Look Both Ways, by Jennifer Baumgartner

Baumgartner is a journalist who worked for Ms. in the early 90s and has covered bisexuality in her writing across her career. This book is partially history/analysis and partially memoir from her own experiences talking to people, going to events, and working in feminist and queer spaces.

Lots of good reflections/personal experiences relating to the things I’m interested in— fashion and sexual identity, conversational sign posts and bisexual identity, etc. It’s also a little more recent than books like Vice Versa (about 10 years later), so while Ms. and Ani DiFranco were still The Big Thing before “my time” (I do listen to Ani DiFranco though), the cultural references feel a bit closer to me, or I can at least point to memories in my own childhood and recognize how 3rd wave feminism, which I was unaware of, impacted me. Like “girl power" as a slogan to aspire to.

I think it’s an interesting place to be, say, in middle school or in high school, and so to be aware of a cultural phenomenon but not REALLY be able to participate in it, since you’re still too young to do a lot of things by yourself and have no money. That doesn’t directly apply to me in this respect, since I was too young even for that, but I am reflecting on the things that I DID feel that youth-induced FOMO and angst and longing about, and simultaneously thinking about how young teens have felt the same way forever. It makes me think about everyone who was too young in the 60s/70s to participate in all of the activism going on (or at least participate in the ways they may have wanted to), but old enough to know about it and want to be a part of it. I also wonder how this phenomenon works differently for people like me, who needed to ask their parents to drive them to any given thing, vs. people growing up in cities where you’re able to go places without your parents from a much younger age via public transit.

Passages I’ve Marked

p.5- story about how news reported that a study that found bi men don’t exist, but the actual study found that the real results were basically the opposite— almost all the men in the study sexually responded to both men and women in some way, just the extent of the arousal varied (and was small in many participants)

p.26- “AC/DC” as slang for bi, feminist atmosphere of Ms. creating the necessary conditions for JB to experiment with women, song “I Kissed a Girl” by Jill Sobule

p.50 - paragraph on the problems with the word “bisexual” and problems with its alternatives. “As a label, bisexual sounds pathological, academic, and a little embarrassed —- like the identities ‘stay at home mom’ and ‘runner up.’” “Or, as writer Jenny Weiss put it in Girlfriends magazine, “Of all the words for bisexual, the worst is probably bisexual.” This is a big mood.

p.51- “The word bisexual makes me cringe at times, but saying I’m heterosexual or a lesbian feels inaccurate- regardless of who I am in a relationship with. So, cringing all the while, I use the label. Because of my relationship with the word feminist, I have learned that cringing is often a sign of unfinished political business: the label bi sounds bad because, at least in some ways, bisexuals are an unliberated, invisible, and disparaged social group.”

p.52- references Garber’s section on Tiresias, notes that the importance of this story is that it shows that the WHOLE STORY/whole picture is what makes a bisexual, not any snapshot in time.

p.78- “The fact is, second-wave women thought about looking both ways a lot, even though they rarely described their lives or insights as bisexual. Instead, they were woman-identified women or political lesbians (gay in the streets if not in the sheets, to paraphrase rock critic Ann Powers)”

p.100 - description of the outfits of Ani DiFranco fans as emblematic of third wave feminism and bisexuality

p.105- Baumgartner and Gloria Steinem both date “when it was okay for women to be bi” as starting in the early 90s

p.108- extended quote reflecting on Liza Featherstone’s own sense of fashion and gender/sexuality presentation as a bisexual

p.123-126- different examples of bi women talking about the loss/exclusion they felt when they got into long term relationships with men

p.141- some thoughts about how dating women changes how women approach dating men and expectations for being in a relationship

p.156-157- some thoughts about bisexuality and the objectification of women and the male gaze, coming to see yourself as a sexual agent instead of perpetually as a sexual object, and how dating women changed Baumgartner’s relationship with porn

p.170- more about p.141, but also pointing out that just because dating a woman may help you clarify what you want when dating a man, sexism/internalized sexism means you might still not be good at actually COMMUNICATING those things to/with men

p.175— “stereotype threat”- the presence of someone from a dominant group diminishes the performance of a non-dominant group, subconsciously. Can make people from non-dominant groups feel less confident, less smart, like they have less agency, and so act that way.

