What's in a Name? Bisexuality, Transnational Sexuality Studies and Western Colonial Legacies

Abstract

This paper explores the role of bisexuality in transnational sexuality studies. The author argues that bisexuality is either absent, or inscribed as potential or behaviour, rather than identity. In the process, transnational sexuality studies reproduces bisexuality's historical role as facilitator of Western sexual oppositions, a role that also facilitates colonial distinctions between cultures as sexually civilised or sexually primitive. In addition, rendering bisexuality as potential or behaviour safeguards lesbian and gay subjects as de facto authors of queer studies transnationally. The author suggests ways of reframing transnational sexuality studies to address these problems.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Phil C. W. Chan for his support throughout, and to the Sexualities Reading Group at the Gender Institute, LSE, for helping clarify many of the thoughts in this paper.

Notes

1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1991), p.27.

2. See, e.g., Bi Academic Intervention (ed.), The Bisexual Imaginary: Representation, Identity and Desire (London: Cassell 1997); Sharon Morris and Merl Storr (eds), ‘Bisexual Special Issue’, Journal of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity, Vol.2, No.1 (1997); Maria Pramaggiore and Donald Hall (eds), Representing Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire (New York: New York University Press 1996).

3. For critiques of this position, see Amber Ault, ‘Hegemonic Discourse in an Oppositional Community: Lesbian Feminist Stigmatization of Bisexual Women’, in B. Beemyn and M. Eliason (eds), Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology (New York: New York University Press 1996), pp.204–16; Jo Eadie, ‘Activating Bisexuality: Towards a Bi/Sexual Politics’, in J. Bristow and A. Wilson (eds), Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Politics (London: Cassell 1993), pp.139–70; Ann Kaloski, ‘Returning to the Lesbian Bildungsroman: a Bisexual Reading (of) Nancy Toder's Choices’, in Bi Academic Intervention (note 2) pp.90–105; Paula Rust, Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics: Sex, Loyalty and Revolution (New York: New York University Press 1995).

4. Marjorie Garber, Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (London: Penguin 1995); Merl Storr (ed.), Bisexuality: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge 1999); Clare Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (New York: Routledge 2002).

5. For transgender studies critiques, see Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1998); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press 2005); Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Trannsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press 1998); and Susan Stryker, ‘Transgender Studies: Queer Theory's Evil Twin’, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol.10, No.2 (2004), pp.212–15. There are, of course, a range of possible reasons for the disparity in the take-up of bisexual and transgendered perspectives. The success of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, which favours drag as performative, must be one such factor. In addition, the distinction between transgender and transsexual has also enabled the former to denote gender ambiguity, and the latter gender identity, in ways that mean ‘trans studies’ can foreground both performativity and the importance of embodiment in critical ways. In contrast, there is no distinction in terminology between bisexuality as action or identity. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge 1990).

6. Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces (note 4); Clare Hemmings, ‘Waiting for No Man: Bisexual Femme Subjectivity and Cultural Repudiation’, in Ken Gelder (ed.), The Subcultures Reader (New York: Routledge 2005), pp.418–32; and Clare Hemmings, ‘Rescuing Lesbian Camp’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol.11, No.1/2 (2007), pp.175–82.

7. Malcolm Bowie's description of the competing definitions of bisexuality remains useful. Malcolm Bowie, ‘Bisexuality’, in E. Wright (ed.), Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1992), pp.26–31.

8. Judith Butler, ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’, in J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1997), pp.132–50.

9. Sigmund Freud (1905), ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, Volume 7. On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, in A. Richards (ed.), The Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin 1977), pp.31–169.

10. Merl Storr, ‘The Sexual Reproduction of “Race”: Bisexuality, History and Racialization’, in Bi Academic Intervention (note 2) pp.73–88. For more general accounts of the relationship between homosexuality and colonialism, see Siobhan Somerville, ‘Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body’, in R. N. Lancaster and M. di Leonardo (eds), The Gender Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy (New York: Routledge 1997), pp.37–52; and Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999).

