Reclaiming Sexual Difference: What Queer Theory Can't Tell Us about Sexuality

Abstract

This article argues that both queer theory's erasure of bisexuality and the masculine bias within the field can be attributed to scholars’ overreliance on, and problematic extension of, the Foucauldian theory of sexuality that has come to dominate the field of sexuality studies. By ignoring the fundamental antagonism between sexuality and meaning and overlooking not gender but sexual difference (i.e., the internal, nonsymbolizable alterity within all subjects), Foucauldian-influenced queer critics are unable to conceive of a subject whose constitution does not depend upon the repudiation of difference and the disavowal of internal and symbolic limits. Drawing on a psychoanalytic conceptualization of femininity, this article theorizes bisexual subjectivity and sexuality as a distinct lived relation to the limits of symbolic identity and knowledge, and attempts to show how the concept of sexual difference is critical if bisexual theorists are to challenge the logic of the universal that accounts for the erasure of bisexuality.

Keywords:

• bisexuality
• sexual difference
• psychoanalysis
• Michel Foucault
• Judith Butler
• Jacques Lacan
• femininity

The erasure of bisexuality within queer theory has produced two distinct yet sometimes overlapping responses from theorists working within the field of bisexual studies. ¹ Although many scholars have focused on affirming bisexuality as a legitimate sexual identity that calls into question the hetero–homosexual binary that structures conceptualizations of sexuality, others have chosen to separate the theorization of bisexuality from bisexual identity and to focus instead on how bisexual meaning is constructed in various discursive contexts and the effects produced by these meanings. Often, this latter approach dovetails with the former, such as when scholars address how various theories tend to reinforce the myth of bisexuals’ nonexistence by relegating bisexuality to either all subjects’ prehistory or deferring its arrival to a utopian future—that is, by placing bisexuality, as Michael du Plessis put it, “in any time except the present” such that “no one is bisexual here and now” (1996, p. 29). ² Indeed, bisexual theorists’ focus on how bisexual meaning is constructed is generally motivated by the desire to expand the range of meanings attributed to bisexuality in ways that make bisexual identity more visible and viable. Thus, while Clare Hemmings (2002) is certainly correct to note that “disagreements between identity and epistemology approaches to theorizing bisexuality are partly what structure ‘bisexual studies,’” the very fact that these two approaches often dovetail together so neatly suggest that these approaches are not necessarily conflicting or even that distinct (p. 22).

Rather, considered separately and together, both approaches and the disagreements over them indicate that bisexual theorists today often share some of the very same problematic assumptions about the relationship among sexuality, identity and meaning/knowledge that are responsible not only for the elision of bisexuality within queer theory, but also for the continually eroding relationship between queer theory and feminism. Although feminist and bisexual theorists often attribute queer theory's exclusions and limitations to the field's move to separate the study of sexuality from the study of gender, far more problematic in my mind are theorists’ overreliance on and problematic extension of the Foucaultian theory of sexuality that currently dominates sexuality studies. ³ The masculine bias and elision of bisexuality within queer theory can be traced back to Foucauldian critics’ refusal to acknowledge symbolic limits and thus their erasure of not gender but sexual difference. Unlike gender, sexual difference is that dimension of the subject's being that resists symbolization and meaning and threatens the coherence of the subject's ego and symbolic identity. In this context, my aim is neither to affirm the legitimacy of bisexual identity nor to examine the meanings attributed to bisexuality. Rather, to underscore the importance and consequences of this lost dimension of sexuality and subjectivity for both queer theory and bisexual studies, I wish to follow Lacan and consider seriously how the bisexual, like the woman, does not exist. In doing so, my intention clearly is not to reinforce popular myths challenging the reality of bisexual individuals or the legitimacy of bisexual identity, but instead to expose the logic underlying the popular and critical dismissal of bisexuality while foregrounding a model of subjectivity inconceivable from within this logic: a subject whose constitution does not depend upon the repudiation of difference and the disavowal of internal and symbolic limits. Ultimately, I intend to theorize bisexual subjectivity as a distinct lived relationship to the limits of language and symbolic identity, one that is similar yet certainly not reducible to a psychoanalytic conceptualization of femininity. Bisexual subjectivity is to be distinguished by its unique subject–object relations, in that the object in bisexuality serves to eroticize, not mask, the limits and instability of the symbolic and subject.

Of course my very desire to discuss bisexuality and femininity together is likely to raise concerns, given a history of psychoanalytic scholarship that has claimed bisexuality as a privileged province of women and a current critical landscape in which femininity is either equated with the performance of socially constructed norms or dismissed as essentialist. ⁴ My intention, however, is not to claim an ontological connection between women and bisexuality, but rather simply to illustrate how the psychoanalytic concepts developed to illuminate woman's unique relation to the symbolic are critical for understanding and challenging bisexuality's erasure. At the same time, I argue that there is a clear connection between the erasure and/or disavowal of these concepts and the erasure of bisexuality within queer theory. That femininity today is no longer recognized as a riddle or question worthy of consideration, but instead clearly situated at either end of the constructionism/essentialism divide, illustrates how this binary erases from view the very conflict psychoanalytic concepts of femininity seek to underscore: this subject's irreducibility and unstable relationship to symbolic categories and norms. Equally problematic though not quite so recognizable are the ways that the constructionism/essentialism binary, by reducing our ways of thinking about subjects’ relationships to symbolic norms and identity categories, also severely limits theorists’ ability to conceptualize other forms of difference like bisexuality.

