Margaret Robinson - writer. researcher. activist - Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Bisexuality and the Seduction by the Uncertain

Please feel free to quote or cite this document, provided the appropriate citation is provided. Ex: Margaret Robinson, "Bisexuality and the Seduction by the Uncertain," (course paper, University of Toronto, 2002). When citing material online you may wish to add the URL, and the last date you accessed the page.

Why devote energy to creating yet another identity-based ethic? The answer has to begin with my disappointment at the absence of bisexual voices in academia, and with the way that bisexuality is misrepresented by gay and lesbian theorists. As a bisexual activist, I want to look at what meaning a term such as "bisexuality" can hold for me and others if sex and gender are revealed to be social constructions rather than essences. If I catch a glimpse of the mechanism--the man behind the curtain--which creates sex, gender or other supposedly essential categories, then what can it mean to identify as a bisexual woman, or to respect the claims of lesbian friends to be "women loving [only other] women?"

My project here is in some sense an exploration. I want to reflect upon what functions bisexual can serve that queer cannot, or does not yet. My imagined audience includes both those who refuse to see bisexual as offering anything beyond a reification of binaries, and those who are committed to bisexual liberation. My point of departure is my experience in one of Toronto's bisexual communities: centering around organizations such as the Toronto Bisexual Network (TBN), Bisexual Women of Toronto (BIWOT), and inter-connected with other local political, social and sexual organizations.1 Since my bisexual community is not uni-sex, my focus will not be either; although my primary identification and interest is with bisexual women. Since I am a theologian and a sexual ethicist, I am concerned with whether it is possible to construct a queer ethic when queer aligns itself with the dissolute, the degenerate, and the perverted.

I begin this project by examining queer theory, and queer in general, precisely to see where it titillates, and repulses me as a bisexual. I then move on to examine bisexual identity, and to describe the ways in which its promises excite me, its limits frustrate me, and its invisibility angers me. From there I will juxtapose queer and bisexual, to imagine what these identities and movements might offer one another, both positively and negatively. Finally, I will turn to ethics, and offer potential places for queer within sexual ethics, and for ethics within queer theory.

Queer

Queer theory is particularly suitable for examining bisexual identity because it emerges from a similar context: "of sex debates between feminists, critiques of feminism, postmodern theory right wing backlash against homosexuality in the AIDS crisis...."2 To these catalysts I would also add the possibility that queer theory emerged in response to bisexual political mobilization, which also matured during this period.3 Bisexuals emerged primarily from the sex-positive side of the sex wars, and bisexual behavior has been labeled, along with BDSM and butch/femme dynamics, as politically incorrect. Bisexual theorists such as Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu emerged in the early 1980s from radical lesbian and hippie commune culture. Bisexual communities were formed during the AIDS era, partially in response to the scapegoating of bisexuals by straight and lesbian writers.

The promise of queer theory is that it challenges universalizing systems and dominating social structures. It "seeks to disrupt, and to assert voice and power."4 For bisexuals, the term queer offers a "non-specificity," which while making a claim to outsider or outlaw status, to difference and deviance, avoids the "exclusionist tendencies" of gay and lesbian discourse, and the linguistic implications of bisexual as a identity term.5

Queer theorists have challenged claims that particular identities (gay, lesbian, woman) emerge from an essential source, have an origin or telos, remain stable, and are able to be clearly identified. In contrast to essential claims, queer theorists approach identity as provisional, contingent, strategic, and politically charged. Although this challenges the truth of claims to bisexual identity, it simultaneously challenges biphobia, which generally manifests itself (in both the heterosexual and gay/lesbian world) as a demand that we choose one of only two authentic categories. By viewing sexual identities as politically necessary errors, queer theorists offer a view of identity that works against the foundation of biphobia. By revealing the "straight" in gay and lesbian and the "queer" in straight, queer theorists challenge the claims that make bisexuality seem impossible. In the face of conflicts over the origins of same-sex attraction, and their exclusivity, queer seems to offers an option for coalition building based on a shared status as outsiders to heterosexual norms.

Another potential within queer theory emerges from the rejection of the essential claim of categories such as male and female. If there are no "real" men or women, but rather many people, some of whom "man" and some of whom "woman" (and some of whom do both, or neither), then the accusation that bisexual women "are sexual with our oppressors" is refuted.6 The knowledge that all men are not our oppressors, that our oppressors may be other women, or systems beyond individual control, may be too challenging for biphobic lesbians to accept. Ultimately, it may also be too threatening for those bisexuals with a vested interest in maintaining the sex/gender system.

