Shady Characters, Untrustworthy Partners, and Promiscuous Sluts: Creating Bisexual Intimacies in the Face of Heteronormativity and Biphobia

Abstract

This article explores the question: what kind of relationship problems do bisexual people experience as a result bi-negative attitudes? It explores stereotypical representations of bisexuality focusing on bisexual identity, intimacy, and sexuality. Bisexuals are often cast as highly problematic or risky lovers or partners. Bisexual intimacies face erasure through invisibility, misrecognition through distortion, or condemnation through moral devaluation. The article locates the origin of common discourses on bisexual people's psychic deficiency, personal incapacity, and lack of loyalty in heteronormative and bi-negative conceptualizations of sexuality.

KEYWORDS:

• bisexuality
• identity
• intimacy
• sexuality
• relationships
• families
• biphobia
• bi-negativity
• heteronormativity

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for the feedback received in response to academic paper presentations on the issues that he deals with in this article. In particular, the author would like to thank the participants of the International Bisexual Research Conference in London (August 26, 2010) and the staff and postgraduate research students of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Hong Kong who attended a seminar presentation of mine at the Department of Sociology (June 26, 2010). The author would further like to thank Helen Hok-Sze Leung for stimulating conversations about the concept of bisexuality and Chiara Addis for her feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Christian Klesse is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University (U.K.). He has published widely on sexuality, intimacy, body modification, sexual politics and research methodology. He is author of The Spectre of Promiscuity. Gay Male and Bisexual Non-monogamies and Polyamories (Ashgate, 2007). He is co-editor of a special issue on Polyamory of Sexualities, 9(5) (December 2006). His articles appeared in many academic journals, including The Sociological Review, Sexualities, Body & Society, The Gay & Lesbian Psychology Review, Social Semiotics, Inter Alia and the ‘Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung.’

Notes

1. I am usually quite reluctant to use the term sexual orientation because it comes along with quite a heavy essentialist baggage, as revealed in the common usage of the concept in the fields of biology, psychology, law and human rights politics (Waites, 2009). However, because ‘sexual orientation’ continues to provide a powerful and influential paradigm for understanding sexual subjectivity, it is difficult to discard it.

2. More recent research puts a stronger emphasis on the possibility of consolidation and reconciliation (Buxton, 1994, 2001) with some authors emphasizing that partners frequently mobilize normative ideologies of romantic love to reach such settlements (Wolkomir, 2009).

3. There are indicators that this situation is slowly changing (M. Barker, Bowes-Catton, Iantaffi, Cassidy, & Brewer, 2008).

4. I put the term in single quotation marks, because it is a tricky enterprise to name a relationship ‘bisexual’ or ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian’ and ‘heterosexual’—at least, if not all participants identify in this way or consider their relationships within such terms.

5. Judith Butler's critique of gender and sexuality duality can be utilized to theorize bi-negativity, even if, as Clare Hemmings (2002) showed, some elements in Butler's theoretical argument around heteronormativity are inconsistent due to her lack of a thorough consideration of ‘bisexuality.’

6. The rejection of homosexuality and bisexuality is deeply engrained in many social settings and many people's worldview and psyche. This means that some friends and family may never be accepting of a bi (or queer) identity or a bi (or queer) way of life. This may be the source of painful separations.

7. I use the term kin work in a broadened and non-biological sense to account for alternate nonheteronormative forms of kinship in lesbian, gay male, bisexual, queer and gender-queer (so-called) ‘families of choice’ (Weston, 1991).

8. Same-sex marriage is currently only possible in the following countries: Belgium (2003), Spain (2005), Canada (2005), South Africa (2006), Norway (2009), and Sweden (2009). Many states have introduced other forms of legal recognition for same-sex relationships (or sometimes, more general, non-married couple relationships) which differ vastly in their legal details.