11. Of course, there are feminist writers within humanities or social/political sciences who achieve this without a particular sexuality focus – Rey Chow and V. Spike Peterson, respectively, come to mind. But transnational sexuality studies' bridging is constitutive of the field rather than exceptional. Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2006); V. Spike Peterson, ‘How (the Meaning of) Gender Matters in Political Economy’, New Political Economy, Vol.10, No.4 (2005), pp.499–521.

12. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, ‘Dismantling Assumptions: Interrogating “Lesbian” Struggles for Identity and Survival in India and South Africa’, Signs, Vol.29, No.2 (2003), pp.491–516.

13. Theorists such as Jyoti Puri and Jon Binnie thus adapt Michel Foucault's delineation of the centrality of sexuality to the emergence of the subject of the modern state to postcolonial contexts. More directly, Laura Ann Stoler seeks to critically integrate his interrogation of sexuality with an analysis of colonialism. Jyoti Puri, ‘Sex, Sexuality and the Nation State’, in Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (New York: Routledge 1999), pp.25–42; Jon Binnie, The Globalization of Sexuality (London: Sage 2004); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol.I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books 1978); Laura Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1995).

14. See Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, in C. Stimpson and E. S. Person (eds), Women: Sex and Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980), pp.62–91; and Carole S. Vance, ‘Anthropology Rediscovers Sexuality: a Theoretical Comment’, in R. Parker and P. Aggleton (eds), Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader (London: University College Press 2002), pp.39–54.

15. Susie Jolly, ‘“Queering” Development: Exploring the Links Between Same Sex Sexualities, Gender, and Development’, Gender and Development, Vol.8, No.1 (2000), pp.78–88.

16. Thus Nancy Fraser and Martha Nussbaum address the relevance of sexuality for a nuanced politics of global justice. That said, mainstream theorists typically position sexuality as concerned with a politics of ‘recognition’, which is to say culture or identity, rather than political economy, marking one of the differences between the fields. The debate between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser in the late 1990s is understood as key to the outlining of both positions in this regard. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (New York: Routledge 1996); Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002); Judith Butler, ‘Merely Cultural’, Social Text, Vols.52/53 (1997), pp.265–77; Nancy Fraser, ‘Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: a Response to Judith Butler’, Social Text, Vols.52/53 (1997), pp.279–89.

17. See, e.g., Angela Y. Davis, ‘Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Racist’, in K.-K. Bhavnani (ed.), Feminism and Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), pp.50–64; Philippa Levine, ‘Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities’, Feminist Review, Vol.65 (2000), pp.5–21; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge 2003); Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London and New York: Routledge 2000).

18. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt’, in R. N. Lancaster and M. di Leonardo (eds), The Gender Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy (New York: Routledge 1997), p.502; M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005); and Almas Sayeed, ‘Making Political Hay of Sex and Slavery: Kansas Conservatism, Feminism and the Global Regulation of Sexual Moralities’, Feminist Review, Vol.83 (2006), pp.119–31.

19. The rape and torture of women and men as part of strategies of ethnic cleansing in conflict situations has been extensively discussed in public and theoretical arenas. Although the failure to be an appropriate sexual citizen is forced rather than chosen here, national humiliation is both aim and result. See, in particular, Katrina Lee Koo, ‘Confronting Disciplinary Blindness: Women, War and Rape in the International Politics of Security’, Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol.37, No.3 (2002), pp.525–36; Wendy Bracewell, ‘Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol.6, No.4 (2000), pp.563–90; Kirsten Campbell, ‘Legal Memories: Sexual Assault, Memory and International Humanitarian Law’, Signs, Vol.28, No.1 (2002), pp.149–78.

