Klesse - 2005 - Bisexual Women, Non-Monogamy and Differentialist Anti-Promiscuity Discourses

05 056620 Klesse (to_d) 24/8/05 8:34 am Page 445
Article
Abstract Popular discourses on bisexuality assume a peculiar

interrelation between bisexuality and non-monogamy. Drawing
upon qualitative research in gay male and bisexual
non-monogamies in the UK, this article explores bisexual
women’s accounts on the effects of promiscuity allegations on
non-monogamous sexual and relationship practice. Due to the
prominence of gender as a differentializing factor in the
discourses on promiscuity, to be publicly known as bisexual and
non-monogamous tends to have particularly stigmatizing effects
on women. The issue is further complicated by the intersection
of promiscuity discourses with discourses on race/ethnicity and
class. The regimes of violence that go hand in hand with the
stigmatization through promiscuity allegations police women’s
sexual behaviour making it more risky for women of certain
positioning to come out or move and socialize in certain
cultural contexts.
Keywords biphobia, bisexuality, gender, intersectionality,
non-monogamy
Christian Klesse
Keele University, UK
Bisexual Women, Non-Monogamy

and Differentialist Anti-Promiscuity
Discourses
Introduction
The tension between sexual danger and sexual pleasure is a powerful one in
women’s lives. Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression,
and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency.
(Vance, 1992: 1)
These were the opening words of Carol Vance’s introduction to the
proceedings of the 1982 Barnard Conference on Female Sexuality. Today,
Sexualities Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 8(4): 445–464 DOI: 10.1177/1363460705056620
http://sex.sagepub.com
Sexualities 8(4)
two decades and many struggles later, and in a different social context,
women still negotiate their personal approaches to sex and desire against
the backdrop of this tension. The concrete terms of the effects of this
ambivalence on individual women’s lives depends on a wide range of
factors that are mediated by the intersecting discourses on gender, sexu-
ality, race/ethnicity, class, age and the body.
In this article, I discuss bisexual women’s accounts of pleasure and
danger whom I have interviewed for a larger research project into bisexual
and gay male non-monogamies, politics and power in the UK.1 Some of
the guiding questions of my research were:
• How do gay men and bisexual men and women live and construct their
relationships as non-monogamous?
• What kinds of discourses on non-monogamy and sex are circulated in
the debates and politics of the bisexual and gay male movements?
• How do heteronormative discourses affect the relationship practices of
people who defy monogamy?
• What power issues surface in or shape bisexual and gay male non-
monogamous relationship practices?
I deployed a variety of qualitative methods (notably in-depth inter-
viewing, focus groups, participant observation, documentary research and
discourse analysis). I conducted four focus group interviews and inter-
viewed 44 people on their experiences in non-monogamous relationships
and their ideas about sexual politics. Eleven of my interview partners2 were
female. Ten women identified as bisexual, one as lesbian, usually provid-
ing detailed descriptions of the nuances of their specific sexual identities.
Most women described themselves as white (using different categories to
describe their ethnic or national background) and considered themselves
to be middle class.
Although I undertook several steps to increase the diversity of my
research sample, I could not motivate many people with an ethnic or racial
minority status or a working-class background to participate in the
research project. It has been suggested that differences in subjective posi-
tioning between researcher and researched may have far-reaching effects
on the research process, in particular if they are bound up with deeper
social divisions (Phoenix, 1994; Song and Parker, 1995). Against the
backdrop of these debates in methodology, it can be safely assumed that
the low participation of people of racial or ethnic minority or working-
class background is an undeniable effect of my own privileged positioning
as a white European middle-class academic (Klesse, 2003, 2004, forth-
coming a). The noticeable bias of my overall sample towards male partici-
pants also finds its explanation in the research process. Originally I had
designed the study as a research into non-monogamous relationship
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Klesse Bisexual Women
practices among gay and bisexual men. This was due to two consider-
ations: As a bisexual-identified man with a non-monogamous relationship
history including male and female partners, I wanted to acknowledge the
fact that many men in non-monogamous male same-sex relationships may
identify as bisexual. At the same time I thought that as sole male researcher
working on this project I would not be able convince a significant number
of women to participate in the research. Doing fieldwork I quickly noticed
that this assumption was unwarranted and that many women would have
liked to volunteer for an interview. I also realized that any meaningful
research of the complex nexus between bisexuality and non-monogamy
would have to include the analysis of bisexual women’s perspectives. I thus
broadened the focus of my research (see Klesse, 2003, forthcoming a). This
essay is exclusively based on the accounts of my female interview partners.
Bisexuality is a contested category. While some activists and theorists
argue that bisexuality (even if not as an identity per se, so at least as an
epistemological perspective) bears the potential to radically undermine the
constrictive ways we tend to think about sexuality and gender, others argue
that the category simply reinforces the binary it claims to challenge
(Burrill, 2002; Däumer, 1992; Dollimore, 1997; du Plessis, 1996;
Hemmings, 2002; James, 1996; Young, 1997). Moreover, there is a range
of often conflicting definitions of what bisexuality consists in. Definitions
have focused alternately on behaviour, fantasy or identity or at the conflu-
ence of all these factors (Klein and Wolf, 1985). Other unsettled questions
are concerned with the occurrence of bisexual desire or behaviour across
the lifecycle (Firestein, 1996; Rodríguez Rust, 2000). I cannot engage
with these complex questions in detail in this article. It should be enough
to say the following: self-declared identity and conscious references to
bisexuality by my research partners provide the basis of my discussion of
bisexuality. Irrespective of the question whether we perceive bisexuality as
a useful concept, it provides a source for identification and political mobi-
lization and should therefore be addressed in scientific work on sexuality
(cf. Hemmings, 2002; Off Pink Collective, 1996).
In this article I do not attempt to discuss the entirety and complexity
of all dimensions of pleasure/danger in bisexual women’s lives. It is not
that it would be impossible to identify certain themes that surface with
some regularity in my interview partners’ accounts. For example, many
women related personal experience stories of sexual (and other forms) of
violence and abuse. Many showed a concern that they may be at risk of
experiencing violence or harassment, in particular, if they have sex with
men or engage in sex in public environments that are frequented by or
shared with men. Many women discussed how STDs and in particular
HIV/AIDS have had an impact on their approaches to non-monogamy.
Others were concerned with the risks of unwanted pregnancy. Many of
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these risks were clearly associated with or at least seemed to be particularly