This connection between theories of femininity and bisexuality becomes clearer if we consider how queer critics’ misreading of the relationship between femininity and Joan Riviere's (1966) concept of masquerade has clear consequences for theorizing bisexuality. Riviere's seminal chapter “Womanliness as Masquerade” focuses on her analysis of a successful American woman who found herself overwhelmed by severe anxiety after occasions where she was required to speak in public before men. To allay the anxiety created by her successful performance of her professional duties, the analysand would afterwards engage in a second performance by “flirting and coquetting” with the men in her audience and masquerading as the castrated woman. Riviere clearly located femininity not in the masquerade (the second performance), but rather in the impasse that confronts her analysand—the fact that she can only ever partially represent herself in any one performance (she can't be recognized as an equal to men and a desirable woman simultaneously)—and in the “extraordinary incongruity” of her two performances. On the other hand, it is only the second performance that queer critics today choose to recognize when they conclude that “femininity is a masquerade” and reduce femininity to a subject's performance of socially constructed norms. ⁵ The costs of the constructionism/essentialism binary on critics’ ability to theorize femininity and bisexuality could not be more clear: this binary violently erases from view the subject who, irreducibile to any single performance or identification, represents itself through its incongruities. Indeed, I'd like to suggest that the hetero/homosexual binary in queer theory is itself as a product of the field's internalization of the constructionism/essentialism division and its inability to separate the study of sexuality from gender fully enough.

Contrary to the common critical view, queer theory's primal scene is to be located not in its move to separate the study of sexuality from the study of gender, but rather in its originary erasure of the distinction between the concepts of gender and sexual difference. Although the concept of gender was introduced precisely to detach femininity and masculinity from biology and provide an alternative to essentialism, the concept of sexual difference has enabled scholars to theorize differences between subjects in ways that transcend the constructionism/essentialism debate. ⁶ Emerging primarily from second-wave French and Italian feminists’ engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and each other's work, the term sexual difference has generally been used by feminists to refer to the radical difference in the structure of masculine and feminine subjectivity that emerges as a result of men's and women's asymmetrical position within and relationship to the symbolic order. Locating femininity in women's distinctive relationship to symbolic identity and language has enabled Luce Irigaray, for instance, to create a symbolic position for a feminine subject whose difference is neither culturally constructed by, for, and in relation to men, nor attributable solely to biology, though it does emerge from women's embodied experience and, more specifically, the impossibility of representing this experience in a patriarchal symbolic order. At the same time, in challenging the neutrality of the universal subject of Western cultural discourse and locating the source of women's oppression in a monosexual cultural system that functions to repress their difference, Irigaray has helped lay the groundwork for a feminist politics that aims to revalue femininity and the female body and restructure the symbolic to render women visible as speaking subjects in their own right, and not simply as the negative mirror image of man. Irigaray's conceptualization of sexual difference has been particularly influential for Italian feminists across the borders, including Rosi Braidotti, Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, and Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio and groups like the Milan's Women's Bookstore Collective and Diotima, whose attention to the differences between women, more nuanced accounts of embodied subjectivity and political practices and interventions have kept the concept of sexual difference vital and politically relevant.

On the other hand, sexual difference was jettisoned by U.S. feminists instrumental in the development of queer theory in the early 1990s, and in the process, all but disappeared from U.S. feminist discourse. This can be attributed partly to the different cultural contexts shaping the development of and relationship between feminist and queer theory in Europe and the United States, and partly to feminists’ narrow interpretation of sexual difference in Lacan. Although there were a number of Anglo-American feminists who embraced the work of Irigaray and other sexual difference feminists in the 1980s, sexual difference was generally constructed as “essentialist” in the United States. This construction, as Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio (1994) explained, expresses the values and modes of thought encoded in the English language, and more specifically, “the values of a liberalism focused on a universalized, masculine individual subject” (p. 215). Indeed, the constructionism/essentialism division itself is a byproduct of a logic that locates the norm and foundation for equality in a universal (read masculine) subject position, a logic that is encoded in the English language through the absence of grammatical gender. In the French and Italian languages, by contrast, “the masculine subject is not universal but only one of two possible subjects, the male and the female” (Anderlini-D'Onofrio, p. 215). The role of grammatical gender provided a historical-materialist base for sexual difference in France and Italy and produced a different logical framework, one in which the division between essentialism and constructionism proved less tenable. For U.S. feminists eager to disrupt binary constructions of gender that could be seen to reinforce heterosexism, on the other hand, the constructionism/essentialism appeared crucial: to embrace sexual difference and acknowledge femininity or masculinity as two distinct modes of relating to language and the limits of symbolic identity would be to articulate a difference that couldn't so easily be dismissed as an effect of gender's culturally constructed and variable meanings. Unfortunately, in relying on the constructionism/essentialism binary to disrupt gender binaries, U.S. feminists would remain locked in a logic of the universal that would, as we shall see, have profound effects on feminists’ and queer theorists’ ability to theorize forms of subjectivity capable of embracing difference within and between subjects.

