Journal of Bisexuality

ISSN: 1529-9716 (Print) 1529-9724 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjbi20

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bisexual

David M. Halperin

To cite this article: David M. Halperin (2009) Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bisexual, Journal of
Bisexuality, 9:3-4, 451-455, DOI: 10.1080/15299710903316679

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710903316679

Published online: 25 Nov 2009.

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 Journal of Bisexuality, 9: 451–455, 2009
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ISSN: 1529-9716 print / 1529-9724 online

DOI: 10.1080/15299710903316679

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THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BISEXUAL

David M. Halperin

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

How is bisexuality defined? There is considerable disagreement among

bisexuals and bisexual theorists themselves. I present 13 definitions of
bisexuality and inquire into their overlaps, differences, implications and
consequences. This unresolved definitional uncertainty points to a larger
uncertainty about what sexuality is and how it should be understood.
Bisexual theory therefore has the potential to remind us of aporias in the
contemporary conception of sexuality.

Keywords: bisexuality, queer theory, homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual classifica-

tion, gay studies.

Bisexuality is a matter of definition. It is also a lived experience, of

course, but I am not going to be concerned with that. I am interested in
bisexuality as a category, as a sexual classification. One of the principal
pay-offs of the bisexual political movement has been the stark light it has
shone, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, on the articulation and
definition of sexual categories. The essays collected in this volume revolve,
accordingly, around problems of constructing, identifying, conceptualiz-
ing, ordering, relating and consolidating classifications of sex and gender.
The reader of this collection will come away from it with a lively sense of
just how acutely questions of sexual definition today remain in a state of
uncertainty, incoherence, flux and irredeemable confusion.
A number of the contributors devote substantial amounts of attention
to the meaning of queer. It has now been decades since that term began

Address correspondence to David M. Halperin, Department of English—1003, University

of Michigan, 3187 Angell Hall, 435 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003, USA (E-mail:
halperin@umich.edu).
 452 JOURNAL OF BISEXUALITY

to receive sustained attention from academic theorists of sexuality. As

someone who joined that debate when it began at Santa Cruz in February
of 1990, and who said everything that needed to be said about the meaning
of queer—along with its political advantages and disadvantages—long
ago,1 I find the global 20-year definitional frenzy over the meaning of
queer very odd: if that humble word really had any particular theoretical
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or political significance, one would think we would have figured it out by

now. Nonetheless, given the apparently inexhaustible nature of the subject,
and of the appetite for debating it, I will happily leave the word queer to
those who find a perennial pleasure in arguing about its true meaning, and
will transfer my focus to another, perpetually fought-over term—namely,
bisexuality.
In this case, I shall not purport to say what bisexuality really means
or try to indicate how it should be understood. I’ll content myself with
merely noting that the reason there has been so much argument over
the meaning of bisexuality is that the word signifies different things to
different people. Even more important, it keeps getting used in different
ways, or to refer to different things. In particular, I can think of 13 different
definitions of bisexual. At least, as the word is currently employed—at
times without an explicit awareness of the slippages or confusions among
different definitions of it—bisexual can refer to at least 13 different types
of people.
Bisexuals, then, are variously defined as people who:

• are sexually attracted to males and females;

• are not prevented from being sexually attracted to anyone because
that person is male or female;
• are sexually attracted to the individuals they are attracted to,
whether those individuals are male or female;
• are sexually attracted to their own sex but have a sexual history
that includes sex with persons of the other sex;
• are sexually attracted to the other sex but have a sexual history
that includes sex with persons of their own sex;
• are in a stable, long-term, sexual and erotic relationship with
someone of their own sex but are also sexually attracted to persons
of the other sex;
• are in a stable, long-term, sexual and erotic relationship with
someone of the other sex but are also sexually attracted to persons
of their own sex;
• have sex only with persons of their own sex who are gay and
persons of the other sex who are heterosexual;
• have sex only with other bisexuals (men or women);
 David M. Halperin 453

