This book was published in 2009 and contains chapters on What is Bisexuality, Coming Out, Why “Bi"?, Life Stories, Crossing Lines, Relationships, The Language of Desire, Bisexual Community, Bisexual Politics, and Bisexual Worlds. Some contributions are very short (only one paragraph), and some are several pages. The contributors seem highly educated overall, and are from 49 different countries.
I was especially interested in the “Why Bi” chapter and the “Bisexual Worlds” chapter. Why Bi is all about why people choose this label over (or in addition to) other labels. Several people say they feel pansexual is more accurate, but they choose bi in public because people understand it better or because it has a longer political history. The Bisexual Worlds chapter is about how bisexuality is conceived of differently in non-U.S. cultures. It addresses myths (like all Arab men are bisexual) and the variance in prejudices against bi people vs. gay people in different places, variance in what is tolerated vs. not, variance in what behaviors are considered normal vs. abnormal, and more.
I marked for myself the passage by Jenny Kangasvuo, a Finnish bisexuality researcher, who is also Finnish and bisexual herself. She describes how she didn’t relate to descriptions of bisexuality in the U.S. and UK and felt those cultures differed meaningfully than what it means to be bi in Finland. So, she made that the focus of her research as an anthropologist. I want to reach out to her to see if we can talk about research methods. But she also writes about how researching bisexuality has made her feel disconnected from her own identity, since she now views identity categories as constructed and abstract and objects of study. I don’t know if my research will end up making me feel the same way, but I think it is important to be aware that researching something about yourself professionally does change your relationship with that thing.