At the same time, European feminists’ interpretation of sexual difference would play a decisive role in its rejection in the United States. Because feminist theorists were primarily employing the concept of sexual difference to address differences between men and women, the more primary meaning of this concept and its relevance for theorizing sexuality and even race was then and remains still even now almost entirely obscured. Sexual difference in Lacan's work addresses first and foremost an internal and unsymbolizable difference within each subject (what Lacan refers to in terms of the real, or that which is inassimilable to the symbolic), as opposed to an intersubjective and symbolic difference between subjects. Sexual difference accounts for the dimension of a subject's being that evades the grasp of the signifier and disrupts all attempts to establish a stable symbolic identity; it is a concept addressing the subject's relationship to its own internal alterity and the limits of the symbolic, a relationship that mediates and underlies the subject's symbolic identifications and relation to other forms of difference. This dimension of internal alterity, however, as well as the understanding that subjectivity and sexuality can be theorized in terms of the relationship subjects adopt to it and in ways that transcend the constructionism/essentialism binary, generally remains repressed in queer theory's primary unconscious.

The irony here is that despite queer theory's subsequent move to separate the study of sexuality from the study of gender, most queer theorists today nonetheless accept as foundational certain tenets of gender theory that become extremely problematic when applied to the study of sexuality. Foremost among these are (1) the position that sexuality, like gender, is socially constructed and that the only alternative is essentialism; (2) the notion that sexuality, like gender, can be considered an attribute of identity; and (3) the belief that identification is the primary process in the formation of gendered and sexual subjectivity. ⁷ Moreover, it is only by privileging identification that scholars are able to posit a clear relationship between the socially constructed meanings attributed to gender and sexuality and their effect on the formation of individual subjectivity and identity. Although these ideas may make sense for the study of gender, their adoption and application to the study of sexuality are extremely problematic, as they all ignore or marginalize the body—its relationship to subjectivity and the way bodily satisfaction, or jouissance, comes at the expense of the subject: in jouissance, the subject is effaced in the disturbing encounter with its own alterity. In other words, all of these ideas derived from gender theory disavow the psychic antagonism between sexuality and identity and the disjunction between sexuality and meaning that is central to a psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality. As Lacan (1973–1974) explained, “Everything implied by the analytic engagement with human behavior indicates not that meaning reflects the sexual but that it makes up for it” (p. 9). Although Foucault correctly called attention to the way modern discourses about sexuality attempt to capture fragments of the subject's sexual being in the nets of meaning by differentiating, classifying and regulating sexuality, his work generally downplays the structural limits of these same discourses: the subject's attempt to signify its sexual difference through the symbolic order will ultimately always fail because sexuality resists symbolization and is itself an effect of the limits of the symbolic order. Stated another way, the psychoanalytic split subject is the effect of this sexual difference—sex introduces nonmeaning into the subject or self-difference.

The recognition that sexuality fractures identity, rendering it fundamentally unstable, and thus in no way can be regarded as an attribute of identity, was, initially at least, valuable to queer scholars eager to demarcate the emerging field of queer theory from the field of gay and lesbian studies. The queer in queer theory ostensibly was to represent the field's critique of the heteronormative logic that attempts to wed sexuality to meaning and identity and its awareness that sexuality, to use Leo Bersani's (1988) expression, “shatters” the ego. It is precisely this “shattering” of the ego that renders sexuality threatening—not simply to individuals disturbed by the encounter with their own internal alterity or nonmeaning, but to the stability of the social order, which depends upon subjects’ desire for and investments in stable symbolic identities and identifications to mask their inconsistency. By separating the study of sexuality from the study of gender, queer theorists hoped to peel away the layers of meaning gender imposed over sexuality, meanings that concealed desire's inherently disruptive and transgressive essence and the fundamental instability of all subjects’ identities. From today's vantage point, however, it is clear that despite gender's removal from the scene of sexuality studies the exact opposite has occurred: the prevailing tendency among queer and bisexual theorists alike is to wed sexuality to meaning and/or identity, and this is just as problematic when considerations of sexual identity and epistemology are divided. The psychic antagonism between sexuality and meaning/identity that was previously central to establishing queer theory's own identity has now been almost completely erased from view.

