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We Are Everywhere A Five-Way Review of A
We Are Everywhere A Five-Way Review of A
We Are Everywhere A Five-Way Review of A
BI BOOK REVIEW
WE ARE EVERYWHERE: A FIVEWAY REVIEW OF A
HISTORY OF BISEXUALITY, OPEN, BECOMING VISIBLE,
BISEXUAL SPACES, AND LOOK BOTH WAYS
Serena Anderlini-DOnofrio
University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, PR
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that have not yet been reviewed in the pages of this journal. To correct
that omission, and in recognition of the importance that these two studies
play in so many of the articles in this special issue, we offer our review
and thoughts here. To set the critical theory of these books in a more
contemporary and applied context, we link them to three more recent texts.
Two, Jennifer Baumgardners trade book Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics
(2007) and Jenny Blocks Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage
(2009), memorialize various levels of personal experience as avenues to
theorizing bisexuality for the lay public, and they observe the ways in which
this trope deploys itself in ones personal life and in the life and culture of
our era. Finally, Beth Firesteins edited volume Becoming Visible (2007)
offers a store of applied research as well as theoretical knowledge directed
to professional counselors and therapists who intend to provide bisexual
patients with the mental and psychological health care they need. The
volumes subtitle, Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan, is emblematic
of the volumes intent to dispel the myth that bisexuality is a phase one
can overcome with proper medical attention. The idea here is that there
are no reasons to overcome bisexuality, though there are many reasons
why counselors and therapists, as well as society as a whole, should think of
bisexuals as very healthy, wholesome and valuable members of the human
community. An overview of these five books, we believe, will help readers
of this collection get a fairly articulate sense of where bisexuality stands
at this time in the realms of human knowledge and experience touched by
these books.
To start, then, Steven Angelides A History of Bisexuality offers a muchneeded historical and theoretical intervention in our thinking about the
history of what the modern era knows as sexuality, as well as our theorizing about the development of sexual identity categories. Co-editor Serena
Anderlini-DOnofrio, who was raised in Italy, brings to our reading of this
book the perspective of a Mediterranean education, where awareness of bisexual behavior registers across the cultural spectrum since antiquity. This
awareness has been articulated in a study of bisexual behavior in ancient
Greece and Rome by Eva Cantarella (1988/1992), a professor of classical
history at the University of Milan. The books title, Secondo Natura, encodes the concept that there is nothing unnatural about erotic expression
across genders: the title translates, quite literally, as According to Nature,
and even better, as Going Along with Nature, or Seconding Nature, as one
seconds a proposal in a meeting. The English elides the poetic aspect of
this and reads, objectively, as Bisexuality in the Ancient World. As might
be expected of a scholar based in Australia, where the legacies of Western
culture have arrived only recently, Angelides book focuses on the past
150 years. Oddly enough, however, Angelides perspective on the recent
history of bisexuality helps to explain why the title of Cantarellas book
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465
that is, the impossibility of any attempt to posit this thing called sexuality, and its component identity-parts of hetero-, homo-, and bisexual.
(p. 196)
For Angelides, undertaking such a theoretical venture has real-world consequences, in a number of ways. Attending to the theoretical difficulties that
bisexuality poses to our conceptualization of sexuality mandates a complete theoretical reconsideration of sexuality; and indeed, Angelides calls
at the end of his study for a substantive rethinking of how we understand
the history of sexuality:
This deconstructive history has demonstrated that no analysis of sexuality can afford to ignore the category of bisexuality, which mandates
a critical rethinking of some of the central terms and strategies of Foucauldian and queer theories. While these theories have provided, and
continue to provide, cogent political and theoretical tools for antihomophobic and anti-heteronormative inquiry, it is important to attend
to their own structuring exclusions in order to strengthen their political
and theoretical promise. (p. 199)
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A focus on bisexual knowledges found elsewhere, those not fully circumscribed by dominant formations of heterosexuality and homosexuality, . . . provides a strategy for resisting the narrativization of heterosexual and homosexual histories that rely on a denial of bisexual
specificity. Instead of celebrating dubious bisexual transgressions of
sex, gender, and sexual positions, I advocate an approach that insists
that bisexualitys capacity to generate radical reconfigurations of those
oppositions resides not outside but within social and cultural meaning.
(p. 197)
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Yes, we agree in part: bisexuals are often invisible within straight and gay
communities; but we are still left wondering exactly how bisexuals are
at the center of cultural conversations between straights and gays about
gay rights. Indeed, the subtitle is misleading: theres not much politics
here, unless its the politics of the personal, which is an important politics,
granted. Wed hoped, though, for more macropolitics, more consideration
of how larger conversations, beyond pop culture, are taking shape around
bisexuality in particular and around sexuality in general. In accordance with
prevalent styles in the trade book industry, the promise of such analysis is
never quite fulfilled.
