I finished this book several months ago but decided I would input all of my notes/highlighted quotes into Zotero before I was allowed to blog about it. I got….bored with that very quickly but kept my word to myself and so never blogged about it.
This is an anthology that “does not aim to be comprehensive, or even to offer a representative sample of published work on bisexuality. It does aim, however, to introduce its readings to the concepts of bisexuality, and to some of the key areas of debate about what bisexuality means and how the concept(s) might be used” (Storr 1). It is also intended to encourage the reader “to interrogate the concept of bisexuality: to think critically about where it has come from and how its origins continue to shape it in contemporary debates” (Storr 1).
The first section of selections is “Genealogy of the Concept of Bisexuality,” beginning with Ellis and Freud and ending with Udis-Kessler in 1992. The second section is about “Bisexual Identity and Bisexual Behavior” (and how these two sometimes overlap but often don’t). Part 3 is on “Bisexual Epistemologies,” or how we can use bisexuality as a framework for thinking about or organizing other things. Part 4 is on “Differences,” both within bisexuality and between bisexuals and other kinds of people.
Thinking back on this book a few months out and just glancing through the table of contents again, there’s a lot I don’t remember, and I will definitely need to go back through and create an index card for each selection. But I do remember that Part 1 made me regret/wish to revise my formulation of bisexuality in my article in the Journal of Bisexuality, and that Part 2 was very thought-provoking in terms of research methods. It also gave me insight into the role of what I would consider bisexual women in the political lesbian movement, which is discussed more in “Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics,” a book I am still at the beginning of. Some women who slept with both women and men identified as lesbians, others identified as bisexual, and others didn’t want either label.
This book definitely requires another skim-read, since pandemic-brain wiped a lot of it from my head, but I’m very glad to have read it.