That queer theory has proven far less anti-identitarian than its originary claims is no surprise to the many feminists, lesbians, bisexuals and queers of color who have been addressing contradictions within the field from its beginning. While the term queer was designed to challenge identity politics and hegemonic conceptualizations of straight, gay and lesbian identity, many critics share Sheila Jeffreys’ (1994) view that queer instead simply signifies “white gay male,” and thus represents “more of the same” masquerading as the “new and uniquely liberating” (p. 469). ⁸ Although the numerous critiques addressing queer theory's inattention to gender, race and various forms of queer sexuality are certainly justified, they generally fail to consider how the field's indifference to difference can be traced back to its almost exclusive reliance on Foucault's theory of sexuality and significant problems with the way this theory has been extended by influential queer theorists, including Judith Butler. ⁹

When applied strictly to the study of sexuality as a subject of discourse, there can be no denying that Foucault has provided scholars with an invaluable model for addressing the various ways sexual meanings have been discursively constructed, disseminated and used throughout history as a privileged means through which power has sought to consolidate and exercise its hold over individuals. Unfortunately, as Tim Dean (2000) noted, the Foucauldian position that sexuality is discursively constituted has been widely accepted within queer theory as “the only viable alternative to the conservative notion that sex is grounded in nature” (p. 176). The crux of the problem emerges when sexuality as a subject of discourse is confused and conflated with living subjects’ sexuality, such as when theorists ignore symbolic limits, reduce the subject to the ego and attempt to read desire as an effect of discursive meaning. The extent to which Foucault himself is guilty of confusing and conflating these distinct yet not entirely unrelated registers of sexuality (i.e., the discursive and psychic) is open to considerable debate and is not a matter that can be addressed adequately here. ¹⁰ What is undebatable, however, is that a problematic confusion and conflation of the discursive and psychic–subjective registers of sexuality is endemic among many of Foucault's followers. And although there certainly are a number of queer theorists who, like Dean, Bersani, and Teresa de Lauretis, have been able to draw productively on the insights of Foucault and psychoanalysis in ways that do not ignore the significant differences between their accounts of sexuality, such work unfortunately has not been able to dislodge the influence or counter the effects of those scholars like Butler whose extension of Foucauldian principles from the discursive to the psychic register results in the disavowal of the antagonism between sexuality and meaning and an exaggerated account of the role of symbolic norms and identification in the process of subject formation.

By focusing on Butler's (1994b) theory of subject formation in Bodies That Matter as an example, I hope to illustrate how her Foucauldian-derived theory of subject formation makes it impossible to conceive of a subjectivity that is not founded upon the repudiation of difference, and how it is precisely the logic underlying this impossibility that accounts for both the masculine bias and the invisibility of bisexuality in queer theory today. Butler's early work, particularly Bodies that Matter, most glaringly exposes the consequences of the logic of the universal for queer theorists’ ability to theorize bisexuality. A number of queer theorists at least pay lip service to the possibility of a bisexual position before dismissing it. Butler's (1994b) classic, on the other hand, is notable not simply for its failure to mention bisexuality, but for its development of a theory of subject formation that renders bisexuality inconceivable. Although Butler's later writings present a more complex account of subject formation, they nonetheless remain rooted within the same logical framework. ¹¹

Given her focus on the exclusionary mechanisms responsible for producing “a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies” that are denied the status of subject in a symbolic order that ostensibly renders heterosexuality compulsory, Butler's (1994b) own exclusion of bisexuals from both the domains of intelligibility and abjection is equally ironic and disturbing (p. 3). Because for Butler the heterosexual subject is specifically constituted through its repudiation and abjection of homosexuality, bisexuality and bisexual subjects are rendered doubly abject and unthinkable in her account, not simply in terms of existing social norms but any and all possible future rearticulations of these norms. This is because no change in the content of symbolic norms is capable of challenging the inclusionary/exclusionary structure that accounts for bisexuals’ erasure in Butler's paradigm specifically, and queer theory more generally. Butler's work reveals an agenda for bisexual theorists: it is not the socially constructed meanings attributed to sexuality and gender that these theorists must challenge, but rather the logic and assumptions that underlies and maintains this structure of inclusion/exclusion.

Butler's inability to theorize subjectivity outside of an inclusion/exclusion binary (1994b) is primarily related to her problematic emphasis on the role of identification in subject formation. She wrote:

The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantom of “sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge. … [T]he subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation. (p. 3)

In Butler's (1994b) formulation, the unsymbolizable, internal alterity that defines the psychoanalytic split subject is recast as a repudiated external alterity with a specific content. For instance, the White, heterosexual, male subject would emerge only through its repudiation of blackness, homosexuality and femininity: identification with any of these three domains of abjection would supposedly threaten the very integrity of this subject. The problem is that in focusing primarily on the role of identification and repudiation in the process of subject formation, Butler here reduces the subject to the ego and thus cannot conceptualize subjectivity outside of an inclusion/exclusion binary. Freud may have designated identification as the primary mechanism in the formation of the ego, but as Lacan (1997) made clear to confuse the ego with the subject is akin to confusing the child with its image in the mirror. ¹² Identification merely functions to conceal the fragmentation of the subject: the ego that emerges from it is but an imaginary formation that provides the subject with an illusory sense of coherence.