20. Peter A. Jackson, ‘Pre-Gay, Post-Queer: Thai Perspectives on Proliferating Gender/Sex Diversity in Asia’, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol.40, No.3/4 (2001), pp.1–25. As Phil C. W. Chan notes in relation to Hong Kong in his paper in this Special Double Issue, there is a particular irony in postcolonial nation-states criminalising homosexuality when very often it was colonial administrations that introduced such legal sanctions. In this respect, it would make more sense for postcolonial nations to refer to criminalisation, rather than homosexuality, as Western: Phil C. W. Chan, ‘Same-Sex Marriage/Constitutionalism and their Centrality to Equality Rights in Hong Kong: A Comparative–Socio-Legal Appraisal’, in this Special Double Issue, pp.33–84.

21. Vincanne Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg, ‘Introduction’, in V. Adams and A. L. Pigg (eds), Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005), p.9.

22. I put ‘queer’ in inverted commas when part of transnational ‘queer’ studies to indicate the contested nature of the proper name for this project.

23. Vance (note 14).

24. Mark McLelland, ‘Is There a Japanese “Gay Identity”?’, Culture, Health and Sexuality, Vol.2, No.4 (2000), pp.459–72.

25. Vance (note 14) p.45.

26. See Jackson (note 20); Neville Hoad, ‘Arrested Development’, Postcolonial Studies, Vol.3, No.2 (2000), pp.133–58.

27. Swarr and Nagar (note 12) p.514.

28. Mark Chiang, ‘Coming Out into the Global System: Postmodern Patriarchies and Transnational Sexualities in The Wedding Banquet’, in D. L. Eng and A. Y. Hom (eds), Q and A: Queer in Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1998), pp.374–96; Martin F. Manalansan IV, ‘In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Transnational Dilemma’, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol.2 (1995), pp.425–38.

29. See variously Robert A. Padgug, ‘Sexual Matters: on Conceptualizing Sexuality in History’, Radical History Review, Vol.20 (1979), pp.3–23; Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Sexuality and the Historian’, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman 1989), pp.1–18; Jennifer Terry, ‘Theorizing Deviant Historiography’, Differences, Vol.3, No.2 (1991), pp.53–71; Terry, An American Obsession (note 10). In relation to these problems as they attend the historicisation of bisexuality, see Marjorie Garber, Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (London: Penguin 1995); and Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2001).

30. Denis Altman's work on the global nature of gay identity and social movements is characteristic of this trend: Denis Altman, ‘On Global Queering’, Australian Humanities Review, Vol.2, July–August (1996), http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-July-1996/altman.html Denis Altman, ‘Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities’, Social Text, Vol.48 (1996), pp.77–84; and Altman, Global Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2001). In this context, ‘gay’ signals both an identity-to-come or in process and a space of sexual freedom associated with Western contexts. As Peter Jackson (note 20) p.19, caustically notes, the presumption is that ‘“prehistoric” or inchoate sexuality may one day emerge into the light of global discursive history’.

31. Altman, ‘On Global Queering’ (note 30).

32. Rich (note 14).

33. Chiang (note 28).

34. Ibid. p.386. There is a growing body of literature on lesbian and gay tourism, which covers a range of perspectives from celebratory: e.g. Marie Cieri, ‘Between Being and Looking: Queer Tourism Promotion and Lesbian Social Space in Greater Philadelphia’, ACME: International E-Journal for Cultural Geographies, Vol.2, No.2 (2003), pp.147–66 – to condemnatory: e.g. Jasbir Kuar Puar, ‘Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel and Globalization’, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol.8, No.1/2 (2002), pp.107–37. This resonates with writing on sex tourism concerned with sexual practices (between client and provider) as formative of contested sexual subjectivities within globalisation (see three papers on this issue in the recent special issue of Feminist Review on ‘Sexual Moralities’, Vol.83 (2006): Esther Bott, ‘Pole Position: How Lapdancing Became Respectable’, pp.23–41; Julia O'Connell Davidson, ‘Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand Up?’, pp.4–22; Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, ‘Female Sexual Tourism: a Contradiction in Terms?’, pp.42–59.

