Bisexuality is invisible, outside and inside the LGTBIQA+ collective. Critiques are needed in order to study, actualize and reframe concepts, yet few papers focus on bisexuality alone. When bisexuality was firstly explained, who did it and from which standpoint? What knowledge – imagery, bodies, and practices– fluctuated in its understanding, and in who's speech?
In this article, I explore bisexuality as both: sexual orientation and identity, and try to explain why, despite all critiques thrown into the grammatical implications of the word itself, there is a need to re-significate it within all its different ways of living and experiencing it.
The concept 'CompHet' (or compulsory heterosexuality), known better amongst queer people, refers to the fact that heterosexuality is assumed and enforced upon people by patriarchal and heteronormative societies. In that paradigm, anyone whose sexuality diverges from the straight category becomes dissident or deviant.
CompHet is a term rather used in lesbian circles when assumed bisexuals or straight simply because some might have dated a man in the past or are dating a man today. But it also affects queer men, even if it does in a different way. Bisexual men are usually labeled as homosexuals when dating other men. However, does that even enable the non-binary identity to exist? And furthermore, who said sexuality or gender could be assumed?
The truth is that not all couples from the same gender are formed by homosexual or lesbian people, nor all couples from different gender are composed of straight people. Even if today being lesbian or gay is widely more accepted than being bisexual, the main problem with compulsory heterosexuality is that sexual orientations (as well as gender or sexual identities) are conceived in a binary framework and are assumed rather than asked by whoever claims to experience them.
Sexuality (as gender) is not a fixed state; but rather a fluid one. So assesments of bisexual people as "indecisive", "fake feminists or queers", "hypersexualized" and "confused" reinforce this static archetype. Thus far, being "mature" is being able to label oneself, to fit into a given category. But what happens when one's identity or sexuality simply diverts from such a choice?
Bi-sex doesn't simply mean 'two sex'
June Jordan, an American bisexual activist, writes in A New Politics of Sexuality (1996): "bisexuality means that I am free and that I have as many possibilities to desire and love a woman than to desire and love a man. And what is the problem of that? That when we are free, we become un-predictable and un-controllable". This definition arrived in a moment where, inside the LGTBIQA+ collective, being bisexual was simply 'not enough'. It meant being 'partly' queer, a definition still comprised in the CompHet ideas and imaginary. But this description only contemplated bisexuality in binary terms, and burried all possibilities to conceive bisexuality in itself as an identity.
Bisexuality has been studied and described from all kinds of different perspectives. Yet not enough. On the other hand, there are plenty of studies, papers and investigations on homosexuality, lesbianism, and heterosexuality. In the vast majority of sexuality researches, bisexuality is understood as the opposite of monosexuality, which stands for the preference for 'only' one gender or sex.
During the past decades, labels such as 'homocurious' or 'heterocurious' have arisen; yet all historical definitions of bisexuality come with grammatical disclosures. One of the main critiques of the word bisexual is that, in itself, it implies gender binarism – when using the prefix 'bi' as a 'double'. However, the existence of bisexuality already challenges the western binarisms of 'gay' vs 'homo'; as well as the given biological and physiological binarisms. Bisexuality is now far from the 'two in one' imaginary that's been historically described because the sum of two parts will always give rise to something totally anew.
In a sense, bisexuality, rather than implying the conjunctions of 'either/or', entails 'both/and'. It doesn't entail being half-lesbian/gay, but rather a sexual orientation in itself, with its own characteristics, different experiences and oppressions. No one is 50% gay and 50% lesbian, but rather 100% bisexual (or 100% asexual, for instance). Likewise, beyond the known heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, and bisexuality, there are even more categories given (and claimed) by other members of the LGTBIQA+ community, like asexuality, pansexuality, demisexuality or polysexuality.
Without a clear distinction of what's a 'woman' or a 'man', there can not be a clear distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality
Without a clear distinction of what's a 'woman' or a 'man', there can not be a clear distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality. In that sense, bisexuality breaks this gender binarism. Simone De Beauvoir claimed that the final objective of the feminist revolution wasn't anymore about erradicating all 'masculine' privilege, but rather the removal of the same distinction amongst sexes. The feminist revolution would arrive, then, when genital differences between human beings are not important anymore.
