#linked text

I actually wrote a fic...

Turning to how bisexuality is expressed within the discourse of femininity exposes another equally disturbing trope where bisexual women are caught in the discursive vice grip between invisibility and hyper visibility. Bisexual women are seemingly everywhere visible in pornography, reality television, and music videos as spectacles in the service of male sexual pleasure, but denied the political and affective complexity and interiority of our own sexual urges. Stereotypes of bisexual women as sexually uncontrolled and ethically unrestrained intensify the discourse of racialized sexual excess and deviance that attaches to non-white femininities, even as they also echo the ways femmes have been shamed for our sexualized attraction to hyperbolic gender. In her essay, “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic,” Deborah Vargas (2014) uses the Spanish phrase lo sucio or “the dirty” to name those modes of sexualized behavior that refuse middle-class comportment and racialized respectability. She points to how,

It is possible to read feminist lesbians of color against these formulations [(re)departure, marginality, and identity] by Trinh T. Minh-ha for ways in which 'identity politics' has been lived. By continually asserting (re)departures, women like Audre Lorde, Chrystos, Barbara Smith, Jewelle Gomez, Alice Lee, Cherríe Moraga, Luz María Umpierre, Gloria Anzaldúa, et al. perennially 'return to the source' to reinvent each of their multiple sources. And they seem to be doing this by redrawing, for example, what being lesbian means for a Chicana story-teller who has never borne children vis-a-vis what being a lesbian means for an Afro-Caribbean poet and essayist who is a mother, vis-a-vis what being a lesbian means for a Native American woman activist and writer vis-a-vis... And all of this, while, for example, intermittently clearing the space of, within, and for Chicano ethnicity from the perspective of a feminist lesbian; and/or while intermittently retracing the boundaries of womanhood as lesbian, while simultaneously redefining lesbian identity from the perspective of being non-white in a Euro-American dominant culture. Admitting such complexity can move beyond the dreary anchor of a unitary self. That fiction can only suppress the delicate contingencies of who each of us is becoming.

The ambiguous handling of bisexuality [in the lesbian magazine DIVA] reflects the struggle to stabilise constructed boundaries against the pull of fluid, and thus threatening, margins, and this appears to be felt no less keenly by readers. The sample included 28 articles coded as focusing primarily on bisexuality; of those, 21 are readers’ letters. This in itself is indicative of the nature of discourse on bisexuality as one of contest and debate, and these letters make up two separate (though very similar) discussions that take place between issues 31 and 35 (1998/ 1999; Discussion 1) and issues 48 and 51 (2000; Discussion 2). Interestingly, Gamson (1996, p. 404) also notes that the two major ‘letters column controversies’ in San Francisco’s Bay Times in the 1990s concern bisexuals and transgendered people. Wakeford’s (1998) interviewee, owner of lesbian listserve Bay Area Cyber Dykes, also highlights the prevalence of such debates: ‘It happens every couple of months and you can almost just count on it. It’s like, gee we haven’t had the Great Bisexual Debate in a while. It’s coming!’ (p. 187). Gamson’s (1996) and Wakeford’s (1998) data coincide, temporally, with mine. Though I emphasise again the historical nature of this analysis, particularly in as far as it might be taken to characterise DIVA, I would point out that Crowley (2010, p. 397) much more recently refers to another, similar online discussion in which one poster writes, ‘seriously if I see this fucking thread one more time’. These arguments continue to be topical in given contexts, even as they are acknowledged as being well-rehearsed.

[I]ntersectionality is for many of us an ongoing mode of interrogation, ongoing because the social formations that it interprets constantly assume new types of imbrications. Consequently, intersectional critique requires patient and careful interrogation, the steady accumulation of historical knowledge, and the purposeful reformulation of theoretical structures. In addition, it means that we must engage sexuality as having multiple domains for its production, constituting several objectives in terms of power, enjoying numerous occasions for its incitement, and revealing various periodizations by which to analyze it.

(on the "lesbian-like" article) I was so surprised that, as late as 2000, theorists weren't remotely in consensus about whether women who loved women and men counted as lesbians. That means wlw who came out in the 20th century (probably still the majority? albeit less visible on tumblr) might still not subscribe to "exclusive" as part of the definition of lesbian, or at least see it as destabilized. Whereas current discourses accept "exclusive" as gospel. Worth further questions, maybe?

Gay men, lesbians, queers, two-spirited people, and men on the DL prefer to use their own identity terms, but many contemporary public health writers prefer the terms MSM and WSW, ostensibly because these terms avoid assumptions about a singular, misleadingly coherent gay identity. In practice, however, MSM and WSW often signify not a neutral stance on the question of identity but a decided lack of sexual-minority identity. More important, by implication, MSM and WSW imply absence of community, social networks, and relationships in which same-gender pairing is shared and supported. We are also concerned with the ways the terms have been racialized. As historian Allan Berube observed, “In the United States today, the dominant image of the typical gay man is a white man who is financially better off than most everyone else.”[20(p234)] Just as gay and lesbian are often coded as “White,” WSW and MSM often implicitly refer to people of color, poor people, or racially and ethnically diverse groups outside the perceived mainstream gay and lesbian communities. To understand how MSM is read, it is important to examine how explicit and implicit boundaries are drawn around the category gay. Consider, for example, a passage from Paul Farmer in which he claims that, in recent years, there have been fewer HIV cases than predicted among gay men in the United States, a category he implicitly racializes as White via the contrast with “injection drug users, inner-city people of color, and persons originally from poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean.”[21(p47)] He further excludes gay from poor and suggests that “males involved in prostitution are almost universally poor, and it may be their poverty, rather than their sexual preference, that puts them at risk of HIV infection. Many men involved in homosexual prostitution, particularly minority adolescents, do not necessarily identify as gay.”[21(p47)] With this juxtaposition, Farmer seems to suggest that same-gender behavior among poor men of color (especially youth) is sex work rather than sex for pleasure and is devoid of identity and community; same-gender behavior among White men is read as synonymous with gay identity. Compare these assumptions with a recent ethnographic report on men at risk for HIV in Dakar, Senegal.[22] While many of these “men who have sex with men” are poor and engage in sex work, the authors found that they have indigenous sexual-minority identities that are differentiated and socially meaningful. Senegalese sexual-minority identities serve as a basis for social organization, including, but not limited to, sexual roles. The authors describe ibbi as men who “tend to adopt feminine mannerism[s] and to be less dominant in sexual interactions,”[22(p505)] whereas yoos are men who “are generally the insertive partner.” They also stress that the categories have “more to do with social identity and status than with sexual practices.”[22(p506)] Despite their careful attention to local sexual identities of men in Senegal, the authors referred to them in the title and elsewhere as “men who have sex with men.” With this usage, the rich information on identity is lost, with MSM conveying transactional, decontextualized same-gender acts. Ironically, applying MSM in this way universalizes a culturally specific phenomenon in much the same way that critics say does the term gay.

A sense of unity has very real benefits at individual (belonging) and group (political organising) levels, but its ability to admit internal difference is compromised in the pursuit. According to Douglas (1966, p. 121), ‘all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered’. Rendering the margins safe involves sacrificing the complexity and difference of ‘real life’ (Martin, 1996). In promoting a sense of ‘us’, any group must rely to some extent on common denominators (Taylor, 1998) that sediment around the core. For Joseph (2004), the danger of collective identity construction is precisely the capacity for that core to deny or delegitimise membership by pointing up difference.