• have sex only with persons of their own sex but identify as bisex-
ual;
• have sex only with persons of the other sex but identify as bisexual;
• have sex with males and females but identify as gay or lesbian;
and
• have sex with males and females but identify as heterosexual.
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Some of these definitions look symmetrical, and they could therefore

be combined: for example, people who are in a stable, long-term, sex-
ual and erotic relationship with a person of one sex, but who are also
sexually attracted to persons of the other sex. So, then, why create two
separate categories for classifying or defining those kinds of people, de-
pending on whether their primary relationship is with someone of their
own sex or not? Why not put such people in a single category, in the same
category?
Well, the answer is simply that there is at present no general
agreement about whether those definitions really are equivalent or
symmetrical—whether, that is, a man who is in a stable, long-term, sexual
and erotic relationship with another man, but who presents himself as also
sexually attracted to women, should be thought of as the same kind of
person as a woman who is in a stable, long-term, sexual and erotic rela-
tionship with a man, but who presents herself as also sexually attracted
to women. That is at least partly because, in the first case, our society
would be inclined to see the man as gay and, in the second case, to see
the woman as straight, and therefore the social implications of the man’s
and the woman’s sexuality differ. It is also because the man’s and the
woman’s self-presentation will have different political consequences, and
those consequences may tend to play out differently in the context of var-
ious gay, lesbian and bisexual communities, not to mention in the eyes of
heterosexuals and straight society.
Do these 13 definitions describe 13 different kinds of sexual subjects,
then? Or are all the people who fit one or more of these definitions the
same kind of sexual subject as the people who fit one or more of the others?
Are the people defined by these criteria all bisexuals? Are they all equally
bisexuals, or are some of them more bisexual than some of the others?
Do these definitions specify different kinds of bisexuals? How exactly
are the people differently defined actually different from one another?
What differences do their differences make for sexual classification and
for sexual communities? Who gets to decide? And how are such decisions
adjudicated, appealed, contested?
One solution to this confusion would be to force some definitional clarity
about bisexuality, to define it once and for all. Some of the contributors
 454 JOURNAL OF BISEXUALITY

to this volume take a shot at that. Another solution, or nonsolution, would

be to treat the perpetual crisis of bisexual definition as a useful one for
dramatizing the larger crisis in contemporary sexual definition, to see it as
witness to a world in which we cannot make our sexual concepts do all the
descriptive and analytic work we need them to do, but in which we can
neither manage to live without them (the constant outcry against “labels”
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being nothing but pure hypocrisy, inasmuch as we have all become junkies
for social identity categories and show no sign of transcending them) nor
simply jettison them in favor of some other set of categories which might do
a better job of accounting for the phenomena before us than do the concepts
of sexuality—whether homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans-, asexual, or various more
specific designations of perversion.
“Queer theory” was once the name for the field of study that capitalized
on this crisis of sexual definition, on this breakdown in our conceptual
categories, electing not to resolve it but to describe it and anatomize it, to
provide a systematic map of our confusion and an analysis of the necessary
and irreparable incoherence of our own thought.2 That is why—in an age
in which queer has lost its sense of unassimilable and irredeemable sexual
deviance, and subsided into a mere synonym of gay—that is why queer
theory, and bisexual theory in particular, may still have something critical
to teach us.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

With thanks to Wallace Stevens (1923) for inspiring the title of this article.

NOTES

1. See Halperin (1995, pp. 56–67), and, for some later reflections, Halperin (2003).
2. See, most notably, Sedgwick (1990). More recently, Halperin (2002), and, especially, Kunzel
(2008), which will, I hope, quickly emerge as a classic in the field of bisexual studies.

REFERENCES

Halperin, D. M. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Halperin, D. M. (2002). How to do the history of homosexuality. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Halperin, D. M. (2003a). The normalization of queer theory. Journal of Homosexuality,
45(2/3/4), 339–343.
Halperin, D. M. (2003b). The normalization of queer theory. In A. Yep, K. E. Lovaas,
& J. P. Elia (Eds.), Queer theory and communication: From disciplining queers to
queering the discipline(s) (pp. 339–343). New York: Haworth Press.
 David M. Halperin 455

Kunzel, R. (2008). Criminal intimacy: Prison and the uneven history of modern American
sexuality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley, CA: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
Stevens, W. (1967). Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. In The collected poems
of Wallace Stevens (pp. 92–95). New York: Knopf. (Original published in 1923)
Stevens, W. (1990). The collected poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage.
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