Queer theorists have been enthralled by change and discovery in sexual identity. Using psychoanalytic theory, Judith Butler argues that sexuality is never fully accessible to the conscious self.7 Turning the coming-out story around, queer theorists ask how knowledge, the self, and knowledge about the self are produced.8 The classic question of "when did you know?" gets replaced by a multitude of challenges: "How do we learn something about ourselves? Are we the last ones to know ourselves? What makes some kinds of sexual knowledge possible?" and, "What do we refuse to learn?" Theorists such as Annamarie Jagose have reinterpreted identity in terms of narrative and myth, revealing the ways we create our own identity-sustaining story, editing out the parts of our histories which don't fit.9 Bisexual activists and theorists are attentive to the irony that what is edited out or refused in order to create both heterosexual and lesbian/gay identity is often sexual and relational experiences with the "wrong" sex.

Identity creation is not merely the project of individuals. Identity emerges from relation; from people in communities responding to, resisting, and being seduced by ideologies, both consciously and unconsciously.10 Queer theory is attractive to me because it offers an explanation of identity that does not necessarily require previous identities be discarded as less "real" or authentic. This potential is important for bisexuals, many of whom come to bisexuality from lesbian, gay or straight identities, and may change identity again later in life. If change is destigmatized, even seen as revolutionary, then the stereotypical charge that bisexuals are untrustworthy because they change can be refuted without having to reject change as bad.

Queer theorists offer a utopian vision--a movement that strives to go no where. It asks not, "where did we come from?" nor even "where are we going?" but "what strategy will get us somewhere different?" The lack of clear goals as a movement, can be dangerous for bisexuals, since the vision does not include a commitment to bisexual parity, inclusion, or liberation. Although queer theorists reject the claims to universality made by gay and lesbian identity politics (good news for bisexuals), many of them still see such identities as strategically necessary in light of heterosexist culture. Judith Butler writes that "there remains a political imperative to use these necessary errors or category mistakes, as it were...to rally and represent an oppressed political constituency."11 While advocating the use of particular identity categories as if they were distinct and real seems to make a place for bisexuality as an identity, queer theorists have not included bisexual as one of these strategically effective identities. Instead, it has constantly valorized gay (and especially) lesbian identity as the only politically effective foundations from which to mobilize.

Bisexual

Bisexual identity is not easy to define. Although the term implies there are two sexes, and seems to define itself by attraction to both, those who identify as bisexual do not always assent to the binary systems it evokes. Bisexuality is not limited to describing an attraction to men and women, to males and females, or to femininity and masculinity. Some bisexuals experience attraction to men as different than attraction to women, others view sex and gender as irrelevant.

Queer theorists have challenged sexual identities for obliterating disparate experiences by considering only the sex of one's partner in relation to one's own. The same category can contain persons attracted exclusively to partners over sixty, to personas of dominance and control or to working class artists. One strength of the bisexual community is that in recognizing that attraction extends beyond sex identifications, it has created a space where the varieties of sexual response can be recognized and explored. Bisexuals may be FTMs attracted to other transfolk, women attracted to femmes across the sexes, or leather bottoms interested in butch tops of any sex. In embracing the mutability of desire, bisexual identity has had to accept that the very experiences that make one potentially eligible to claim bisexual identity may change, or cease. Stimuli can stop eliciting desire. Relationships and emotional commitments can elicit desire where none previously was felt, and can cause other desires to fade in urgency or importance. Bisexuals have sometimes individuated desire, asking not "do you like women," but "do you like me?"

Bisexual culture tends to reject binaries in favor of spectrums, grids, or metaphors of fluidity, escape, and transgression. Whereas queer theorists frequently uses the image of crossing borders, and admiring those who do, bisexuality tends to use the image of homelessness.12 Personal narratives tend to be not only a "coming out" but a story of being forced out, and a group of bisexual women alone together will inevitable turn to discussing the pain of rejection, misunderstanding, and exclusion by lesbians and the lesbian community.

In some sense, the bisexual movement has arrived at the party just as everyone else was leaving. We face a culture which has done identity politics and is now ready to move on. Bisexual identity is refuted by some queer theorists for the assimilation strategies of gays and lesbian politics; yet bisexual politics have not been included in the assimilation project--indeed, as a movement, bisexual politics resembles the early liberationist days of what later became the lesbian and gay equality movement.

