Sunday 7 November 2010

The BiReCon Files 4: Why We Need To Get Bi

Another transcript from the BiReCon videos for you: here is Robyn Ochs -- part of her talk on why we need to 'Get Bi', which looked rather like this:

Robyn says:
Isn't this exciting?  Hehe!  I am so happy to be here.  Wow.  So quick audience survey - how many people are here from outside of the UK? 

Wow.  If you're from outside of the UK and you're in the first row where are you from? 

[audience: Germany, Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, US, Israel... fade out]

We love binaries.  And when you think of how sexual orientation is constructed in most places by most people, it's constructed as having two boxes.  Gay, and its opposite, straight, right. 

And of course in this binary construction we have one box that is more valuable and more honoured than the other - culturally, right, the straight box is more valuable - not by us, by them.

The straight box is considered you know a much better box and a bigger box and the gay box is considered a subordinated box

And in betwen those two boxes.  It's like the boxes
they have walls.  They have solid steel walls, right, and lids to keep the people in.  And in this kind of social construction they are separated by this big void.  Like they are opposite sexualities.  We even use terms like opposite - like "straight is the opposite of gay" - and they are separated by the void, the void of nothingness

I think that is another challenge to understanding bisexuality, is that people don't - they have a hard time imagining any space between the two.

The only time people can imagine something between straight and gay is when it's a transitory thing, when someone might be sliding from one to the other.

But it's seen as a temporary place, as an unstable location that isn't real because it's in the void

And this is something that is a big challenge for us and one thing that helped me not be so frustrated by this is that we do this with a lot of different things.  We like to put everything into binaries. 

No comments:

Post a Comment