pronounced with regard to sexual relationships with men. However, rather
than working through the whole range of these topics, my focus is specifi-
cally on hegemonic discourses that link bisexuality and non-monogamy.
The construction of bisexuality and non-monogamy

The scarce research into bisexual relationship practices (that mostly refers
to the US context) suggests a relatively high frequency of non-
monogamous relationship arrangements among bisexual-identified
women and men (George, 1993; Rodríguez Rust, 2000; Rust, 1996;
Weinberg et al., 1994). Bisexual non-monogamies are extremely diverse.
Non-monogamous relationships differ in terms of numbers of partners,
kinds of arrangements and degrees of closeness and commitment, legal
relationship status, constellations of genders, sexual or social identities,
living arrangements and household forms, parenting arrangements, and so
on (see Hutchins, 1996; Klesse, 2003; Pallotta-Chiarolli, 1995; Paul,
1997). Moreover, many non-monogamous bisexuals also participate in
public, semi-public or group sex activities and frequent so-called public
sex environments, such as cruising grounds, swingers’ clubs, sex and s/m
clubs and parties in diverse subcultural contexts.
There is an intensive and lively debate about non-monogamy and
polyamory in the bisexual movement in the UK (Klesse, 2003). Non-
monogamy is a troubling issue for many bisexuals, because dominant
discourse constructs bisexuals as non-monogamous by necessity. The
assumption that bisexuals have to be non-monogamous flows from the
traditional western construction of sexuality in a dualistic scheme. If
homosexuality and heterosexuality (thought as opposites) are perceived as
the only ‘real’ and valid forms of sexual orientation, then bisexuality can
only be thought of as a ‘mixed’ form of sexuality consisting in parts of
homosexuality and heterosexuality (see Ault, 1999 [1996]; Däumer,
1992; Rodríguez Rust, 2000). The ‘homosexual side’ and the ‘hetero-
sexual side’ of an individual are thought to be (at least potentially) in
permanent conflict (Rust, 1996; Whitney, 2002). One of the dominant
definitions of bisexuality demands people to be – at any particular time –
behaviourally or actively bisexual (see Zinik, 1985). According to this
discourse people can only call themselves to be truly bisexual, if they
maintain relationships to people of both male and female genders at the
same time. Consequently, authentic bisexuality is only possible in the
context of a non-monogamous life practice.
Although many of my interview partners rejected this definition, I have
gained the impression that it still has quite a strong hold among many self-
identified bisexuals. In group discussions and workshops people repeatedly
448
declared that they would find it difficult to maintain a bisexual identity if

