Imagining Bisexual Futures: Positive, Non-Normative Later Life

Abstract

Gerontologists have long noted that people find it hard to imagine themselves growing old. Previous research has also shown that, despite the increased variability and diversity of postmodern life courses, people still tend to project normative life courses, centering on marriage, childbearing and grandchildren. It has been argued that this tendency, combined with the scarcity of representations of older queer people, creates particular difficulties for younger queer people in imagining later life positively. This article presents findings from a study where members of a bisexual community used creative methods to imagine their futures. Predominantly, they created positive and non-normative futures.

KEYWORDS:

• ageing
• BiCon
• bisexual
• creative methods
• future
• heteronormativity
• imagining
• later life
• life course
• non-normative
• normativity
• pictures

Acknowledgments

The Research Committee of the Faculty of Health and Social Care at the Open University provided financial support to cover the fieldwork costs, for which the author is grateful. The author would like to thank all the participants in the Imagining Bi Futures research for sharing their imagined futures, and the organizers of BiCon and BiReCon for enabling the workshops to be run. The author would also like to thank Dr. Esther Saxey for extremely helpful and timely comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Dr. Rebecca L. Jones is a Lecturer in Health and Social Care in the Faculty of Health and Social Care at The Open University, UK. Her research interests are chiefly in the social, narrative and discursive construction of ageing, sexuality and sexuality in later life. Her latest book, co-edited with Richard Ward, LGBT issues: Looking beyond categories (Edinburgh, Dunedin Academic Press, 2010), applies theoretical concepts about the complexity and variability of sexual and gender identities to the specificities of health and social care practices.

Notes

^aThis figure is a response to a yes/no question “have you ever described yourself as bisexual.” More nuanced accounts of sexual identity are elicited elsewhere in the BiCon survey and the Bi Futures questionnaire

^bThe question about gender identity in the BiCon survey offers 10 options and “other, please specify.” These include a 7-part Likert-style scale of female to male. Answers 1–2 and 6–7 on this scale are coded as ‘female’ and ‘male,’ respectively. Although the demographic questionnaire was free response, I used an analogous metric to categorize those responses that were not straightforwardly ‘male,’ ‘female’ or ‘transgender/genderqueer.’

^cSince I have not seen the original data from the 2004 BiCon survey, I cannot account for a figure of 99% white ethnicity from a sample of 92 respondents.

^dWhite ethnicity seems to be systematically underrecorded.

^aUnclear because of two ambiguously worded questions.

1. Queer is used here as an umbrella term to include all non-heterosexual and non-cisgendered people.

2. Goltz unhelpfully collapsed these categories in the rest of the paper into ‘the gay men’ and ‘the lesbian women.’

3. BiCon is the main U.K. annual gathering for bisexual people (http://bicon.org.uk). The six participants in the pilot workshop were not at BiCon when they imagined their futures. This convenience and snowball sample of bi-identified people had, however, all (except one person) previously attended BiCon, most of them several times. Several people remarked afterwards that it had felt like being at a mini BiCon. The visions of the future produced at the pilot workshop are indistinguishable from those produced at BiCon itself in all significant respects. They are therefore included in the analysis.

4. This may simply reflect changes in who attends BiCon since 2008, because recent BiCons have made consistent efforts to make BiCon more accessible to parents and their children.

5. The structure and resources provided for the pilot workshop were slightly different.

6. She describes her gender identity on the demographic questionnaire as ‘Cis-“female”—flexible presentation of my gender in day to day. I've often considered myself to not ‘fit’ the female types but I don't consider myself anything else specifically.’