But there is meaty stuff here, nonetheless. One nearly throwaway passage in the books final chapter gave us much pause for thought:
What Anne [Heche] symbolizes to me is the great what-ifwhat if it
were okay for gay people to have straight expectations? Not to pass,
or become palatable, or go back in the closet, but simply to expect
what Heche took for granted: to not have to be careful and quiet about
her love life. Heches cluelessness and her sense of entitlement were
annoying, but they were also her weapons against fearfear of being
gay in a homophobic society and in a very homophobic (though very
gay) industry. (p. 217)
The insight here seems smart and dead on: perhaps what is necessary at
timesnot just to increase bi-visibility, but to help create a world of greater
sexual freedomis a bit of cluelessness, a willingness to claim a sexual
empowerment even when such may not be willingly offered by those
around you. This is dangerous territory, but Baumgardners willingness
to provoke discussion about a bisexual politics is dangerous, to gays,
straights and even some bisexuals too. And though one may not be as
theoretically provoked, as is the case with Angelides and Hemmings
books, a reader of Look Both Ways may find him-, her-, or ze-self personally
provokedand that might be the most effective kind of provocation of all.
Similarly provocative, but in more subdued ways, is Jenny Blocks
Open (2009), a narrative about the authors personal journey through her
meanderings of social prescriptions, expectations and cliches, and her
endeavor to define herself as a bisexual, polyamorous subject, a woman
capable of loving men and women and of sustaining more than one amorous
relationship at once. Blocks narrative is presented as that of a modern
every(wo)man, who, in the United States, tries her best to meet social
and familial expectations while at the same time continuing her search for
what is fulfilling on a deeper level, as well as honest and authentic. The
literary quality of the book is quite impressive, which also speaks well
471
Even though Jenny was the one who suggested opening the marriage,
and even though Lisbeth was primarily her friend, when Lisbeth decides
to continue the sexual relationship with Christopher and not her, Jenny
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The author comes across as a woman with integrity, love, intelligence and
determination, a person one would want in ones life, and one who is
ready to fight her battles to define herself and her circumstances in her
own terms. Toward the end of the memoir the author goes back to some of
the dramatic moments in the story to offer her reflections on how she and
Christopher made it though the most difficult times. She clearly knows how
to establish the terms of a negotiation with her partner, as a person who
chooses marriage rather than feeling obligated to accept it as a womans
biological destiny.
Christopher and I recovered from our first debacle almost instantly,
simply because we decided we would. So much of navigating a new
lifestyle involves letting go of the norms and meanings to which
people have grown accustomed. We were figuring things together, and
we had to learn to talk to each other and to listen . . . we continue to
work at that. (p. 228)
Eventually, the life narrative Block presents in this memoir ends with the
formation of a three-way relationship that has Jenny involved with Christopher and Jemma, the younger woman who accepts to be her exclusive
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Electric School, also based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She points
out that leadership in the creation and development of these intentional
communities has consistently been bisexual, and that the effect of the work
of these communities in the culture at large has been that of teaching anew
forms and styles of the arts of loving, some of which were quite well known
in cultures ancient or other than the West. In other words, when all life is
recognized as a form of the sacred, as it was in classical antiquity and still
is in Tantric Hinduism, then bisexuality, like other plural forms of erotic
expression, are every bit according to nature, or, in Secondo Natura, as
Cantarellas original title explains. This erotic knowledge, we would like
to add, is indeed part of the sacred, as it helps to assuage pernicious fears
that stand in the way of practicing love sustainably. This knowledge helps
to control risks involved in producing love in an age of uncertainty like
our own, when production of this essential element that all life shares is
especially necessary.
The breadth of topics and disciplines, as well as the range of interests
and perspectives deployed in the books reviewed here, suggests that the
intersection of bisexuality and queer theory is a space populated with
multiple minds that vibrate together as their intellectual visions examine
and gradually transform our cultural notions of the sexual, the amorous
and the erotic.
NOTE
1. Winner of the 2009 Lambda Award for Bisexuality.
REFERENCES
Angelides, S. (2001). A history of bisexuality. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press.
Baumgardner, J. (2007). Look both ways: Bisexual politics. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Block, J. (2009). Open: Love, sex and life in an open marriage. Seattle, WA: Seal Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York:
Routledge.
Cantarella, E. (1992). Bisexuality in the ancient world. Yale University Press. (Originally work published as Secondo natura, 1988)
Firestein, B. (Ed.). (2007). Becoming visible: Counseling bisexuals across the lifespan.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Garber, M. (1995). Vice versa: Bisexuality and the eroticism of everyday life. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Hemmings, C. (2002). Bisexual spaces: A geography of sexuality and gender. New York:
Routledge.
Klein, F. (1993). The bisexual option. New York: Harrington Park Press.
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