they do not have concurrent relationships with people of both male and
female genders. Monogamy with a partner of either sex tends to destabi-
lize bisexual identity narratives (cf. Eadie, 1996). Some research suggests
that identity problems are particularly pronounced in the case of the
absence of same-sex relationships in bisexuals’ lives (Blumstein and
Schwartz, 2000 [1977]). The hegemonic definition of bisexuality as essen-
tially non-monogamous affects bisexuals in a variety of ways. The issue I
am primarily concerned with in this article is the fact that this assumption
presents one of the most pervasive anti-bisexual stereotypes.
Differentialist anti-promiscuity discourses

Bisexual activists and academics have for some time promoted the concept
biphobia to comprehend the specific discrimination faced by bisexuals,
both in straight and lesbian and gay contexts (e.g. Firestein, 1996;
Rodríguez Rust, 2000; Udis-Kessler, 1996b). Robyn Ochs (2000) defines
biphobia as prejudiced behaviour, discrimination, and marginalization.
Like homophobia, biphobia draws on a set of stereotypes. A heightened
sexuality, an essential non-monogamy or promiscuity is a strong feature of
biphobic discourses.
However, the theorization of promiscuity stereotypes within theories of
biphobia usually does not pay very much attention to the fact that differ-
ent people (depending on their bodies, identities and group associations)
are affected differentially by stigmatization through promiscuity
discourses. The specific meaning of the term promiscuity is strongly deter-
mined by context with the social location of both addressee and the person
using the label being of high importance. Accusing a person of being
promiscuous is part and parcel of a highly gendered, classed and racialized
discourse on sexuality (LeMoncheck, 1997).
Feminist analyses have emphasized that promiscuity discourses can be
deployed to subject women’s sexual agency to a specific disciplinary
regime of morality that is commonly referred to as the ‘double standard’.
The deployment of labels such as ‘promiscuous’, ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘whore’
activates associations of impurity, unchastity and dishonour and functions
as an attack on women’s reputations (see Cowie and Lees, 1987; Holland
et al., 1998; Lees, 1993; Tanenbaum, 1999; Wolf, 1997).
Processes of labelling according to the ‘whore stigma’ renders offensive
and unacceptable any form of female sexuality that is not subject to
men’s desire to control (Pheterson, 1986). In behavioural terms the
promiscuity stigma may serve to delegitimize a wide range of sexual
activities of women: sex before or outside marriage, sex with more than
one partner, sex other than heterosexual genital sex (such as oral, anal or
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s/m sex), sex with other women, sex of divorced or widowed women,
‘public’ sex or flirtation, and so on. Promiscuity discourses establish a
disciplinary regime of control and self-control and an effective form of
social punishment. The promiscuity accusation is often deployed to legit-
imize male sexual violence and abuse (Edwards, 1981; Smart, 1995;
Tanenbaum, 1999).
Although any woman may be subjected to promiscuity discourses, they
have historically been most frequently used against particular groups of
women. Material power relationships and the interplay of discourses on
gender, race/ethnicity and class in the construction of sexualities have led
to a particular strong sexualization of black and other racialized feminini-
ties (Bhattacharyya, 1997; Cohen, 1996; Marshall, 1994). Similarly, in the
imaginary of dominant groups Jewish women and working-class women
have been represented as being sexually immoral and transgressive (Peiss,
1983; Pheterson, 1986; Theweleit, 1978). Moreover, women play a
significant role as cultural symbols in the construction of the boundaries
of nationalist, ethnic or racial collectivities. Women’s sexual behaviour
therefore is policed for the sake of the creation of interest-bound repre-
sentations of the ‘nation’, ‘race’ or ‘community’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis,
1989; Cohen, 1996; Yuval-Davis, 1997). Futhermore, the cultural values
promoted within religious discourses and movements often tend to
discourage female sexual autonomy and agency (Bhatt, 1997; Herman,
1997; Saghal and Yuval-Davis, 1992).
Dealing with promiscuity discourses