35. Lionel Cantú Jr, Eithne Luibhéid and Minna Stern, ‘Well-Founded Fear: Political Asylum and the Boundaries of Sexual Identity in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands’, in E. Luibhéid and L. Cantú Jr (eds), Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship and Border Crossings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2005), pp.64–6.

36. Ibid. p.66. The authors further suggest that the construction of the American legal system as saviour obscures the lack of political, social and cultural rights of gay men in the United States.

37. Vivien W. Ng, ‘Looking for Lesbians in Chinese History’, in M. Duberman (ed.), A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press 1997), pp.199–204; Mariam Fraser, ‘Classing Queer: Politics in Competition’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.16, No.2 (1991), pp.107–31. Lisa Adkins takes up Mariam Fraser's critique of Nancy Fraser's ‘politics of recognition’ model in this regard, in her analysis of lesbian and gay negotiations of identity within service economies: Lisa Adkins, ‘Sexuality and Economy: Historicisation vs Deconstruction’, Australian Feminist Studies, Vol.17, No.37 (2002), pp.31–41.

38. Paul Boyce, ‘Moral Ambivalence and Irregular Practices: Contextualizing Male-to-Male Sexualities in Calcutta/India’, Feminist Review, Vol.83 (2006), pp.79–98.

39. Ng (note 37).

40. Boyce, ‘Moral Ambivalence’ (note 38) p.84. James N. Green makes a similar argument in his work on Brazil, where nineteenth century European medico-moral constructions of sexual identity circulated in a context that already had ‘same-sex erotic subcultures and identities’. Green and Boyce underscore the ways in which a queer developmental model (with Western gay identity as its presumed culmination) necessarily forgets the ways in which colonisation, trade and migration have always had an impact on the sexual construction of a nation. James N. Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999), p.8.

41. Jackson (note 20) p.3; Martin F. Manalansan IV, ‘Migrancy, Modernity, Mobility: Quotidian Struggles and Queer Diasporic Intimacy’, in E. Luibhéid and L. Cantú Jr (note 35) pp.146–60.

42. Jennifer Robertson, Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader (Oxford: Blackwell 2004).

43. Sedgwick (note 1); Butler, Gender Trouble (note 5).

44. Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press 1989), was paradigmatic in this regard. More recent work on queer diasporas in the United States continues this queer focus of thinking race, ethnicity and sexuality together. Indicative work includes: Gayatri Gopinath, ‘Funny Boys and Girls: Notes on a Queer South Asian Planet’, in R. Leong (ed.), Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience (London: Routledge 1996), pp.119–27; Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desire: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005); David L. Eng, ‘Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies’, Social Text, Vol.15, No.3/4 (1997), pp.31–52; Eng and Hom (note 28); John C. Hawley (ed.), Postcolonial Queer: Theoretical Intersections (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 2001); Cindy Patton and Benigno Sãnchez-Eppler (eds), Queer Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2000). It should be noted that the majority of this material focuses on Asian or Latin American, rather than African, diasporas within the United States. E. Patrick Johnson's work on ‘Quare’ studies is one exception, and its critique of ‘queer studies’ from an African diasporic perspective also suggests why this might be the case: E. Patrick Johnson, ‘“Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from my Grandmother’, Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol.21, No.1 (2001), pp.1–25.

45. Jolly (note 15); Paul Boyce, ‘Men who have Sex with Men in Calcutta: Gender, Discourse and Anthropology’ (PhD Dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, 2004).

46. Sasho A. Lambevski, ‘Suck My Nation – Masculinity, Ethnicity and the Politics of (Homo)sex’, Sexualities, Vol.2, No.4 (1999), pp.397–419.

47. Jyoti Puri, ‘Stakes and States: Sexual Discourses from New Delhi’, Feminist Review, Vol.83 (2006), pp.139–48.

48. Eithne Luibhéid, ‘Introduction: Queering, Migration and Citizenship’, in E. Luibhéid and L. Cantú Jr (note 35) pp.ix–xlvi.

