Resisting Erasure: Bisexual Female Identity in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Bisexual erasure refers to the cultural de-legitimation of bisexuality as an intelligible sexual identity. There is little South African research that considers how this occurs. Generally bisexuality is “a silenced sexuality” both in popular and academic discourse. Research has not attended to (women’s) “self-aware bisexual identities”, tending to focus on men’s bisexual practices or other people’s perceptions of bisexuals. This article is intended as a starting point for further local research. Using an intersectionality approach, it looks at how race, class, space and gender intertwine with sexuality in ways that further compound marginalisation or provide avenues for resistance to dominant norms from an autobiographical perspective. The analysis shows how bisexual erasure occurs through acts of non-recognition and misrecognition, as well as instances of resistance.

Keywords:

• bisexuality
• erasure
• intersectionality
• identity
• South Africa

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zuziwe Khuzwayo

ZUZIWE KHUZWAYO is a PhD candidate at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. She received her master's degree from the University of Witwatersrand; it focused on gender equality in the South African Commercial Catering Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU) and the policies implemented by the union to address this issue. This research received a Research Excellence Award in 2012. She is currently a researcher in the Research Use and Impact Assessment unit at the Human Sciences Research Council. Her research focus is in gender and sexuality studies.

Tracy Morison

TRACY MORISON (PhD) is a Social and Health Psychology lecturer in the School of Psychology, Massey University, New Zealand, and an Honorary Research Associate in the Critical Studies in Sexualities and Reproduction research programme at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her research focus falls within the broad area of sexual and reproductive health, with a particular interest in reproductive “choice”, stigma and marginalised identities. She works with critical feminist theories and qualitative methodologies. She is the co-author of Men's Pathways to Parenthood: Silence and Heterosexual Gendered Norms (Morison and Macleod, 2015, HSRC Press).