Butler's position that identification with symbolic norms is required, a condition of becoming a subject at all, proves equally problematic. That is, she regards such identifications as compulsory yet is not only unable to explain why some subjects are more heavily invested in their gender and sexual identifications than others, but why some subjects are able to reject identification with symbolic norms completely. It is inconceivable, for instance, why all White, male, heterosexual subjects are not racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, given that in Butler's account of subject formation their very constitution and continued existence as subjects depends upon the repudiation of these differences and the perception of the sexual and racial other as threatening. Ironically, the repudiation of difference and threat of otherness here is less a product or effect of the contingent discursive meanings that constitute and sustain the other as other, and more a matter of structural necessity. Butler's (1994b) account of subject formation glaringly reveals the main problem inherent in all social constructionist accounts of subjectivity that idealize symbolic power and ignore the nonsymbolizable dimension of subjectivity underlying subjects’ identification with symbolic norms. Indeed, these accounts represent the repudiation of difference as a necessary condition of subjectivity as opposed to one possible stance a subject may assume in relation to symbolic difference. And so long as the repudiation of difference is deemed a necessary condition of subject formation, a bisexual subject will remain utterly inconceivable.

If Butler and other social constructionists are ultimately unable to recognize the possibility of different subjective responses to difference, this is because the “universal” process of subject formation they posit represents, from a psychoanalytic perspective, a specifically masculine response to the limits of the symbolic and subject. Lacan's (1998) formulas of sexuation present two separate processes of subject formation that are based not on biology, but rather on the different ways subjects may respond to the fact that the symbolic order, as the locus of all meaning, is itself incomplete and lacking—“it does not hold up … there is a fault, hole, or loss therein”—and is therefore incapable of guaranteeing the subject's consistency and meaning (p. 28). Lacan draws upon classical logic and set theory to illustrate how the limit to the symbolic can be processed differently, according to either the masculine logic of the universal or what he refers to as the feminine logic of the “not-all.”

The logic of the universal, as Butler's theory illustrates, disavows the limit of the symbolic by displacing this limit from the internal, psychic domain to a living “other” who embodies and represents this limit, thus producing a subject whose identity depends upon the process of exclusion and the repudiation of difference. Identification for this subject is not a necessity, but rather a defense against its sexual difference and symbolic limits. By contrast, in the logic of the “not-all” the subject's experience of the symbolic's limits and inconsistency leads the subject to internalize this limit as opposed to externalizing it in others. Less able to maintain an illusion of the symbolic's or its own wholeness, this subject is in a better position to establish a relationship to its own internal alterity and accept as unthreatening the position of being “not-all” or not-wholly represented within the symbolic. This creates, in turn, a greater potential for accepting other, external forms of difference. Although Lacan nnnnn emphasized this subject's potential to establish a healthier relationship to internal and external differences, he also acknowledged that this subject's less secure relationship to the symbolic could equally lead the subject toward an identification with the norms and logic of the universal. There are two possible paths within this position, which need not be conceived of as mutually exclusive.

Although Lacan used these distinct logics to account for differences in the structuration of masculine and feminine subjectivity, it is critical to underscore that the logic of the “not-all” exceeds its applicability to woman. The logic of the not-all is ultimately designed to expose the limits of the universal logic and bring into view any subject that remains invisible and unintelligible from the vantage point and within the terms of the logic of the universal (without attempting to define or delimit this subject). Thus, Lacan's (1998) controversial assertions that “Woman does not exist” (la femme n'existe pas), “There is no such thing as Woman” (il n'y a pas la femme), or “nothing can be said of woman,” while focusing specifically on woman, are all ultimately intended to call into question what counts as existence and knowledge within a universal perspective founded on the disavowal and externalization of its own limits. The original French makes clear that Lacan is not putting into question the noun woman, but the definite article that indicates universality. Lacan is simply saying nothing can be said about woman or any subject whose identity is not founded on exclusion and repudiation from a universal perspective: because this subject is not formed in relation to an external limit, its identity cannot be delimited on the basis of a definite, predetermined trait.

Lacan's distinction between the logic of the universal and the logic of the “not-all” helps illuminate why bisexuality has been erased by queer theory, while providing bisexual theorists with an alternative logic from which to challenge this erasure and begin to theorize bisexual subjectivity and sexuality. Bisexuality remains inconceivable from within the logic of the universal because it represents precisely that which this logic attempts to disavow: the internal alterity that marks the limits of the symbolic and the subject. Whether defined in terms of the co-presence of male and female biological characteristics, “masculine” and “feminine” gender traits, or the proclivity for both male and female sexual object choices, the bisexual subject embodies the internal alterity or self-difference that is typically disavowed and repressed through subjects’ identifications with, and theorists idealization of, symbolic norms and authority. Butler's (and by extension queer theory's) erasure of bisexuality merely literalizes the fantasy implicit in universal theories of gender and sexual subject formation from Darwin on that take the bisexual subject as their starting ground: the fantasy that the subject's internal division and the conflicts arising therefrom can be erased.