Neither gay and lesbian studies nor queer theory has included or effectively addressed bisexuality. Where bisexuality is named, it serves as a conjurer's device. It is brought forth in order to miraculously disappear.13 Some gay theorists have done this by focusing on practice rather than identity, absorbing all whose acts might open them up to or protect against HIV transmission into the category of "men who have sex with men," while reading that category as a synonym for (ultimately, even if still in the closet) gay.14

Lesbian theorists have tended to go to the other extreme, rejecting practice in favor of ideology. Lesbian politics frequently rejects bisexual women as male-identified, assumes that bisexual identity is less political than lesbianism, and charges that bisexuals are more likely than lesbians to be complicit with heterosexual privilege. The tendency to present bisexual women as male-identified, is partly a product of reality (some are) and partly a result of the lesbian community's disavowal of those ways in which lesbians themselves receive heterosexual privilege, identify with men and masculinity, or are able to "pass." That which gender presentations can "pass" as straight is strongly determined by class and culture is glossed over in favor of a simplified view: butch=lesbian= visible, femme=bisexual=passing. Those whose existence challenges this equation, such as bisexual butches, are simply unacknowledged.

In a lesbian culture which values political visibility and activism, the political contributions of bisexual women tend to be downplayed, or claimed as lesbian. Membership in lesbian community constantly remains a privilege that could be revoked, regardless of previous contribution. Carol Queen's concern that her position as a leader in the lesbian community would be ruined if she was "caught in bed with a faggot" was not mere paranoia.15 Transgressions which challenge the foundations of identity can result in being made an outsider to both straight and lesbian circles.

Yet bisexual communities do exist, and bisexual identity does offer distinct strategies. I will suggest four: 1) bisexuality challenges monosexism; 2) bisexual community is a resource for change; 3) bisexuality can offer a focus on gendered power relations; and 4) bisexual identity allows for openness to other oppressions.

Bisexuality challenges monosexism. A term emerging from bisexual politics, "monosexism" describes the assumption that sexual orientation naturally fixates on one easily identifiable sex, whether understood as the same or the opposite to one's own. Bisexual visibility, although not enough in itself, does work as a strategy to confront monosexism. Bisexuality rejects the assertion that desire is "naturally" directed toward only one of two sexes, instead enabling desire to encompass, surpass, or subvert concerns about the sex of ones partner. Attempts to describe bisexuals as "half gay and half straight" reflect gay, lesbian and straight attempts to define bisexuality according to a monosexist perspective.

The danger of queer is that it pretends to offer inclusion, but can in fact simply veil and reinforce identity-based power relations. The use of queer as an inclusive term can hide the biphobia of individuals and organizations.16 That so many queer theorists seem to automatically conceptualize queer in terms of gay and lesbian versus straight reveals the power of monosexism.
Bisexual community is a resource for change. Admittedly, bisexual communities are smaller than gay and lesbian communities, with less visibility, and less political and financial clout. Since there is no "bisexual village" bisexuals individuals tend to make a home in goth, polyamorous, swinging, pagan, BDSM, and other accepting sub-cultures, including gay and lesbian communities themselves. Bisexuality's exclusion thus results in a broad diversity of members, often with radically different ways of living out their sexual identity, and with access to multiple strategies for challenging the norm.
Bisexuality can offer a focus on gendered power relations. Maria Pramaggiore writes that bisexual is useful as a term "precisely because it acknowledges that the world is divided by and governed according to gendered power relations."17

Bisexuality can also be used to explore the ways in which individuals experience gender in relation to others. How I "woman" with other women may be different from the way I "woman" with men, with transmen, transwomen, or with people who live a fluid gender. As well, my working class femme is different from the femme of my upper-middle-class friends, and my mixed race femme is different from my friends Jewish femme or black Caribbean Canadian femme.