Most women in my study complained about the sexual double standard
operating in wider society. Franca emphasizes the pervasive double
standard she experienced as a teenager and young adult, when she still
lived in Italy. Sexual behaviour is regulated by a Madonna/whore
dichotomy, she argues, according to which sexualized women are ruled
out as respectable partners (for marriage).
Franca: The way of seeing relationships is different because usually every-
body gets married and has kids and that’s what you’re supposed to
do. And women are not supposed to be very sexual . . . Either
they’re sluts or Madonnas, you know – either they’re saints and
they’re really pure or they’re really sluts and they don’t get married
with them anyway . . . And it was all very strange, because I had a
very bad reputation. And I didn’t go with anyone then, but I had
the worst reputation in my town. [laughs] And it was only because
I was very open about sex and I would talk about it . . . But it
didn’t stop me at all. I think I did my own thing anyway, and I
think it would have been the same if I was English or whatever.
450
Maybe I would have done it before, because there would have been
more opportunities. That’s the only difference.
Franca did not date any body at this time. Already talking openly about
sexuality was considered being inappropriate and damaged her reputation.
Yet Franca continued ‘doing her own thing’, thus articulating agency
against the repression of her sexual desire. Her motivation to escape these
pressures finally fed into her decision to migrate. I do not intend to foster
stereotypical views on Italian culture by recounting Franca’s story. Women
raised in England, too, felt the effects of the ‘double standard’ in their
social lives. They, too, were adamant that they were not willing to let sexist
assumptions rule their personal life choices. Caroline, for example, argues:
Caroline: I think there’s more pressure on women to be monogamous than
there is on a man . . . and it’s more accepted for men to cheat, so
perhaps people find it less surprising that a man would want to be
in an open relationship, but they seem to find it hard to understand
that a woman would want to. But that’s external expectations.
Inside the relationships I haven’t really noticed any difference.
When I ask Caroline whether these ‘external expectations’ would make it