p.189- describes the “feeling out if someone is gay and implicitly communicating to them that you are also gay” as “embroidery” and notes that her own go-to embroidery is finding ways to work in the phrase, “my ex-girlfriend”

p.194— same as above, mentions the difficulties of having “to constantly crowd every conversation with sign posts (“ex-girlfriend,” “ex-boyfriend,” “baby’s father”) to indicate the whole person I am”

p.220- more about the relationship between sexuality and gender presentation for bi women (shift in it becoming more okay in 3rd wave feminism to be lipstick/femme than it was in the 2nd wave)

Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men, Edited by Robyn Ochs and H. Sharif Williams

This anthology is similar to Getting Bi, but its content is more focused (just on bi men), and the section themes are different: identity, challenging labels, liminality, institutions, “anger, angst, and critique,” bodies and embodiment, religion and spirituality, traveling, and relationships. Each chapter is also longer, on average, than the ones in Getting Bi.

I’m really glad they made this book. Many of the men say they thought they were the only bi men in the world, or at least were the only bi men they knew. One chapter is an exploration of phallagocentrism and bi visibility— how if a man is even a little bit interested in another man, or a penis, he is Gay. Women have more leeway. Bi women are more visible. I can name a handful of bi women characters from television (usually ethnically ambiguous side characters who serve as love interests to a more important white male character), even if the representation is not very good. But I can only name two bi men from TV off the top of my head, and that’s only because my partner reminded me of one of them (Blaine, on Glee) today. (The other one is Wolf from Future Man, who I actually really adore as a character.) Another difference is that bi women are seen as “secretly straight,” while bi men are seen as secretly gay.

I don’t know if this is true, but I think I’m also left with the impression that bi men are more likely to stay closeted for longer.

I also wonder if there’s any patterns between bi people (across genders) who start out being very sure they have same sex attractions and take longer to accept/embrace their different-sex attractions, vs. people who start out being very sure they are straight and have to realize they also have same-sex feelings.

I marked three places in this book to come back to:

p.27 - notes that closeted bi men married to women might be the biggest bisexual demographic and/or the one most in need of outreach and community.

p.96-97- the author’s bisexual literacy journey (from expository nonfiction to memoirs to Tumblr) and notes that sometimes being bisexual IS confusing and you ARE confused about your sexuality while still being bisexual. Sometimes the activism around “bisexuals aren’t just confused” (which is important) swings too far the other way, such as in his case— he felt like it was not okay for him to be confused.

p.105- talking about how activities through his union helped him feel comfortable with his sexual identity. Haven’t seen this before!

Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Edited by Robyn Ochs and Sarah E. Rowley

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.

Bisexual Women in the 21st Century

This book is a book version of an issue of the Journal of Bisexuality that came out concurrently in 2002. As seems typical for this journal, the authors are mostly in the social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, counseling), while others are community activists not affiliated with universities or in women’s and gender studies. There is one contributor from an English department.

Reading this book was frustrating for two reasons, neither of which are the book’s fault. First, as I felt when reading Vice Versa, it seems like not much has changed in the last 20 years since this book came out. Most of the well-cited books about bisexuality came out in the 90s (or, in the case of this one, shortly after the 90s), and most of the issues and debates they discuss are still happening now. The main difference I see between then and now is now, since 2008, pansexuality has taken off as a similar identity, so people argue about the differences between the two terms. The second frustration was entirely personal— it made me have a miniature crisis about whether I ought to just be in the social sciences, and the difficulties of interdisciplinary interests and work.

One chapter/article, by Laura-Zoe Humphreys, is what I would call a counterstory, written as a dialogue (one of the examples of counterstory genres that Martinez explores). Another, by Carol Queen, is a memoir about the author’s experience pretending to be a lesbian to fit into the community when she was really bisexual. So, this book unexpectedly crossed over with all 3 of my reading lists!

