Rewriting the Narrative of Bisexual People of Color and Indigenous People: Introduction to the Special Issue

We are excited to introduce you to our special issue on bisexual people of Color and Indigenous people (POCI) and believe the work in our special issue meaningfully enhances our understanding of bisexual POCI communities. We set out to create a special issue on bisexual POCI because we saw a need to increase knowledge and awareness of the unique identity negotiations and lived experiences of bisexual POCI, particularly as it relates to systems of oppression that thwart wellness for bisexual POCI community members. We are hopeful that this special issue also helps to challenge some of the normative discourse around bisexuality and bisexual POCI by moving beyond a focus on stigmatization and marginalization to a focus on documenting the resilience, strengths, and healing strategies of bisexual POCI.

Scholars have well documented that systems of oppression impede wellness for bisexual POCI through instances of oppression based on race and sexuality (see Mosley, Gonzalez, Abreu, & Kaivan, 2019). Bisexual POCI experience oppression in distinct ways through interlocking systems of racism, heterosexism, and monosexism. These interlocking systems of oppression manifest through bierasure (Elia, 2014) and colorblind racial ideologies (Neville, Awad, Brooks, Flores, & Bluemel, 2013) that reinforce and perpetuate stigma and marginalization of bisexual POCI.

Bisexual people make up approximately half of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) community, and POCI are more likely to identify with the bisexual label when compared to White people (Movement Advancement Project, 2016). Some research suggests that bisexual women of Color represent about 36% of all bisexual women and bisexual men of Color represent about 35% of all bisexual men (Movement Advancement Project, 2016). Despite strong representation of bisexual POCI in broader sexual minority communities, bisexual POCI are often absent from research on sexual minorities, and scholars who are studying bisexual communities do not use intersectional frameworks to explore how interlocking systems of oppression uniquely impact bisexual POCI (Ghabrial & Ross, 2018). Similarly, sexual minority scholarship often neglects to focus on the unique needs of POCI within sexual minority communities (Huang, Brewster, Moradi, Goodman, Wiseman, & Martin, 2010). Given these findings, we wanted to use this special issue to create space for scholarship on bisexual POCI so that we can begin to rewrite the narratives, recenter race and sexuality in the scholarship on bisexual and POCI communities, and more intentionally argue for the need for scholars to use intersectional frameworks to analyze how systems of oppression negatively impact bisexual POCI communities.

As a term, ‘intersectionality’ has been utilized in myriad ways, ranging from a theoretical standpoint to a method, and more (Collins, 2015). In calling for this special issue, we aspired to employ intersectionality as Collins (2015) recently articulated it: an overarching framework that recognizes “that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities” (p. 2). The authors in this special issue took up several of these entities, explicating how people who identify as a POCI and bisexual, navigate and experience systems such as White supremacy and heteronormativity across personal, interpersonal, and systemic domains. By simply centering bisexual POCI’s experiences in an academic journal such as the Journal of Bisexuality, we are engaging with intersectionality’s core premise: power is ever present, influencing the extent to which people with different social identities experience privilege and well-being or oppression and suffering. In compiling and sharing these manuscripts, we reject the systematic erasure of bisexual POCI, make visible (a small portion of) the wide range of needs and experiences of this community, and set a precedent for focused, critical, intersectional scholarship on an oft-overlooked population.

Special issue overview

We are excited that the articles in our special issue include scholarly work from the fields of community health, sociocultural anthropology, and psychology, including applied social psychology and counseling psychology. The articles in our special issue include quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method approaches, all using interdisciplinary and intersectional frameworks. In reflecting on of the aims of the special issue, our special issue begins with articles focused on positive narratives of bisexual POCI (Galupo, Taylor, & Cole, 2019; Ghabriel, 2019). Galupo and colleagues (2019) explored the positive experiences associated with being bisexual/plurisexual and biracial/multiracial and found that bisexual/plurisexual people who were also biracial/multiracial named being unique, enhanced connections to community, increased character strengths, and having multiple options as positive aspects associated with their bisexual/plurisexual biracial/multiracial identities. Ghabrial (2019) also identified notable strengths of bisexual women and gender diverse people of Color including the ability to move in between communities, identities, and worlds and use their passing privilege to engage in advocacy work.