In the service of this fantasy, the category of bisexuality is often constructed in queer theory today as the cause of binary divisions of gender and sexuality, a construction that functions to mask the subject's internal division by symbolically displacing and externalizing it. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, rationalized her inattention to bisexuality on the grounds that bisexuality reinforces or consolidates existing gender and sexual divisions and hierarchies. She suggested that it is precisely because bisexuality is posited as a predispositional ground that sexuality has historically been read as an effect of gender difference. ¹³ Thus, for Sedgwick and other scholars eager to theorize sexuality free from its historical linkage to gender, bisexuality is rendered incapable of illuminating the relationship among the categories of sex, gender and sexual identity: bisexuality instead becomes the glue underlying normative formulations of the relationship between gender and sexuality and the heterosexual–homosexual binary. Unfortunately, by locating the burden for these hierarchies’ and divisions’ maintenance in bisexuality, Sedgwick remains blind to and trapped within the very same logic responsible for producing these divisions and hierarchies in the first place: it is not the content of socially constructed bisexual, heterosexual or homosexual meanings that is responsible for binary divisions and hierarchies, but rather the disavowal of internal and symbolic limits and the repeated displacement and externalization of these limits onto new symbolic categories and subject positions.

The very term bisexuality carries the historical traces of this process of displacement. Malcolm Bowie (1992) wrote:

This term has at least three current meanings, and these can easily produce confusion. As used by Darwin and his contemporaries it presented an exclusively biological notion, synonymous with hermaphroditism, and referred to the presence within an organism of male and female characteristics. This meaning persists. Secondly, bisexuality denotes the co-presence in the human individual of “feminine” and “masculine” psychological characteristics. Thirdly, and most commonly, it is used [to express] the propensity of certain individuals to be sexually attracted to both men and women. (p. 26)

The instability of bisexuality's definition reflects the process by which way the subject's and symbolic's limits have at specific historical moments been externalized and displaced onto the categories of sex, gender and sexual identity and helps illuminate that it is this process of displacement and not the meanings of bisexuality that account for the binary structuration of these categories. The shift from the second to the third definition of bisexuality, for instance, represents the displacement of the internal limit of the subject and the symbolic category of gender onto the new category of sexual identity at the end of the 19th century, a period when many of the traditional ideologies of gender were losing their ability to secure subjects’ investment and identification and thus to guarantee their consistency and identity. The now-visible fissures in the subject and category of gender were masked by the creation of the new symbolic category of sexual identity, which externalized the division within the former through the creation of two new subject positions: the heterosexual, whose “proper” object choice masks the limit of his or her gender identity, and the homosexual, who on the basis of his or her “improper” object choice is made to bear the burden of embodying and representing the inconsistency and limits of heterosexuals’ gender identity. Essentially, the category of sexual identity functioned to supplement and thus mask the limits of gender through reference to object choice.

Ultimately, though Sedgwick is correct to argue that heteronormativity relies on an undeniable connection between the categories of gender and sexuality, she mischaracterizes this relationship by (1) assuming this relationship derives its force from the production of symbolic meanings as opposed to the disavowal of symbolic limits and (2) failing to recognize how the category of gender itself is already an effect of sexuality (i.e., the disavowal of sexual difference and the displacement of internal and symbolic limits). Consequently, Sedgwick's (1990) strategy to focus on “how certain categorizations work, what enactments they are performing and what relations they are creating, rather than what they essentially mean” is ultimately compromised by her inability to account for the processes underlying the emergence of the various categories she is analyzing and to recognize how these categories function in relation to that which resists meaning and symbolization (p. 27). And though her attention to the productive force of contradiction provides us with a more sophisticated understanding of how ideologies of gender and sexuality operate, she still mistakenly locates the force of the hetero–homosexual binary and the structure of the closet in the contradictory meanings attributed to gender and sexuality as opposed to the disavowal of the subject's and symbolic's limits. In the end, Sedgwick's desire “to render less destructively presumable ‘homosexuality as we know it today’” (Sedgwick, p. 48) is thwarted by her inability to escape the very logic by which “sexuality has been made expressive of the essence of both identity and knowledge” (Sedgwick, p. 26).

Because Sedgwick's (1990) strategy has served as an important model for many bisexual scholars taking an epistemological as opposed to an identity-based approach to theorizing bisexuality, it is critical to underscore the limitations of this model. As long as bisexual theorists focus on the construction and circulation of discursive meanings about bisexuality and the effects produced by certain categorizations without acknowledging the limits of the symbolic and the subject, the antagonism between sexuality and identity, and the process of displacement by which internal limits are externalized across sex, gender and sexual identity categories and positions, they too will remain trapped within the same logic responsible for their erasure. Butler's work illustrates that expanding or resignifying the meanings attributed to bisexuality will not challenge the binary structuration of sexuality or the logic underlying bisexuality's erasure: rather, it is the assumptions about the relationship among sexuality, meaning and subjectivity and the disavowal of symbolic and subjective limits that bisexual theorists must challenge.

