Looking at a Bisexual
Looking at a Bisexual
Thirteen Ways
How is bisexuality defined? There is considerable disagreement among bisexuals and bisexual theorists themselves. I present 13 definitions of bisexuality and inquire into their overlaps, differences, implications and consequences.
This unresolved definitional uncertainty points to a larger uncertainty about what sexuality is and how it should be understood. Bisexual theory therefore has the potential to remind us of aporias in the contemporary conception of sexuality.
Bisexuality is a matter of definition. It is also a lived experience, of course, but I am not going to be concerned with that. I am interested in bisexuality as a category, as a sexual classification.
One of the principal payoffs of the bisexual political movement has been the stark light it has shone, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, on the articulation and definition of sexual categories.
The essays collected in this volume revolve, accordingly, around problems of constructing, identifying, conceptualizing, ordering, relating and consolidating classifications of sex and gender. The reader of this collection will come away from it with a lively sense of just how acutely questions of sexual definition today remain in a state of uncertainty, incoherence, flux and irredeemable confusion.
Several of the contributors devote substantial amounts of attention to the meaning of queer. It has now been decades since that term began to receive sustained attention from academic theorists of sexuality.
As someone who joined that debate when it began at Santa Cruz in February of 1990, and who said everything that needed to be said about the meaning of queer—along with its political advantages and disadvantages—long ago,
I find the global 20-year definitional frenzy over the meaning of queer very odd: if that humble word really had any theoretical or political significance, one would think we would have figured it out by now.
Nonetheless, given the apparently inexhaustible nature of the subject, and of the appetite for debating it, I will happily leave the word queer to those who find a perennial pleasure in arguing about its true meaning, and will transfer my focus to another, perpetually fought-over term—namely, bisexuality
13 definitions describe 13 different kinds .
How exactly are the people differently defined different from one another? What differences do their differences make for sexual classification and for sexual communities? Who gets to decide? And how are such decisions adjudicated, appealed, contested?
One solution to this confusion would be to force some definitional clarity about bisexuality, to define it once and for all. Some of the contributors to this volume take a shot at that.
Another solution, or nonsolution, would be to treat the perpetual crisis of bisexual definition as a useful one for dramatizing the larger crisis in contemporary sexual definition, to see it as witness to a world in which we cannot make our sexual concepts do all the descriptive and analytic work we need them to do,
But in which we can neither manage to live without them (the constant outcry against “labels” being nothing but pure hypocrisy, inasmuch as we have all become junkies for social identity categories and show no sign of transcending them) nor simply jettison them in favour of some other set of categories which might do a better job of accounting for the phenomena before us than do the concepts of sexuality—whether homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans-, asexual, or various more specific designations of perversion.
“Queer theory” was once the name for the field of study that capitalized on this crisis of sexual definition, on this breakdown in our conceptual categories, electing not to resolve it but to describe it and anatomize it, to provide a systematic map of our confusion and an analysis of the necessary and irreparable incoherence of our own thought.
That is why—in an age in which queer has lost its sense of unassimilable and irredeemable sexual deviance and subsided into a mere synonym of gay—that is why queer theory, and bisexual theory in particular, may still have something critical to teach us.
Bisexuality
In this case, I shall not purport to say what bisexuality really means or try to indicate how it should be understood. I’ll content myself with merely noting that the reason there has been so much argument over the meaning of bisexuality is that the word signifies different things to different people. Even more important, it keeps getting used in different ways, or to refer to different things.
I can think of 13 different definitions of bisexual. At least, as the word is currently employed—at times without an explicit awareness of the slippages or confusions among different definitions of it—bisexual can refer to at least 13 different types of people.
Bisexuals, then, are variously defined as people who:
- are sexually attracted to males and females.
- are not prevented from being sexually attracted to anyone because that person is male or female.
- are sexually attracted to the individuals they are attracted to, whether those individuals are male or female.
- are sexually attracted to their own sex but have a sexual history that includes sex with persons of the other sex.
- are sexually attracted to the other sex but have a sexual history that includes sex with persons of their own sex.
- are in a stable, long-term, sexual and erotic relationship with someone of their own sex but are also sexually attracted to persons of the other sex.
- are in a stable, long-term, sexual and erotic relationship with someone of the other sex but are also sexually attracted to persons of their own sex.
- have sex only with persons of their own sex who are gay and persons of the other sex who are heterosexual.
- have sex only with other bisexuals (men or women);
- have sex only with persons of their own sex but identify as bisexual.
- have sex only with persons of the other sex but identify as bisexual.
- have sex with males and females but identify as gay or lesbian; and
- have sex with males and females but identify as heterosexual.
Some of these definitions look symmetrical, and they could therefore be combined: for example, people who are in a stable, long-term, sexual and erotic relationship with a person of one sex, but who are also sexually attracted to persons of the other sex.
So, then, why create two separate categories for classifying or defining those kinds of people, depending on whether their primary relationship is with someone of their own sex or not? Why not put such people in a single category, in the same category?
Well, the answer is simply that there is at present no general agreement about whether those definitions really are equivalent or symmetrical—whether, that is, a man who is in a stable, long-term, sexual and erotic relationship with another man,
But who presents himself as also sexually attracted to women, should be thought of as the same kind of person as a woman who is in a stable, long-term, sexual and erotic relationship with a man, but who presents herself as also sexually attracted to women.
That is at least partly because, in the first case, our society would be inclined to see the man as gay and, in the second case, to see the woman as straight, and therefore the social implications of the man’s and the woman’s sexuality differ.
It is also because the man’s and the woman’s self-presentation will have different political consequences, and those consequences may tend to play out differently in the context of various gay, lesbian and bisexual communities, not to mention in the eyes of heterosexuals and straight society.
Do these 13 definitions describe 13 different kinds of sexual subjects, then? Or are all the people who fit one or more of these definitions the same kind of sexual subject as the people who fit one or more of the others?
Are the people defined by these criteria all bisexuals? Are they all equally bisexuals, or are some of them more bisexual than some of the others? Do these definitions specify different kinds of bisexuals?
