The BiReCon Files 9: Creating Bisexual Intimacies in the Face of Heteronormativity and Biphobia

Christian Klesse - Creating Bisexual Intimacies in the Face of Heteronormativity and Biphobia

"OK, the first set of problems I want to briefly relate to, refer to questions of identity and identification.

You know, if you look at the historical and sociological literature on LGBT sexualities, there is a common sense, I suppose that non-heterosexual relationships are often constructed as deviant, there is something wrong with it, pathological, they are considered to be more problem-ridden and also you know less stable more fragile.

And you can find these descriptions in academic literature but you can also find these ideas in popular culture.

I suppose, you know, that some of these themes which I would argue are targeted, address non-heterosexual sexualities in a more general sense, are even more pronounced in the case of bisexuality. Because as David Bell said in an article in the mid 1990s in 1994: bisexuality is a kind of identity which is often assumed not to exist at all. So you know, problems around bisexual identity take often a particular twist, let's put it this way, because, you know, bisexuality is considered to be 'just a phase', an issue of immaturity, indecisiveness, of internalised homophobia or lesbophobia and so on.

We find bi-negativity across various discourses social life worlds. And I think bi-negative thought and bi-negative ideology very often finds a quite distinctive way of articulating itself in distinctive sexual cultures so there's no - I am going to talk a bit about biphobia in a while - but I think there's no such thing as biphobia as a universal force operating in society. It depends very much on the context.