Quotes/Passages/Ideas I Marked

p.4- that bisexual women activism grew directly out of lesbian-feminism, as a reaction against sexism and biphobia within that movement

p.11- standpoint theory (citations included), idea that “individuals located outside of dominant ways of being and knowing are often best able to reveal unacknowledged assumptions operating within such regimes”

p.18- discussion of how “the continuum narrative” (idea that almost everyone is bisexual, and very few people are totally gay or totally straight) does elide important differences between self-identified bisexuals and people who are “technically bisexual in thought or action but identify as gay or straight,” but it also “enlarges and normalizes” the bisexual category while relegating heterosexuality to “just as weird and abnormal as homosexuality” (in terms of % of the population)

p.29- note about method and interview schedule/script, refer back to this later. 22 participants. notes about recruitment tactics and use of snowball sampling

p.41- participants in this study almost all agree that prejudice from lesbians is worse than prejudice from straight people, but they still try to organize with lesbian communities politically and socially

p.76- this article is a literature review of research on bisexual women adolescents, and they identify 4 primary methodological barriers to research in this area- 1) tendency to label all bisexual girls as gay, 2) viewing bisexuality as a transitional phase, 3) “the continued theoretical dominance of the tripartite categorization gay, lesbian, and bisexual despite the rapidly changing social milieu of sexual minority youth” and 4) the marginalization of queer theory. Later in the chapter, they clarify that #3 is mainly about how lots of young people are beginning to identify as queer instead.

p.81- same article as above, this page talks about some of the problems with using self-identification as the single measurement of bisexuality. I understand the limits of this measurement, but I feel like it’s equally scientifically irresponsible to say “well even though you say you’re straight, you have fantasies sometimes so you’re REALLY bisexual.” Since the question of “why do people identify as X when their behavior might make an outsider think they are Y” is interesting and important!

p.111- couple epigraphs about how sexual identity is not just about sex and romance, it comes with cultures too

p.113- talking about cyborg theory, Harroway says cyborgs are post-gender and post-sexual dualisms, and thus have no ideological origins in Western culture, but author of this piece argues that cyborgs and bisexuals (as legible identity categories) are only possible because of the original binaries put in place.

p.115 “It’s useful to be queer when you want to suspend certainty to pose interesting questions, but when you want to relate to others, it may become strategically necessary to act as though your desires consistently match up with a recognized identity label (1997,p.97)

p.116- question of how to “perform bisexuality” or “become bisexual” in the Butlerian sense. Author gives some examples of how she tries to do it but how those tactics also always fail

p.123- examples of words people use “to avoid the b word,” examples of biphobic things lesbians have said to the author and her research participants

p.125- “The freedom to be bisexual can make alternatives to compulsory heterosexuality less the avant garde phenomenon or radical choice and more something which the average woman (person) feels comfortable taking for granted” (Elliot, p.327)

Sources I’ve Marked

p.12- “active interviewing strategy” (Holstein & Gubrium, 1997)

p. 30- “thematic decomposition analysis” (Stenner 1993, Woollett, Marshall, and Stenner, 1998) My understanding is that thematic analysis looks at what topics are discussed, and discourse analysis (in the sense used here, which I think is different from how it’s used in other fields?) means engagement in broader “discourses” (social norms/trends/webs)

Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, by Marjorie Garber

Angelides described this book as talking about something like “the history of instances of bisexuality” rather than bisexuality as a concept (his aim), and now that I’ve read it, I understand what he means. Each chapter takes on a different theme relating to bisexuals, bisexuality, and discourse around it, and examines different examples of that theme and how they function in their respective times/places.

For example, some subjects include bisexual celebrities, bisexual vampires, bisexual bohemians, different sexologists’ takes on bisexuality, bisexuality in movies, jealousy, love triangles, and threesomes. This book was a little slow going for me because I didn’t want to skim! Even the sections on stuff I already know about (like the discussion of Portrait of a Marriage, which I read a few months ago), I wanted to read them!