more difficult for her to maintain a non-monogamous lifestyle, she just
laughs and replies: ‘Personally no, no. I’m quite good at doing things
differently from the rest of the world!’
Similarly, Marianne argues that despite the dominant gendered construc-
tions of sexuality, she does not ‘feel obliged’ to meet anyone’s expectations.
Despite her personal experiences of being stereotyped as promiscuous, she
does not see any gender issues in her personal relationships.
Christian: Would you say that as a woman you face different problems being
polyamorous or non-monogamous? . . . Do you think there are
gender issues involved?
Marianne: I don’t know. I mean, in terms of what normal society expects, it’s
much easier for a man to sleep around than for a woman to. Like
women get labelled tarts and promiscuous and things like that,
whereas if a man does the same thing he’s just being one of the
lads. But that’s sort of normal society and what’s portrayed on tele-
vision and soap operas and things, and I don’t feel in any way
obligated to live my life like that, so I don’t really . . . see a gender
issue. Certainly within the poly community, there’s as many if not
more women as men. I think the women just tend to be a bit more
vocal. . . . So no, I don’t think there is a gender problem.
Caroline and Marianne clearly assert their agency and autonomy against
these sexist discourses and pressures. I found it striking that although both
women criticize sexism in wider society, they clearly exempt their personal
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and political environment from this critique. Their accounts imply that
sexist double standards might be an issue ‘out there’, but not in their
relationships and the bisexual and polyamorous movements in which
women are quite vocal and that are comparatively enlightened by the
feminist critique. This position can be interpreted as post-feminist in that
it assumes that the critique of feminism has restructured sexual ethics and
shifted the gendered relations of power at least in certain societal ‘pockets’
– such as the bisexual/queer scenes (cf. Klesse, forthcoming b; Whelehan,
1995). Such a view was not shared by all of my interview partners.
Cath, for example, gives many examples of how gender structures
male–female intimate and sexual relationships in the bisexual scene. Thus,
she points out that women who identify themselves as non-monogamous
tend to be approached for sex by bisexual men in inappropriate ways or in
inappropriate social spaces, such as political meetings.
Cath: Especially the fairly young in the community . . . walking into that
awesome bisexual polyamory thing . . . for the bisexual women
there are great stereotypes. And being identified as non-
monogamous, inappropriate partners come to speak to me, surely,
you know people, who have no connection to me at all, and
wonder if I want to sleep with them. And that’s something that
I’ve heard in X-town from a large number of women, who just get
hit on all the time, by men – bisexuals, because . . . that’s part of
it: ‘We’re non-monogamous!’
According to Cath, being identified as non-monogamous reinforces
bisexual women’s sexualization irrespective of context and relationship.
Bisexual women tend to be particularly sexualized in the imagination of
many heterosexual and bisexual men (Garber, 1995; George, 1993).
Sharon refers to this as the ‘hot-bi-babe’ syndrome, when she explains
the gendered specificities of bisexual coming-out experiences. While
straight men would frequently feel either extremely insecure or react
with rampant homophobia, if they learn about a male friends’ bisexual
identity, such information about a female friend would often entice their
sexual fantasy.
Sharon: You always get the odd straight man fantasizing about bisexual
women. Because quite a few I’ve come out to have been like
‘ooh really?’
Christian: A friend of mine has recently said, she thinks there’s a kind of
stereotype among some straight men . . . that bisexual women
would be easy prey or whatever . . .
Sharon: Gagging for it . . . Yes! The hot-bi-babe! . . . There are quite a few
straight men who hope you’re gagging for it. But yes, I try and
avoid coming out to them.
452
In distinction to Caroline and Marianne, Sharon and, even more so, Cath
do not assume that conflicts around gender and sexism are settled in their
personal relationships or the wider movement context.
I see this as an effect of different degrees of politicization. It is because
Cath identifies to a much stronger degree with the political discourse of
feminism that she notices power relations around gender in her personal
intimate and political environment (cf. Assiter, 1996; Grant, 1993; Weise,
1992). The same applies to issues regarding racism and the racialization
of sexuality. Only a few of my female interview partners brought up topics
regarding race or racialization, without being specifically asked about it.
This is certainly due to the fact that most of my female interview partners
were white and used rather race-evasive discourses (Frankenberg, 1993).
Marianne, the only bisexual-identified woman in my sample, who claims
a racialized (in this case, a mixed-race) identity, points out that race and
in particular racism would not be an issue at all in her intimate and/or
sexual relationships and beyond that in the bisexual and polyamorous
movements.
Christian: But within this poly community . . . or the bisexual groups . . . or
within your relationships, it hasn’t been a problem of being one of
the few mixed-race people? . . . You described the poly community
as a fairly white community.
Marianne: No, no. It’s not something I’ve noticed . . . Well most people read
me as white anyway. It’s only if I tell people that I’m not that they
[realize], because my skin’s quite light coloured. Most people just
assume I’m white. I mean I know there’s a woman in the bi and
poly communities, who is [ethnic minority], and she does talk
about . . . ethnics and how her ethnicity is important. Because it’s
all part of what your family says, and how much you tell your family
as to whether or not it’s important, I suppose. But in terms of the
actual community it’s not important.
Marianne grounds her assessment partly on the fact that she is light-
skinned and that therefore most people would ‘read her as white’. She
seems to imply that that is why race (or racism) does not come up as an
issue in the relationship. When she refers to a woman, who makes an issue
of race and ethnicity in her social/political environment, she constricts
their significance to a matter of primarily family-mediated cultural expec-
tations. This way of putting things tends to personalize this other
woman’s strategy to emphasize race. Beyond that, Marianne interprets
the predominance of white people in the bisexual-polyamorous commu-
nities as a certainly deplorable, but finally not too relevant lack of diver-
sity that will out-balance itself as soon as polyamory will enter
the mainstream.
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Sexualities 8(4)
Marianne’s rather optimistic account differs from Lynne’s emphasis of

