from academic discourse of amorous practices that happen in real time and are better described as bisexual or bi-erotic; studies of bisexuality are often limited to merely physiological observations and statistics (Angelides, 2001). Put another way, queer theory has focused considerable attention on deconstructing identities, but it has not yet significantly theorized the flows of desires—particularly desires that do not confine themselves to same-sex practices. More to the point, the emergence of bisexual movements, in the 1970s and in the AIDS era, has met significant resistance from gay rights organizations and the larger heteronormative culture. The cultural richness of these movements indicate that without the due consideration of bisexuality that this collection proposes, queer theory’s historical analyses will be either incomplete or flawed, or both.

Indeed, in the vernacular, everyday cultures at large that nurture LGBT communities, the cultural trope of bisexuality has been increasingly deployed in multiple modes, including bisexual practices, politics, identities, communities, and epistemologies—even if not always positively (Garber, 1995; Storr, 1999). For instance, while bisexuality is somewhat more visible in mainstream culture, more often it is perceived either as a specter of disease in the context of the AIDS crisis, or as a specter of a potentially nonnormative nonmonogamy that compromises the credibility of gay activism around marriage equality rights. Yet when brought to bear on the critiques of heteronormativity in which queer theory is invested, bisexuality ends up querying the sustainability of all that goes along with heteronormativity, including compulsory monosexuality and monogamy and their attendant surveillance systems. Even more broadly, bisexuality seems to point to how reductive the social construct of sexuality really is. We have observed a rhetorical gap between (bi)erotic action and (mono)identity assertion, and this suggests a persistence in binary thinking about sexuality. Queer theory is poised to critique this binary thinking, yet paradoxically it rarely considers how bisexuality and the persistence of bi-erotic desires might assist in, augment, or complicate such critique. Hence we must infer that the discursive gap between “bisexuality,” as a practice of love shared by players in many erotic communities, and “queer theory,” as a practice of knowledge situated in academe, is what has produced the lamentable separation between the practices of love in some amorous and erotic communities and the production of certifiable knowledge about those loves—a gap this volume intends to bridge.

BISEXUAL THEORY? A QUEER PATH TO KNOWLEDGE

Two significant texts published in the last decade have initiated the conversation between queer theory and bisexuality, Steven Angelides’ A History of Bisexuality (2001), and Clare Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces (2002). Many of the chapters in this book use Angelides’ and Hemmings’ texts as reference points, taking up their positions, arguing their assertions, and dissenting from their claims. We offer here a brief account of both works, as a way to introduce our insights into the larger questions at the heart of this collection. In particular, we note how Angelides and Hemmings attempt to figure bisexual love as a mode of knowledge, an intimate way of knowing the self, the “other,” and everything in-between, that can open up new epistemological vistas on the formations of subjectivity and the practices of intimacy.

Steven Angelides’ A History of Bisexuality offers a much-needed intervention both in our thinking about the history of what the modern era knows as sexuality and in our theorizing about the development of sexual identity categories. Angelides’ book helps us see what has been lost in the modern scientific classification of sexual behavior (beginning at least with late 19^th-century sexology), and what a postmodern perspective can recuperate for itself and humanity’s future, particularly in the ways of fostering a positive, sustainable notion of the multiply intimate and erotic. Specifically, Angelides uses deconstructive strategies and a Foucauldian approach to the history of sexuality to trace the development of the category of bisexuality, from psychoanalytical and sexological theories at the end of the 19^th century, through post-war gay liberation, to queer politics at the end of the 20^th century. Angelides rightly points out how seemingly central bisexuality was, conceptually, to early psychoanalytic and sexological theory. For instance, Freud’s theories of polymorphous perversity and naturally innate bisexuality serve as foundations for his theories of sexuality, even as they ultimately position bisexuality as the “immature” (e.g., “perverse”) state out of which sexual maturity (i.e., heterosexuality) must arise. Angelides shows how bisexuality is cast in this role both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, namely in relation to the genesis of each individual and that of the species. From this starting point, Angelides deftly demonstrates how a series of controlling binary oppositions—man and woman, but also, fairly quickly, heterosexual and homosexual—come to dominate theoretical, and cultural as well as political, constructions of sexuality and sexual identity.

In the process, bisexuality becomes, in Angelides’ accounting, a kind of “ghostly other” to sexuality itself—there in the shadowy background, but ultimately something that must be denied in the pursuit of more mature sexual expressions. The persistence of bisexuality in this ghostly role embodies cultural fears that “sexuality,” per se, may not exist, that it may be nothing but a cultural construct that helps modern institutions control people’s multiple talents and possibilities for love. Even with the rise of gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, when some gay liberationists advocated a “bisexual chic” or a sexual freedom that would return us to our original polymorphousness, bisexuality never seemed to gain traction, either as an identity or a community or even a politics. Consider, for instance, Rich’s “lesbian continuum,” which seemed to acknowledge, explicitly, like Kinsey’s famous scale, a continuum of sexual, erotic, and intimate interest, from the fully lesbian to the singularly straight. In the hands of gay and lesbian activists and thinkers, however, only two poles become the focus of attention—gay and straight. The minoritizing logics of identity politics figure “gayness” as another identity, like straightness, and the in-between status of bisexuality seems to question too much the non-threatening innateness upon which much of gay politicking came to depend: we’re born this way, after all, so please don’t discriminate. Bisexuality, by comparison, seemed too much the sexuality “of choice,” and particularly with the advent of AIDS, it came to be seen as the dangerous sexuality that vectored disease from promiscuous homosexuals to an otherwise pristine suburbia. So while bisexuality seemed to be the “centerpiece” of much of gay liberationist thinking, it was a bisexuality in name only—a very theoretical bisexuality.

Angelides (2001) attempts to ascertain what happens to our theories and understanding of sexuality when we take bisexuality much more seriously. He argues that “[t]racking the epistemic path of bisexuality has been for me one way of bringing into clearer view the failure of our epistemology of sexua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Bisexuality and Queer Theory: An Introduction
• Part I: Theories
• Part II: Readings
• Part III: Socialities
• Part IV: Responses
• Index