The Refusal to Refuse: Bisexuality Trouble and the Hegemony of Monosexuality

Abstract

This paper both revisits and productively draws on Judith Butler’s theory of sexuality offered in Gender Trouble, to consider how this foundational queer theory text inadvertently works to contain and bracket plurisexualities such as bisexuality. I consider how Butler at once rejects the idea of originary bisexuality provoked by psychoanalytic discourse on polymorphous perversity yet subsumes bisexual oppression into that of homosexuality. I interrogate Butler’s monosexual presumptions to extend their notion of the heterosexual matrix to account for an operational hetero/homo binary that both excludes plurisexuality as its Other and obscures this exclusion. Following this theoretical line, I consider how the asymmetric hetero/homo binary has been coded along the lines of comedy/tragedy in culture, and in contrast how bisexuality and other plurisexualities are often rendered impossible. I suggest that plurisexualities, representing a refusal to refuse the originary prohibition, “haunt” both straight and queer contexts alike.

Keywords:

• Bisexuality
• plurisexualities
• queer theory
• monosexuality
• hetero/homo binary
• bisexual erasure

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah McCann

Dr Hannah McCann is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research is in critical femininity studies, and much of her work focuses on feminist debates on femininity and queer identity, salon workers and the beauty industry, and queer digital culture. Her monograph Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation was published with Routledge in 2018. Her coauthored textbook Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures was published in 2020 with Whitney Monaghan, available via Bloomsbury.