Of significance, the bisexual/plurisexual biracial/multiracial participants in Galupo and colleagues’ study (2019) specifically contextualized their experiences within an intersectional framework by which they negotiated the multiple aspects of their identities. This intersectional framework enhanced participants’ understanding of their bisexual/plurisexual biracial/multiracial identities (Galupo et al., 2019). Often the struggles of bisexual POCI are at least partially a result of invisibility when looking at intersections of sexual identity, gender identity, and ethnoracial identity (Ghabrial, 2019). The first two articles in the current special issue reinforce the importance of using intersectional frameworks to accurately understand and capture the lived experiences of bisexual POCI.

Two of the articles in our special issue focus on gender and the experiences of bisexual POCI men and women (Castro & Carnassale, 2019; Bostwick, Berger, & Hequembourg, 2019). Castro and Carnassale (2019) detail the experiences of bisexual men who are also migrants living in Italy, and their psychosocial and socioanthropological analysis informs a transnational understanding of bisexual POCI experiences. Castro and Carnassale’s (2019) findings suggest that bisexual men of Color in the sample experienced unique burdens as a result of the intersection of their sexual identity, skin tone, and migratory status, and often resorted to “passing” to cope with stigma and discrimination. Castro and Carnassale (2019) also detail important findings including how bisexual men of Color who are also migrants find acceptance, resist oppression, and are resilient in the midst of societal stigma and discrimination. Bostwick, Berger, and Hequembourg (2019) explore the differences in importance of bisexual identity (identity centrality) to one’s view of herself for bisexual women of Color living in the United States. Bostwick and colleagues (2019) found that bisexual women of Color either feel very strongly that their bisexual identity plays a huge role in their sense of self, feel very strongly that their bisexual identity does not play a huge role in their sense of self, or feel that their bisexual identity is neither important nor unimportant, it is just part of who they are. Of significance, many bisexual women of Color demonstrated a tendency to avoid vocally or visibly asserting a bisexual identity, and Bostwick and colleagues (2019) assert that bisexual identities can be important for women of Color regardless of outness.

One article in this special issue (Flanders, Shuler, Dsesnoyers, & VanKim, 2019) details the importance of social support in combating internalized binegativity, feelings of illegitimacy, depression, and anxiety for bisexual people of Color. Flanders and colleagues (2019) found that social support was important in facilitating positive experiences for bisexual people of Color while connection to the LGBTQ community was associated with more opportunities to affirm a bisexual identity but increased rates of binegativity and negative experiences. These findings suggest that social support is vital for bisexual people of Color and can function to protect against increased symptoms of depression and anxiety caused by binegativity (Flanders et al., 2019).

Finally, we conclude our special issue with a content analysis of the supports in place on college and university campuses for bisexual POCI students (Mosley, Gonzalez, Abreu, & Kaivan, 2019). Mosley and colleagues (2019) found that colleges and universities are largely not attending to the specific needs of bisexual POCI students and that resources available to students often neglect to consider the intersection of race and sexual identities when developing services for students. Mosley and colleagues (2019) offer practical suggestions for university counseling centers, sexual and gender diversity centers, and multicultural centers on how to improve and better attend to the unique needs of bisexual POCI students.

The manuscripts comprising this special issue are inspiring. We hope that readers are moved by the creative and yet critical, empirically sound, approaches applied to the study of sexual, gender, and racial minorities. New models for the study of queer, transgender, and POCI communities are direly needed, and the studies herein suggest several innovative approaches that can be modeled. Further, as scholars and practitioners who are unapologetically committed to enhancing the wellness of queer and transgender POCI broadly, and bisexual POCI specifically, we are optimistic that others are as inspired as we are by these works. We hope that other scholars in this area, and individuals who hold these social identities, find affirmation, inspiration, visibility, and perhaps even a renewed commitment to their work (for scholars) and/or their wellness (for bisexual POCI readers) as they find either themselves, or the communities they care about and study, named and represented in these pages.