49. Arvind Narrain, Queer: Despised Sexuality, Law and Social Change (India: Books for Change Press 2004), p.2.

50. Alyssa Howe, ‘Undressing the Universal Queer Subject: Nicaraguan Activism and Transnational Identity’, City and Society, Vol.XIV, No.2 (2002), pp.237–79.

51. Ian Barnard, ‘Queer Race’, Social Semiotics, Vol.9, No.2 (1999), pp.199–212.

52. Jasbir Kuar Puar, ‘Global Circuits: Transnational Sexualities in Trinidad’, Signs, Vol.26, No.4 (2001), pp.1039–66.

53. Barnard (note 51) p.208.

54. Sedgwick (note 1) pp.25–6.

55. Butler, Gender Trouble (note 5).

56. Michael du Plessis, ‘Blatantly Bisexual; or, Unthinking Queer Theory’, in Hall and Pramaggiore (note 2) pp.19–54; Garber (note 4); Rust (note 3); Rebecca Kaplan, ‘Your Fence is Sitting on Me: the Hazards of Binary Thinking’, in N. Tucker (ed.), Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions (New York: The Haworth Press 1995), pp.267–80.

57. See, e.g., Brenda Marie Blasingame, ‘The Roots of Biphobia: Racism and Internalized Heterosexism’, in E. R. Weise (ed.), Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism (Seattle: Seal Press 1992) pp.47–53; Elias Farajajé-Jones, ‘Fluid Desire: Race, HIV/AIDS, and Bisexual Politics’, in Tucker (note 56) pp.119–21.

58. Garber (note 4); Eva Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press 2002); Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, Women and Bisexuality: A Global Perspective (New York: Haworth Press 2003).

59. Ng (note 37); Ara Wilson, The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City (Berkeley: University of California Press 2004); Y. Antonia Chao ‘Drink, Stories, Penis, and Breasts: Lesbian Tomboys in Taiwan from the 1960s to the 1990s’, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol.40, No.3/4 (2001), pp.185–209; Swarr and Nagar (note 12).

60. Binnie (note 13).

61. Puar, ‘Global Circuits’ (note 52); Jackson (note 20).

62. This assurance about Western sexual categories is not only a problem of transnational ‘queer’ studies, of course. Shelley Budgeon and Sasha Roseneil perform something of the same sleight of hand in their work on British cultures of intimacy, mentioning bisexuals as part of families at one point, but continuing to reinforce the assumption throughout that heterosexual and homosexual desire, identity and behaviour are coextensive and mutually exclusive. Shelley Budgeon and Sasha Roseneil, ‘Cultures of Intimacy and Care Beyond the Family: Personal Life and Social Change in the Early Twenty First Century’, Current Sociology, Vol.52, No.2 (2000), pp.135–59.

63. Jackson (note 20) p.9.

64. See also Alisa Solomon, ‘Strike a Pose’, Village Voice, November (1991), pp.13–19.

65. As Amber Ault (note 3) p.206, notes, queer theory ‘rescues lesbianism from [a psychoanalytic] apolitical abyss but leaves bisexuality mired there’.

66. McLelland (note 24) p.463. Chao (note 59) effects a similar gesture, subtitling her article on sexual practices among women ‘Lesbian Tomboys in Taiwan’, despite none of her informants ever using the term to describe their own behaviour or subjectivity.

67. McLelland (note 24) p.464.

68. Ibid. p.464.

69. Ibid. p.465.

70. Gillian A. Dunne, ‘The Lady Vanishes? Reflections on the Experiences of Married and Divorced Non-Heterosexual Fathers’, Sociological Research Online, Vol.6, No.3 (2001), http://www.socresonline.org.uk/6/3/dunne.html.

71. Boyce, ‘Moral Ambivalence’ (note 38) p.23.

72. This question of ‘the burden of representation’ has been raised by numerous theorists, perhaps most canonically by Gayatri Spivak, who cautions against the Western intellectual tendency to expect ‘the other’ to do the work of difference. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999); Tobias Hecht, After Life: an Ethnographic Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2006).