In a sense, bisexual as a term reminds us to be aware of the ideological "other" in a way that categories such as gay and lesbian, with their implications of homogeneity, do not. As well, bisexuality benefits from its relative invisibility by avoiding the gender commodification which has defined what gay and lesbian looks like in commercial terms, so that particular brand names evoke an identifiable gay "look". Although it has sometimes been exploited by pop culture, or named as "trendy," bisexuality has not yet been gentrified, identified with particular brand names, or associated with a particular segment of white culture. Our invisibility has enabled multiple racial and classed gender expressions to be embraced, rather than offering up one image as the "ideal bisexual." Ironically, as we strive for greater visibility, we risk losing this gender multiplicity.
Bisexual identity allows for openness to other oppressions. Bisexuality offers a political identification with women in response to patriarchy, but also an association with particular men or communities, in response to race, class, or sexual oppression. Bisexual identity has not commonly required rejecting other categories of identification, or prioritizing sexual identity. My biracial identity is not treated as if it were competing with my sexual identity, but rather recognized as another instance of experiencing the incongruity between my reality and society's selection of valued categories.

Bisexuality can evoke a recognition of other also/and experiences, such as bi/multi-racial or bi/multi-lingual identity, rather than insisting on a homogeneous universal. That is not to say that bisexuality always does this, or must. In some cases bisexual identity claims have been used to silence, erase, and deny the multicultural roots of the movement itself.18 Yet challenging compulsory homogeneity is one strategic function bisexuality can serve. Which, if any, identities markers take precedence is then a question of strategy. The strategy Dajenya relates, of being out as lesbian to confront straight homophobia, and of being out as bisexual in queer circles, to confront lesbian biphobia, is echoed by many bisexuals.19 Other situations may require visibility according to class, race or gender lines.

Queer and Bisexual

Queer theorists, and former queer theorists, have identified four dangers within queer theory: 1) that masculinity, and its associated values, will be valorized as generic; 2) that transcending categories will ignore the reality of oppression; 3) that queer will only be "gay and lesbian studies" in radical drag; 4) and that any one will be able to claim queer subjectivity, thus obscuring the role of power and privilege.20 Queer theory has failed bisexuals on all of these fronts: 1) viewing bisexual women as "femmes" and pronouncing them less authentic, 2) ignoring the reality that bisexuals experience violence and systemic denial of their rights, not only when mistaken for gay or lesbian, but as bisexuals; 3) uncritically adopting the biphobia and monosexism of gay and lesbian studies; 4) and by reserving radical subjectivity for gays, lesbian, (and sometimes transfolk), while ignoring the way gays and lesbians perpetuate biphobia and monosexism.

In general, queer theorists have heterosexualized bisexuality, viewing it as less functional, and more dependent on categories of sex and gender than gayness or lesbianism.21 At the same time, queer theorists have advocated gay and lesbian (but not bisexual) as strategic identities, to be taken up with an awareness of their limitations, for particular political purposes. As a movement within theory it has consistently forgotten, suppressed, or rejected bisexuality. Can we embrace queer theory without embracing biphobia?

One potentially effective strategy within queer theory which I believe offers promise for the bisexual liberation movement is the use of the "as if." Simply put, we acknowledge that the categories which we treat as essential are in fact not, yet we operate on a day-to-day basis as though they were. Naming and opposing the reality of our oppression in some way requires that we respond as though these categories really did possess the essence they claim. The "as if" stance enables strategies to be formed in light of the reality of our oppression as women, as queers, etc., without giving total credence to the truth claims of the categories themselves. Knowing that my sex and gender is a social construct will not prevent my being swarmed by a carload of homophobic men; strategic planning in light of the reality of queer-bashing may.

Ethics

There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female....
Galatians 3:28

It is traditional to begin theological writing with an appeal to word derivation. The word "ethics" comes from the Greek word . Although this word is often translated as "habit," ethics is not simply the accumulation of habits, whether socially approved or not. It is closely related to the Greek word , which means character. The study of ethics is focused not so much on what acts are permissible or forbidden, but rather, on how various forces (personal, political, social, religious) shape human character. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that we become virtuous when we use our rational mind to convert our irrational impulses and desires into choices, which form our character. We become by doing, and our desires are informed by deliberation. That which is habitual (the moderns might say unconscious) is brought forward examined, and perhaps claimed, resisted or rejected.22 The implications of this for sexuality is both exciting and (if one knows anything of history) disturbing. The primary difference between the project of building character and that of forming identity is that, for queer theorists, identity is a strategy which has aims outside of itself. Character, by contrast, is viewed by ethicists as being an end rather than a means, even if it is argued to have secondary benefits.