Things I Marked

p.21 - Susie Bright, an example of someone self-identifying as a “bisexual lesbian” (people on Twitter argue about whether or not this is a valid thing, so I want to refer back to this 30-year old example next time I see it come up). This is also on p.58- bi-dyke, bi-lesbian, lesbian-identified bisexual, bi-affectional, lesbian, and formally-lesbian bisexual. Also “hasbians” (but this is negative and not a self-identity)

p.22- things “being read bisexually” — people criticized a Calvin Klein campaign because it was making men uncomfortable by making them attracted to the models, and they blamed the company for making an upsetting ad

p.25 - description of man taken for bisexual (noting this so I can later compare it to modern ways people write themselves/read others as bisexual)

p.28 - themes- nonmonogamy/inability to commit, maturity/immaturity, trendiness, hetero/passing privilege

p.30 - list of kinds of bisexuality- Defense Bisexuality, Latin Bisexuality, Ritual Bisexuality, Married Bisexuality, Secondary Homosexuality, True Bisexuality, Experimental Bisexuality, Technical Bisexuality

p.45 - premise of “L.U.G.” - lesbian until graduation

p.57- note about bisexuals and puns (I can’t believe this was already a thing in the 90s hahaha)

p.67- student responses to “Would coming out as bisexual be easy or hard?”

p.81- some discussion around a Gay Pride March taking “bisexual” out of the march’s name, which had been added the year before. One woman asked “Why can’t you just be gay for a day?”

p.84- a political argument for dismissing bisexuals as victims of the patriarchy/betrayers

p.88- June Jordan comparing being bisexual to being biracial

p.93-99- discussion of AIDS as one big factor in stigma against bi men and of lesbian stigma against bisexual women (they touch sperm and so might infect them), and vampires as metaphor for bisexuals as deadly AIDS spreaders

p.105- list of some ways bisexual behavior is described as anything but that. “invisibility is produced as a startling by-product of omnipresence”

p.252- suggestion that “we have made virtually no progress since [1948] in understanding bisexuality’s place in sexual and cultural life”

p.253-254- some data from the Kinsey report

p.323— on “rewriting, encoding, and editing the ‘classics’ in order that they should tell an orderly tale, which is to say, most often a tale with a heterosexual ending”

p.323- idea that a book can have a bisexual plot without having a bisexual character

p.327- “the three of us can’t live together”

p.342- having a crush on a teacher is transference, like a therapist, and a crush can be a crush without being a “crush” (i.e., you can be drawn to a teacher via transference without actually wanting to be romantically or sexually involved with them)

p.390- how in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it’s framed as Brick must be either straight or gay, there is some lie happening, he cannot possibly both love his wife and his best friend

Things To Look Up

The International Directory of Bisexual Groups

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers- Lillian Faderman

A History of Bisexuality by Steven Angelides

Angelides set out to write a genealogy (in the Foucauldian sense) of bisexuality as a concept. He ultimately argues that the hetero/homo binary (theorized by Sedgwick and others) is impossible without bisexuality. Or rather, any binary is defined against the idea that there might be a both/neither. Binaries do the work of eliminating overlap between categories.

Foucault describes his process like this: “I start with a problem in the terms in which it is currently posed and attempt to establish its genealogy; genealogy means that I conduct the analysis starting from the present situation.” (Angelides p. 11, Foucault p. 238)

In the introduction, he talks about how the historiographical method of distinguishing between homosexual acts and homosexual identities just displaces the question of bisexuality. What is a bisexual act? Being intimate with people of multiple genders simultaneously? But a multi-person sexual interaction could have many different configurations of acts, and any given person in the interaction may not do “bisexual acts” during that time. And how can we know when someone’s relationships with people of multiple genders are due to multiplicities of desire, vs. due to other reasons? (Socio-economic necessity or expectations, for example.) We can’t, unless someone’s letters, diaries, etc. provide evidence one way or the other. So, Chris Cagle describes the common approach as “monosexual gay historiography.”

Quotes/Passages I’ve Marked

p.8 — Lisa Duggan suggested that queer theory concepts applied to LG history texts might be fruitful, but mostly that hasn’t happened. Queer theory and LG history have “strained relations".” Angelides suggests part of this issue is “an implicit and unproductive distinction between social constructionism and deconstruction.” He says this distinction is silly bc both methods rely on historicity/historical analysis of shifting categories, so they definitely are not in opposition to each other.

p.10 “In this book I would like to initiate a productive exchange between the two fields of queer theory and gay/lesbian history. What I am endeavoring to work toward is what I will call a form of deconstructive history; or more specifically in this case, a queer deconstructive history….In order to do this I want to situate bisexuality not as marginal to discourses of sexuality…but as central to any understanding of the historical construction of binary categories of sexuality.”