ethnocentric aspects of the (primarily) lesbian women’s cultures she social-
izes in. Although Lynne points out that due to the specificities of her
family history ethnicity has not impacted on her sexual and intimate life
too much, she sees major issues for other women of colour.
Lynne: I mean I don’t think my ethnicity has been a factor because, you
know, although I’m sort of half Arabic . . . I’m not having to deal
with questions about kind of coming out in the community. It’s
not like I was brought up in that community and I’ve got to deal
with that like say, if I was an English Indian . . . and I was living
in that community . . . I think a lot of non-white English women
– yeah – women who aren’t sort of white English women, like
Indian women . . . and black women, I don’t think they sort of feel
that they fit into the scene very well. They don’t like it very much
. . . It is quite kind of English white women, it’s quite kind of butch
and kind of a bit aggressive . . . I think that especially women from
other ethnic backgrounds find it really uncomfortable . . . The sort
of butch look and the short hair and that kind of aggressiveness,
that sort of ‘fuck off, I’m a lesbian – what are you going to do
about it?’ kind of thing. But I suppose when you go to some bars
and you look round and you think . . . like that’s the way you’ve
got to look. But that is something that is changing.
Apart from her reference to the difficulty to ‘come out in the
community’, which alludes to potential friction with cultural values that
may be inimical to homo- or bisexualities and female sexual autonomy,
Lynne also emphasizes the cultural marginalization of women of colour in
lesbian culture. She specifically refers to certain forms of butch (and later
also femme) styles that she perceives as racialized (white English) gender
identities that would enfold an ethnocentric normativity (see Lee, 1996).
At the same time, Lynne stresses that in particular the scene in London
has got more diverse. The growth of venues that are primarily frequented
by women of colour would show that ‘the ethnicity thing can [also] be a
good way for people to meet people’.
Articles by black feminist bisexuals in Bisexual Community News (BCN)
clearly indicate that critiques of ethnic or racial exclusion are not restricted
to lesbian women’s spaces, but extend to the whole bisexual movement
(Ellis, 1998, 1999; Hunt, 1996). The problem that the bisexual
movement in the UK is predominantly white, is aggravated by the fact that
the readiness to confront issues regarding ethnocentrism and racism is not
highly evolved in its cultural spaces (Klesse, 2003; cf. Hemmings, 2002).
The following account by Sharon, a white Euro-American woman, may
serve to illustrate that the white hegemony within the movement fosters
race-evasive attitudes (see Frankenberg, 1993; Haritaworn, 2005). While
454
Sharon claims, that race/ethnicity has never been an issue for her, she has
been stunned by the fact that black women often would bring up the topic
quite early in an encounter.
Sharon: Erm . . . and I sort of flirted with women since who’ve been black
and they’ve always asked me ‘have you ever been out with black
women before?’ so I said ‘yes’ and they said ‘oh’ . . . And I’ve
always wondered, why they feel this need to ask that, but I’ve not
really come up with any answer.
Christian: The conversation didn’t go on?
Sharon: They [would] just say ‘oh’ and change the subject – which is kind
of odd – so I’ve never really got involved with them . . . You know,
I felt like asking ‘why did you need to go and ask me that?’
Although Sharon seems to feel uneasy about these conversations, her
reluctance or refusal to consider black women’s concern with racial
fetishization as a possible motivation for bringing up this topic, leave her
puzzled and confused. Sharon does not seek clarification, particularizes
these women’s reaction as mysterious or ‘odd’ and rules them out as sexual
partners. The absence of a politicized perspective on race in a predomi-
nantly white cultural context such as the bisexual movement does not seem
to provide a discursive repertoire to easily address questions around white-
ness, race and racism (see Frankenberg, 1993). This may be the case both
for white women (such as Sharon) as for ethnicized/racialized women
(such as Marianne). More research is needed in the complex intersections
of race, sexuality, gender and heteronormative in bisexual contexts.
Political lesbianism and differentialist promiscuity

discourses
A further example for the differentialist character of promiscuity discourses
is the specific construction of bisexual women in the context of political
lesbianism. Within lesbian and gay politics bisexuality has always been
perceived as rather problematic. Although early gay liberationism attacked
rigid gender and sexual categorization as an expression of heterosexism
and envisioned liberation in the development of true polymorphous
perversity, to consciously claim a bisexual identity was not well perceived
among gay liberationists (Udis-Kessler, 1996a). It tended to be seen as a
cop-out or a lack of allegiance with the lesbian and gay cause in the face
of the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality (Rust, 1995; cf. Mieli,
1980). The historical emergence and growing influence of political
lesbianism within (lesbian) feminism created a situation in which this kind
of criticism has been particularly pronounced, if directed against women.3
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Sexualities 8(4)
While in theory it was possible for bisexual-identified women to claim a