Bisexuality became a political identity with feminist movements, specially after the third-wave (1960s & 1970s). But even if that helped the bisexual community to partner up with queer and feminist activists because of the shared agenda, there was still a sense of abandonment towards the bisexual male. Today this can even jump into the invisibilization of trans and nonbinary identities who identify with bisexuality as their sexual orientation.
Decades before Jordan's definition of bisexuality was written, many theorists explored the subject as an identity and a biological status, where rather than simply a sexual orientation that broke all conceived standards, people born as what we today call intersexuality also fit into the bisex category. Even if labels are put in order to disappear in the future, they help us organize the chaos of uncertainty, and to make visible the experiences from people's identity. But labels are personal and personal is political, as the Radical Feminist activist Kate Millet established. This widely known feminist lemma proposed a debate on the way sexuality; romantic love; maternity; nuclear family organization; violence against women; abortion, and ComPhet were understood. However, RadFem entails a biphobic view on bisexuality, especially amongst the proposal of political lesbianism as the tool to break free from patriarchal norms.
Bisexuality needs to be re-framed and understood as a complete and fluid sexuality and identity in itself, where any form of binarism is far from its transforming definition
It wasn't until 1990 that the bisexual manifest became a reality. Amongst its claims, the invisibilization inside the LGB collective was brought into the conversation. Bisexuality had been historically marginalized and still is. Because of the categorical binary imposition (male/female, straight/homo...), bisexuality had been widely avoided in LGBTQA+ activism and discourses. And all revindications that the 30-year-old bisex manifesto did are still in force. In this manifest, for instance, monosexuality was criticized as being part of the heterosexist perception that oppresses homosexual people and negates the existence of bisexuality. Monosexuality understood as Compulsory heterosexuality, but also as the binary way of comprehending the world.
Biphobia in LGTBIQA+ activism
The term 'Internalized Biphobia' is commonly thought of as the non-acceptance of one's own sexual orientation and the impossibility to feel proudness out of it. However, internalized biphobia also entails the constant internal questioning of weather one is lesbian/gay or straight; the feeling that bisexual people don't belong to queer spaces and activism; the false belief that in order to validate bisexuality, a person has to date/have sexual interaction with people from more than one gender identity; and even the feeling that having a relationship that could be read as normative (a.k.a. straight) entails straightness and thus, invalidates one's identity as bisexual.
Because of the lack of bisexual references and the internalized biphobia, alongside the discrimination and constant invisibilization of bisexuality in and outside the LGTBIQA+ collective and activism, bisexual people often feel their sexual orientation is less important than other orientations. In order to reframe the concept and to thrive for a bisex-inclusive queer activism, bisexuality needs to be understood as a complete and fluid sexuality and identity in itself, where any form of binarism is far from its transforming definition. Because despite bisexuality being widely understood under those binary lens, the fluidity that it entails goes beyond the given binarism and further includes other ways of experiencing own's identity and sexuality.
Towards a trans-inclusive and non-binary feminist activism
Film and Media Professor on gender & sexuality studies Maria Parmaggiore proposes in BI-ntroduction: Epistemologies of a fence (1996) another way of understanding sexuality that entails a radical change in the perception of all 'deviant' identities. Rather than "coming out of the closet" as queer, she proposes a "fence". This understanding erases all binarisms entailed in sexuality and enhances the possibility of fluidity. While a closet has doors and either one is inside or outside of it, a fence allows mobility and de-tatches any static meaning or form of sexuality. One could either be moving 'in' or 'out' of that fence, or in the bisexual case, one could be "fence-sitting": sitting on top of that fence.
Regardless of years of bisexual activism trying to break through the imposed gender and sexual binarisms, there is still a reticence towards accepting non-binary identities. This has further increased the discrimination towards trans people, and also misled bisexual activism framed into a binary definition. As sexuality is fluid (like the all movements allowed from inside to outside of a fence), so is gender. Maybe art was the variable that allowed the limits of what is considered 'normal' to slip away, and that desguised the possibility of inhabiting outside of the norm.
In any case, the existence of 'deviant' people will always put in question the status quo. Even if the new paradigm is more and more trans and bisex-inclusive, it is exhausting for people who identify as queer to constantly give explanations of their identity. Perhaps, as De Beauvoir pointed out, when genitalia is not important anymore, bisexuality will be finally understood as fluid and complete sexuality, rather than an unchangeable orientation. But in the meanwhile, it is crucial to further discuss how can LGTBIQA+ activism surpass the universal (identity) to the particular (expression). Might the answer reside in making the in(bi)sible, visible.
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