What has ethics to do with queer theory? At first glance, ethics seems to be merely part of the (hetero)normative categorical thinking which queer theorists challenge at the roots. This may seem to be particularly true in regard to sexual ethics. Queer theorists have generally rejected attempts to normalize sexuality, instead focusing on the marginal, the forbidden, and the perverse, even when it is found within the supposedly mainstream.23 The exploration of sexual identity categories gives way to the examination of the production, experience and expression of desire.24 Often this reveals that the categories which purport to reflect desire are in fact rigid and unmoving precisely in order to contain desire, which seems to transcend, counteract, and destroy categories of sexual identity. In light of queer theory's many challenges to identity, and its affiliation with reviled difference, can there be a queer ethics? I would argue that queer ethics can be found in the creation of queer identity, and particularly in the practice of queer theory.

Colleen Lamos suggests that queer theory "does not appeal to universal human values or to transcendental notions of the good," but instead offers ethical claims that are

"pragmatic and relative; 'the good' or 'the right' is what is good or right for certain purposes, under certain conditions, at specific times, for certain groups of people whose understanding of themselves as a group sharing common interests is itself a matter of debate."25

Yet without offering a systematic or universal program for ethics, queer theorists have tended to make truth claims. Allowing that these claims are necessarily situational, I propose three values which have been typical of the writing of queer theorists in addressing sexuality within our present context: 1) inclusion; 2) self-direction; and 3) conditionality.

Inclusion: identity politics has made good use of liberal humanist rights language, emphasizing parallels between sexual orientation and (supposedly fixed) ethnicity and race, aiming to achieve equality or equity within social structures. By contrast, queer theorists advocate a dismantling of the very social structures which make sexual subjects possible.26 Annamarie Jagose contrasts the two approaches as a politics of identity versus a politics of difference.27 Whereas identity politics encourages political mobilization as lesbians, or as gay men, and must overlook differences such as race and class in order to present a united identity, queer politics sees identity categories as strategies, not starting points, beginning instead from a commonality of exclusion from the norm. In this sense, queer theory and its political expression offer more room for diversity than gay and lesbian identity politics. Whereas racial, ethnic, or class identities tend to be seen as competing identities by gay and lesbian organizations, queer politics interprets multiple differences as heightening queerness. Queer activism is strengthened by the presence of people whose multiple identities reveal the gaps and inaccuracies in heteronormative truth claims. To the extent that queer theorists have ignored and rejected the strategic possibilities of bisexuality, they have contravened their own values.
Self-Direction: Queer theorists have challenged categorical claims to essence, and offered a view of categorical experience as socially constructed, its mechanics of reproduction often (perhaps necessarily) hidden from consciousness, yet requiring personal participation. Butler's description of performativity applies not only to something done to individuals, nor something individuals do for others, but to the way in which individuals become and create themselves and their subjectivity as people, even if the only "audience" is themselves.28 The tendency of queer theorists to point out the constructed nature of categories removes the mystique of essentialism and makes it permissible to challenge rigid categorical thinking. If categories are socially constructed they can be dismantled.

In pointing out the slippages, breaking points, and illusions of identity, queer theory creates "wiggle room" for individuals who do not easily fit the popular categories. This is promising for bisexuals, whose identity, experiences, and desires are too frequently expected to be partitioned, however artificially, into categories of "gay" and "straight." Categories "become detrimental," writes bisexual theorist Liz A. Highleyman, "when labels are seen as more important than people, and when people are pressed to limit what they think, say, and do in order to fit into identity-based categories."29 Queer theorists have tended to give preference to people over categories. Gloria Anzaldúa writes,"[l]a persona esta situada dentro de la idea en vez del reves," reiterating the need for people to have priority.30 This is an ethical stance.
Conditionality: Many queer theorists aim to escape ranked dualisms, avoid class, race, and other categorical hegemonies. Although queer theorists have not done this with regard to bisexuals, the goal is one which promises to challenge the power dynamics within queer communities-a dynamic which bisexuals experience as gay/lesbian hegemony. This hegemony is frequently manifested as bi marginalization, exclusion, or erasure.

Queer theorists do not offer strategies for living with the unknown, the mysterious or the unresolved, instead advocating that people live as if the categories had not been revealed to be without essential foundations. In a sense, this is an issue of philosophy: can a thing be the same once it has been seen? Is it possible to live "as if" once we know some other possibility? In a sense we are left with an issue of faith: can we live without knowing, or without holding out the hope that knowing is possible?