In many respects, Butler's and Sedgwick's treatment of bisexuality helps illuminate not simply queer theory's limitations with respect to bisexuality, but the severe costs of the constructionism/essentialism binary on feminist and queer theorists’ ability to theorize sexuality and difference. As such, one of the lessons that bisexual theorists can glean from queer theory's erasure of bisexuality is the dangers of choosing sides when confronted with two seemingly contradictory or antagonistic options. Because the constructionism/essentialism binary is itself a byproduct of the logic of the universal, feminists ultimately were mistaken to assume that either option would prove capable of challenging patriarchal structures produced by this same logic. Similarly, bisexual theorists operating within a field structured, as Clare Hemmings (2002) put it, by “disagreements between identity and epistemology approaches to theorizing bisexuality” need to be wary of choosing sides or assuming that either one can challenge the logic responsible for bisexuality's erasure. Thus, though Hemmings is certainly right to call attention to the limitations of an identity-based approach bent on establishing the legitimacy of bisexual identity by noting how the proliferation of sexual identities “maintain[s] the structure of inclusion/exclusion, itself productive of minoritization,” she is ultimately mistaken to assume that her own epistemological approach, which is based on Sedgwick (1990), is somehow more capable of challenging the logical structures that render bisexuality invisible (Hemmings, 2002, p. 31).

Although working to legitimate bisexual identity is a path bisexual theorists should clearly avoid, this does not mean that theorists should ignore the specificity of bisexual subjectivity. Indeed, bisexuality's transformative potential derives not from its position as a distinct sexual identity, but rather in its ability to expose the limits of any symbolic identity and reveal a fundamentally different subjective stance toward internal and external difference. Here I am not suggesting that bisexuality should simply be approached as a metaphor for the transgressive dimension of all sexuality, the position adopted for instance by Marjorie Garber. The problem with this formulation is that it drains bisexual subjectivity and sexuality of any specificity and eliminates any distinct vantage point from which bisexuality can help transform existing structures of sex, gender and sexuality.

Between these two positions—bisexuality as a distinct identity and bisexuality as a metaphor for sexuality's resistance to identity—I wish to adumbrate a third: an understanding of bisexuality as a distinct subjective relation to the limits of symbolic identity and a specific mode of sexuality that eroticizes rather than disavows these limits. The first part of this formulation helps challenge the division between considerations of identity and epistemology that currently characterizes the field of bisexual studies and the problematic assumptions underlying this division: bisexuality is not assumed to be a distinct sexual identity with an identifiable content of its own, but a distinct relationship a subject assumes to its own nonmeaning and the limits of symbolic identity. Conceived as such, bisexuality foregrounds the alternative logic of the not-all and the limits of social constructionist theories of subject formation. Bisexuality emerges as an epistemological position founded on the recognition and not the disavowal of the impossibility of symbolizing the subject's sexual difference.

As this account of bisexual subjectivity essentially mirrors Lacan's account of a potential within feminine subjectivity, an additional step is necessary to begin to demarcate bisexual specificity. Rather than locating this specificity in the terms set in place by logic of the universal (e.g., conflicting gender traits or object choices), bisexual specificity should challenge the role gender and object choice have traditionally assumed in perpetuating heteronormativity. As the logic underlying heterosexuality eroticizes external differences (specifically the difference between the subject and object's sex and gender) to disavow internal differences and sustain the illusion of the subject's and the symbolic's wholeness and integrity, a bisexual model of sexuality must ultimately challenge this logic by which the object of sexuality is conceived of as the glue of the subject's identity and meaning. The specificity of bisexual desire thus should be conceptualized not on the basis of the relationship between the sex and gender of subject and object, but rather on the basis of bisexual subjects’ distinctive relationship to their objects. One way of conceiving of this distinctive subject–object relationship would be to suggest that the object in bisexuality serves not to mask the inconsistency of the subject and the symbolic, but to foreground and eroticize this inconsistency and instability. Jonathan Dollimore (1996) presents a similar understanding of bisexual specificity in an essay urging bisexual theorists to address the “mass of tangled desires and identifications” underlying bisexual practice (p. 528). Presenting readers with a scenario in which “a bisexual male partakes of a threesome in which he watches a man fucking with a woman,” Dollimore explored the contradictory identifications and desires of the bisexual voyeur and concludes that it is precisely the instability of this position that makes bisexuality worth analyzing (p. 529). Rather than producing anxiety or paranoia, this heightened instability frees the bisexual subject from the constraints of subjectivity and enhances its ability to receive, channel and redirect the multiple erotic energies that surround us.

This preliminary formulation of bisexual subjectivity and sexuality helps to illustrate how bisexuality can be conceptualized in ways that transcend the constructionism/essentialism binary and challenge the logic responsible not simply for bisexuality's erasure, but for queer theorists’ inability to conceptualize a subject whose constitution does not depend upon the repudiation of internal and external differences. Bisexuality's promise, as I've tried to suggest, is not to be located in the production of new meanings about gender and sexuality or the symbolic recognition of a new sexual identity, but in its ability to expose the internal limits of all symbolic categories and identities and to reveal a form of subjectivity capable of eroticizing as opposed to disavowing these limits. It is precisely subjects’ acceptance of nonmeaning and the limits of symbolic identity that can dismantle existing structures of sex, gender and sexuality founded on and sustained through subjects’ disavowal and subsequent displacement and positivization of these limits in others. Whether bisexual theorists, however, will be able to draw successfully on this position to challenge the hetero/homosexual binary ultimately will depend on their ability to reclaim sexual difference for the field of sexuality studies—that dimension of nonsymbolizable alterity within the subject that threatens the coherence of the subject's ego and symbolic identity. Challenging the logic of the universal that dominates queer theory today requires that bisexual theorists recognize and address not simply what queer theory isn't telling us about sexuality, but what it can't possibly tell us about sexuality. It is only by reclaiming and embracing this dimension of impossibility and by liberating bisexuality from meaning and identity that bisexual theorists can successfully challenge the logic that renders bisexuality nonexistent.

