Doing Sexuality: How Married Bisexual, Queer, and Pansexual People Navigate Passing and Erasure

ABSTRACT

Society’s binary understanding of gender and sexuality often render the identities of bisexual, queer, and pansexual (bi+) people invisible in everyday interactions. Furthermore, when a bi+ person gets married, they are often mistakenly presumed to have “made a choice” regarding their sexual preference or identity. What are the consequences – both negative and positive – of this perception? Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with 23 married bi+ individuals, this research extends the theory of doing gender to the context of doing sexuality to explore if and how married bi+ people attempt to make their sexual identities known in everyday interactions. Findings suggest that being married increased feelings of bisexual erasure. However, married bi+ people who were presumed by others to be heterosexual during interactions frequently reported taking advantage of passing to situationally avoid prejudice or discrimination. Applying a queer theoretical critique of heteronormativity and the binaries it reinforces, this research considers how increased visibility of married bi+ people could contribute to the deconstruction of gender and sexual binaries and the inequalities they create.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality
• bisexual
• marriage
• erasure
• passing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. From here on, we use the term mixed-gender marriage rather than man/woman marriage to accurately and respectfully represent our nonbinary participants. For example, Sawyer was assigned male at birth but now identifies as nonbinary and is married to a cis woman. While Sawyer acknowledged that others sex categorize him as male based on his masculine gender presentation, to call their marriage “man/woman” would discredit Sawyer’s gender identity. Similarly, Brook – who was assigned female at birth, identifies as nonbinary, and is married to a cis man – was also typically sex categorized by others as female, and therefore perceived to be in a man/woman relationship.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel J. Bartholomay

Daniel J. Bartholomay is an assistant professor of Sociology and Co-Coordinator of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to researching social inequalities and health disparities within the LGBT+ community, Bartholomay also studies pedagogical methods that promote equity and justice in higher education.

Meagan Pendleton

Meagan Pendleton is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. She received her BA in Sociology from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in 2022. Meagan's current research interests broadly include the study of inequalities related to gender, sexuality, and family. Her current projects explore bisexual identity formation and the sexual identity disclosure process.