p.10 “The more tangible objective of this study, then, is to employ bisexuality as a heuristic device for rereading and rethinking some of the critical moments in the history, theory and politics of sexuality.”

p.12 “Garber’s Vice Versa is less a study of history than an examination of particular instances of bisexuality as they have appeared in a wide range of historical texts.”

p.13— criticism of the Merl Storr anthology (Bisexuality: A Critical Reader), saying that while it does “attempt to document the historical production of thought in relation to bisexuality in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries…these chapters are not historicized analyses of such work”

p.17— argues bisexuality has been cast (in theorizations) as always in the past or the future, never existing in the present. “My argument is that the elision of bisexuality from the present tense has been one of the primary discursive strategies employed in an effort to avoid a collapse of sexual boundaries— a crisis of sexual identity”

p.26— Paraphrasing Irigaray as saying that women are symbolically constructed as “object of the phallic economy,” meaning that “she is but the mirror through which masculine identity is constructed and reproduced.” Masculinity is often defined as “not being girly.” Angelides also says Irigaray is saying that gender itself (as a category/concept( is phallagocentric, I think because the whole result of dividing people into genders is to shore up masculine identity and therefore masculine power. I’m not TOTALLY sure I’m understanding this correctly though. Also talks about the shift in Western thought from “all humans are one thing, women are just inverted forms of men” to “there are two fundamentally different kinds of humans. but male is the best kind.”

p.73— Paraphrasing Freud, childhood sexuality is “a universal prerequisite to the development of gender identification. Normality…is but a convoluted and precarious achievement.” Freud also helped break apart “normal sexuality” from “procreation” by showing how sexual development matters in other ways too. Also quotes from a letter in which Freud tells a woman not to worry that her son is gay because while it’s unusual, there’s nothing wrong or unnatural about it. He also refused to treat homosexuals in therapy unless they showed symptoms of normal things you would go to psychoanalysis for. Being gay was not a cause in and of itself for him.

p.119- Some stats from Kinsey— 18% of white American men had had both homosexual and heterosexual experiences in the past 3 years, and 46% had had them at some point in their lives.

p.122— Melbourne chapter of American Radicalesbians (the group from Tales from the Lavender Menace) also agreed that everyone’s sexuality starts the same in its base nature, but we choose to express it differently. The sexuality of a gay person and of a straight person are not fundamentally different.

p.125— 1972, Melbourne Gay Liberation Publications Group publishes article reflecting current anxieties about too many straights in the Gay Lib movement. Steve Gavin, writing in a NY gay lib magazine, wrote about how straights and bisexuals (a word he puts in scare quotes) should stay out of the movement and should not be included in consciousness raising groups. Angelides says the issue of consciousness raising groups was how the “gay lib for gays only” idea really became a big issue.

p.146— Foucault viewed gay liberation movements as not liberating at all, but a new form of falling prey to the “compulsion to discourse” about sex. Homosexual identity was created by history, so embracing that identity is just following along those same lines of history. quote from Foucault- “It is not enough to liberate sexuality. We also have to liberate ourselves…from the very notion of sexuality.” He saw the movement as useful in terms of getting more civil rights, but that was about it. Also said the phrase “let us liberate our sexuality” doesn’t really have a useful meaning.

p.154 and 157— Critiques of Foucault

p.163- Purpose for the chapter is, “lots of people have noticed bisexual erasure, but nobody’s really made a convincing argument for WHY that has occurred”

p.174 and p.183— Critiques of Sedgwick

p.176— “Bisexuality…is unthinkable outside of binary logic” (in this case the binary is homo/hetero, not male/female)

p.183- treating sexuality and gender as two separate things might work for some people, but for some people, they are very much tied up with each other! “I would argue also that this kind of exclusionary mapping of sexuality serves to sustain the analytical distance Sedgwick has installed between feminism and gay/lesbian/queer studies. That is, bisexuality (and indeed transgenderism) is the pawn that is forced out in an act of methodological and disciplinary secessionism”

p.186— In relation to the above, we have to always remember that “sexuality” as a category first emerged as a disorder of gender. So, while we may often think about them as separate now, they are two divergences of the same initial thing.

p.196 “This deconstructive genealogy is intended, to quote Foucault, ‘not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation.’”

p.197- “Any notion of identity is inherently repressive of internal differences”

Sources I’ve Marked

“A Gay Manifesto” by Carl Wittman and “Gay is Good” by Martha Shelley both suggest that everyone is naturally bisexual and people divide themselves into straight and gay for sociopolitical reasons.