Notes

1. For an excellent map of the field of bisexual studies and a more in-depth treatment of the differences between the identity and epistemology approaches I briefly explain below, see Clare Hemmings (2002, chap. 1). Although I take Hemmings’ account of this division within the field as my starting point and share her view that this division is problematic and contributes to the erasure of bisexuality, I ultimately challenge the notion that these two approaches are distinct and reject both so long as the epistemological approach focuses on the production of bisexual meanings without connecting this production to the limits of the symbolic and the subject. Hemmings, by contrast, rejects only the identity approach and adopts the epistemological approach to analyze how bisexuality is constructed as an untenable middle ground. I address Hemmings’ argument in more detail later in this article.

2. This same point is addressed at length in Steven Angelides (2001).

3. For two key works explaining the original rationale behind separating the study of sexuality from the study of gender see Rubin (1993) and Sedgwick (1990). For key early critiques of this separation from feminists working within queer theory, see Judith Butler (1994a) and Biddy Martin (1996). Bisexual theorists who connect queer theory's erasure of bisexuality in part to its treatment of gender include Angelides (2001), Hemmings (2002) and du Plessis (1996).

4. Freud's assertion (1964a) that “[T]here can be no doubt that the bisexuality, which is present, as we believe, in the innate disposition of human beings, comes to the fore much more clearly in woman than in men” (p. 227–228) has received a considerable amount of attention from numerous feminist psychoanalytic critics eager to both exploit and challenge this linkage of bisexuality with women. Although Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray (1985), for instance, flesh out this connection in their respective theories of femininity, Sarah Kofman (1985) and Teresa de Lauretis (1994) challenge this identification of women with bisexuality. See Sigmund Freud (1964a, pp. 227–228, Hélène Cixous (1986, pp. 61–132) and (1976), Luce Irigaray (1985), Sarah Kofman (1985) and Teresa de Lauretis (1994, pp. 38–57).

5. This reading of “femininity is a masquerade” is particularly common among queer theorists addressing drag and butch–femme relationships.

6. Concepts that similarly challenge the constructionism/essentialism binary include Italian feminists’ concept of “sessuazione,” which emphasizes the inextricable connection between gender and embodiment; Adriana Cavarero's (1995) theory of “concrete essentials,” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's (1984–1985) concept of “strategic essentialism,” which though challenging essentialist notions of identity, points to the ways that groups can adopt and use such notions strategically to challenge oppression. Spivak's concept, originally developed in the context of subaltern studies, was adopted by feminists and interpreted and used in ways that Spivak would later oppose.

7. For other feminist critiques of social constructionism and its application to sexuality see: Adriana Cavarero's (1995) concept of “concrete essentials,” Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio (1997), Toril Moi (1999).

8. For a good account of queer theory's initial position vis-à-vis identity see Annamarie Jagose (1997). As Jagose explained, queer theory's anti-identitarian stance goes hand in hand with its rejection of identity politics: “Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics and having no stake in its own hegemony, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity” (p. 131). See also Judith Butler (1989) and Michael Warner's introduction (1993) for a more sustained analysis of the limits and problems inherent in identity claims and politics. In addition to Jeffrey's (1994), Butler's (1994), and Biddy Martin's (1996) earlier critique of queer theory's treatment of gender (see note 3 above), see Merck, Segal, and Wright (1998), Margaret Cruikshank (1996), and Jacquelyn Zita (1994). For critiques of queer theory's treatment of race/ethnicity see Jose Esteban Muñoz (1994), David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom's (1998) introduction, Roderick A. Ferguson (2004), Ian Barnard (2004). For bisexual, transsexual and transgender critiques of queer theory, see Ki Namaste (1996) and Stephen Angelides (2001).

9. Two scholars who have addressed the limits of queer theory's anti-identitarian position in relation to critics’ reliance on Foucault's theory of sexuality are Tim Dean (2000) and Christopher Lane (1998) (though both do not address queer theory's treatment of gender, race, and other forms of difference).

10. Because Foucault's earlier and most cited works fail to conceptualize subjects as anything other than products of existing discursive power/knowledge relations, his work certainly lays the groundwork for the conflation of the discursive and psychic registers of sexuality. Moreover, Foucault's refusal to recognize the internal limits of the symbolic and his reduction of sexuality to meaning indicate his adherence to the logic of the universal which, as I explain shortly, is ultimately what accounts for the erasure of bisexuality.

11. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection is often noted as an example of this more modulate, more complex approach.

12. For one of Freud's more extensive discussions of identification and its relation to ego formation, see Freud (1964b, pp. 105–110). For Lacan's account of the relationship between identification and the ego, see Lacan (1977).

13. See Sedgwick (1989) and the introduction in Sedgwick (1990).