73. Gayatri Reddy, ‘Geographies of Contagion: Hijras, Kothis, and the Politics of Sexual Marginality in Hyderabad’, Anthropology and Medicine, Vol.12, No.3 (2005), pp.255–70.

74. While the term MSM would seem to be the ultimate neutral description of behaviour, its use within international public health is now so widespread that it too has been taken up as an identity marker by sexual subjects wanting to access resources. Boyce, PhD Dissertation (note 45).

75. Richard Parker, ‘Male Prostitution, Bisexual Behaviour and HIV Transmission in Urban Brazil’, in Sexual Behaviour and Networking: Anthropological and Socio-cultural Studies on the Transmission of HIV (Liege, Belgium: International Union for the Scientific Study of Population 1992), pp.109–22; Rob Tielman, Manuel Carballo and Aart Hendriks (eds), Bisexuality and HIV/AIDS: A Global Perspective (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books 1991).

76. Peter Aggleton (ed.), Bisexualities and AIDS: International Perspectives (London: Taylor & Francis 1996).

77. Peter Aggleton, ‘Introduction’, in Aggleton (note 76) pp.1–2.

78. Shivananda Khan, ‘Under the Blanket: Bisexualities and AIDS in India’, in Aggleton (note 76) pp.161–77; Richard Parker, ‘Bisexuality and HIV/AIDS in Brazil’, in Aggleton (note 76) p.151.

79. Parker (note 78) p.151.

80. Aggleton, ‘Introduction’ (note 77) p.1.

81. Parker (note 78).

82. Suiming Pan with Peter Aggleton, ‘Male Homosexual Behaviour and HIV Related Risk in China’, in Aggleton (note 76) pp.178–90.

83. As Miguel A. Munoz-Laboy suggests in the context of Latino male populations in the United States, ‘male bisexuality has been studied for the most part with a focus on men who have sex with men (MSM) and with little attention to sexual desire’: Miguel A. Munoz-Laboy, ‘Beyond “MSM”: Sexual Desire among Bisexually-active Latino Men in New York City’, Sexualities, Vol.7, No.1 (2004), pp.55–80.

84. Ana Luisa Liguori, M. Gonzalez Bloch and Peter Aggleton, ‘Bisexual Communities and Culture in Costa Rica’, in Aggleton (note 76) pp.76–98.

85. Green (note 40) p.7.

86. Altman, ‘Rupture or Continuity?’ (note 30) p.88.

87. For bisexual critiques of this position, see Eadie (note 3); Kaloski (note 3); Stacey Young, ‘Bisexuality, Lesbian and Gay Communities, and the Limits of Identity Politics’, in Tucker (note 56) pp.219–28.

88. Altman, ‘Rupture or Continuity?’ (note 30) p.89.

89. In addition to MSM or bisexual behaviour, a common way of seeming to avoid sexual imposition is the anthropological cliché of active/passive engendering. Very often, anthropologists, policy makers and queer theorists describe same-sex behaviour in this gendered way as though this bore no relation to the Western oppositional categories of heterosexual/homosexual. However, theorising behavioural bisexuality in the way I have been doing here as racialised and gendered suggests that active/passive and masculine/feminine oppositions are also central to ideas about the development of modern sexual identities.

90. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press 1985).

91. This is a similar point to one Amal Treacher and I make in our editorial ‘Everyday Struggling’: Clare Hemmings and Amal Treacher, ‘Everyday Struggling’, Feminist Review, Vol.82 (2006), pp.1–5.

92. Robyn Wiegman suggests further that we need to challenge the assumption that we know what ‘sex’ is in the first place, let alone what ‘it’ means to people, nationally or transnationally: Robyn Wiegman, ‘Interchanges: Heteronormativity and the Desire for Gender’, Feminist Theory, Vol.7, No.1 (2006), pp.89–103.