Fuss Inside/Out

Du Plessis “Blatantly Bisexual, Or Unthinking Queer Theory”

p.248- note 39, a list of works critiquing queer theory

Lesbian and Bisexual Identities: Constructing Communities, Constructing Selves, by Kristin G. Esterberg

Similar to Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, this is a sociological study from the 1990s on lesbian and bisexual women. In this case, all of the women are from the same college town community. Some of them are affiliated with the university, and some of them are not. Esterberg conducted initial interviews with them over a period of a couple years, and then came back a few years later to do follow-ups and see what (if anything) had changed.

The chapters cover topics such as, how do the women identify themselves? How did they come to identify this way? How have their identities and lives changed over time? How do race and class interact with their sexual identities? What does it mean to them to “be a lesbian” or “act lesbian”? What is the lesbian community like? What are the kinds of lesbians or lesbian social groups in their community? What internal rules or expectations are there? And how do the bisexual women in the community fit in or not fit in?

Quotes and Passages I Marked

Quote from Stuart Hall at the beginning of Chapter 2 about how identity is always “a cover story” and identity can be better conceptualized as the ongoing process of identification since it’s always in progress

p.32— Esterberg says the women interviewed referred to “4 different dimensions of lesbian identity” — 1) having sex with women, 2) having emotional relationships with women (does this mean romantic? Idk), 3) making their relationships with women central to their lives (including friendships), and 4) political dimension. One respondent (p.34) says she sees this political dimension as including that as a lesbian, people don’t expect her to act like other women, so she has more freedom from those standards. She says her brother in law treats her like her own person, instead of just As A Woman

p.41 “Coming-out stories…tell women how to interpret and recast their own past experiences to bring them in line with their current identities” — Esterberg also notes that the negative side of this is, her experiences didn’t match up with the coming out narratives she was familiar with, so she was very confused and worried she wasn’t actually a lesbian since her childhood experiences didn’t line up

p.45 “Other women felt that contact with other lesbians— both in person and through reading— was important in their coming out.” Yeah it definitely never occurred to me that I might like girls until I learned through others that it was POSSIBLE to like girls. Some people come to that on their own, even if they feel like they must be the only ones. I never did.

p.47— question of “can you choose to be a lesbian?” answer from one person: “Maybe.” Some respondents thought definitely yes, some thought definitely no, others thought some people can and some people can’t, etc.

p.49— quote from a respondent— “I think that all women are lesbians. I think it has to do with intimacy. In our society, I think to be with a man is to choose abuse. That’s negating one’s self, because they have power over us in this society. If that did not exist, then I think people would have freedom to choose.” There’s a lot to unpack here lol

p.52- quote from another respondent- “I’ve gotten to do so many of the things that I couldn’t even imagine wanting to do [if I were heterosexual], ‘cause there was no room to begin to imagine doing them.” I think this quote is important— some stuff imposed on us by heteronormativity doesn’t even have much directly to do with sexuality at all. But it still restricts those possibilities, because you’re so busy doing The Straight Things You’re Supposed To Do that it can’t occur to you to do those other things.

p.53— citation of Celia Kitzinger who identifies 5 kinds of lesbian identities— radical feminist, transitional, “special person,” individualistic, and lesbianism as path to personal fulfillment.

p.80— chapter on “performing lesbian identity”

p.88— section on gaydar and “what a lesbian looks like”

p.158— section on “the elusiveness of bisexual community”

Sources Marked

Rust 1992a and 1992b and 1993, Weinberg, Williams, Pryor 1994, Garber 1995, Klein 1993 — all listed as sources on bisexuality

Bisexuality: A Critical Reader, Edited by Merl Storr

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.