The three values I have identified (inclusion, self-direction, and conditionality) form part of queer theory as strategies or practices. Yet if Aristotle is correct in that we become by doing, then such strategies are not merely tools which subjects may choose to take up for a cause, but are additionally tools by which we assist in fashioning our own selves. Queer theory enables us to dig into the soil of human character, revealing some of the ways in which we build personhood, and become subjects-especially (perhaps always) sexual subjects. In short, queer theory reveals our sexual . Viewing such a project as a theologian, queer theory stands out as an explicitly ethical project.

Notes

See, for example, http://www.biwot.org; http://www.torontobinet.org. BIWOT and TBN are two parts of a tri-part support and social system. The third group is Bisexual Men of Toronto. Since I do not attend their meetings I know them primarily through bisexual community projects. Despite their names, all three groups include and welcome transfolk.
Heather Sykes, "Turning the Closets Inside/Out: Towards a Queer-Feminist Theory in Women's Physical Education," Sociology of Sports Journal 15 (1998) : 155. See also, James T. Sears, "A Generational and theoretical Analysis of Culture and male (Homo) Sexuality," in Queer Theory in Education, ed. William F. Pinar, (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999),78-79.
Maria Pramaggiore, "BI-ntroduction I: Epistemologies of the Fence," in RePresenting Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire, ed. Donald E. Hall and Maria Pramaggiore (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 5; Amanda Udis-Kessler, "Identity/Politics: a History of the Bisexual Movement," in Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries and Visions, ed. Naomi Tucker, Liz Highleyman and Rebecca Kaplan (New York: Harrington Press, 1995), 17-30; Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu, "Political Activism: a Brief History," in Bi Any Other Name, ed. Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991), 359-367.
William G. Tierney and Patrick Dilley, "Constructing Knowledge: Educational Research and Gay and Lesbian Studies," in Queer Theory in Education, 59.
Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 76.
Marilyn Murphy, "The Gay-Straight Split Revisited," Lesbian Contradictions (Fall 1989), quoted in Dajenya, "Sisterhood Crosses Gender Preference Lines," Bi Any Other name, 247.
Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge Press, 1991), 15.
Dennis Carlson, "Who Am I? Gay Identity and a Democratic Politics of Self," in Queer Theory in Education, 115.
Jagose, Queer Theory, 15
Ibid., 78; Diana Fuss, "Inside/Out," in Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, 2.
Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," 16
Rebecca Gorlin, "The voice of a wandering Jewish bisexual," in Bi Any Other Name, 252 and Rebecca Shuster, "Beyond defence: Considering next steps for bisexual liberation," idem., 267.
Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," 16; Cherríe Moraga and Rosemary Weatherspoon, "Queer Reservations; or Art, Identity and Politics in the 1990s," in Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders and Generations, ed. J. A. Boon et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 67; Erica Meiners, "Remember When All the cars Were Fords and All the Lesbians Were Women? Some Notes on Identity, Mobility, and Capital," Queer Theory in Education, 122.
See Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu, "Overview," in Bi Any Other Name, 216, on the proliferation of terms used to avoid saying "bisexual."
Carol A. Queen, "The Queer in Me," in Bi Any Other Name, 19.
Naomi Tucker, "Introduction," in Bisexual Politics, 4.
See also, Maria Pramaggiore, "BI-ntroduction I," 5.
Laura M. Perez, "Go Ahead: Make My Movement," Bisexual Politics, 111.
Dajenya, "Sisterhood Crosses Gender Preference Lines," 247.
Annamarie Jagose, "Queer Theory," Australian Humanities Review (December 1996). Available at http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-Dec-1996/jagose.html; last accessed January 8, 2002.
Moraga and Weatherspoon, "Queer Reservations; or Art, Identity and Politics in the 1990s," 66-67, 73.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2.
Tierney and Dilley, "Constructing Knowledge," 59-62.
Dennis Sumara and Brent Davis, "Telling Tales of Surprise," in Queer Theory in Education, 198.
Colleen Lamos, "The Ethics of Queer Theory," in Text, Theory and Responsibility, ed. Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods (New York: St Martin's Press, 1999), 144.
Tierney and Dilley, "Constructing Knowledge," 65.
Jagose, Queer Theory, 77.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 84-87.
Liz Highleyman, "Identity and Ideas: Strategies for Bisexuals," in Bisexual Politics, 76.
Gloria Anzaldúa, "To(o) Queer the Writer-Loca, Escorita, y Chicana," in Living Chicana Theory, ed. C. Trujullo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998), 266.