place on the ‘lesbian continuum’, the orthodoxies of political lesbianism
fostered the demand to dismiss intimate or sexual relationships with men.
In fact, many bisexual-identified women decided to have only (significant)
intimate or sexual relationships with women or to be celibate (see George,
1993; Gregory, 1983; Off Pink Collective, 1988). This did not mean that
they were welcomed in the community of lesbian feminists. The insistence
on using the identity label ‘bisexual’ rendered these women suspicious in
the eyes of many lesbian feminists (cf. Wilkinson, 1996). The discursive
effects of these specific ideological developments within the feminist and
lesbian movements have continued to render problematic the participation
of bisexual-identified women in lesbian feminist projects (Rust, 1995;
Stein, 1997).
Many lesbians’ doubts about bisexual women’s loyality to the lesbian
feminist cause have been aggravated by the conviction that bisexual
women carry on ‘sleeping with the enemy’ or that they are likely to leave
their lesbian partners for a relationship with a man (see Ault, 1996a,
1996b; Hemmings, 2002; Rodríguez Rust, 2000; Udis-Kessler, 1996b).
Drawing on the assumption of an essential bisexual non-monogamy or
promiscuity, bisexual women are construed as unprincipled or ‘risky’ lovers
and partners. This is why many lesbians prefer not to get intimately or
sexually involved with them.
The persistence of such attitudes can be well illustrated with the follow-
ing quotation. Emma emphasizes her anxiety about being rejected in the
lesbian community, if she revealed her bisexual or polyamorous identity.
Being non-monogamous on top of being bisexual, she imagines, would
double political lesbians’ scepticism of getting involved with her.
Emma: I’m troubled within the lesbian community that they don’t [like]
bisexuals, they fear that bisexual women could go off with a man
. . . But there is also a great deal of insecurity to say ‘Well, I am
bisexual’ at all – within the lesbian community. And I think the
polyamorous [bit], they would even be more distrustful and it
would be even more that . . . ‘Well, I think you can’t trust that
person at all! They are always liable to go off with men, if they like.
They have relationships with other people’. There was a woman
that was involved with . . . she was very distrustful.
Experiences of marginalization in lesbian movement spaces have troubled
many of my bisexual-identified female interview partners (cf. Bower et al.,
2002). As a range of insightful analyses have shown, what is at stake in
these stereotypes is much more than a matter of personal opinion. Amber
Ault (1996a, 1996b) has argued that personal hostilities, such as entailed
in the statements ‘I don’t like bisexuals!’ ‘You can’t trust them!’ ‘Don’t
sleep with them!’ and so on should be conceived of as parts of public
456
discourse or politics. Such opinions work as a means of political censure

aiming at an erasure of bisexual identity and visibility in lesbian culture and
politics. Behind the accusation of bisexual women as sexually promiscu-
ous, perverted, immature, personally deceived, in denial, and unable to
form stable family bonds and so on, it is possible to identify anxieties about
identity and community boundaries, claims on territorial space, and
conflicts over visibility. ‘What is at stake’, Ault concludes, ‘is not so much
whether a woman will leave her woman lover for a man as whether dissemi-
nation and institutionalization of a bisexual identity category during the
present period constitutes a hegemonic move that could incorporate
lesbians into dominant cultural systems’ (1996a: 214). According to
Hemmings, this stereotype reveals to what a strong degree lesbian desire
and identity may be built upon the repression of bisexuality. In this process
bisexual women become the icons of heterosexist hegemony within the
lesbian or queer community. They tend to be perceived as ‘the cultural
embodiment, or better, hologram – of a psychic model of sexual subjec-
tivity that privileges opposite-sex object-choice’ (2002: 11).
HIV/AIDS, gender, and ‘bisexual promiscuity’

A concern with HIV and AIDS adds a particular angle to the construc-
tion of bisexual promiscuity within certain lesbian discourses. It can be said
that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has generally reinforced the stereotype of
bisexual promiscuity. In different sets of discourses both bisexual men and
women have been constructed as disease carriers that are responsible for
spreading the virus from (high) risk groups to other ‘communities’. In the
face of increasing worries about the possibilities of a heterosexual AIDS
epidemic behaviourally bisexual men came to be presented as the vectors
of transmission between the ‘gay community’ and the heterosexual popu-
lation from the mid-1980s onwards. The perception of bisexual men as a
(new) ‘high risk group’ led many people – and often even bisexuals them-
selves – to be extra cautious about not becoming sexually involved with
bisexual (or gay) men. (Rodríguez Rust, 2000; Weinberg et al., 1994).
The association of risk with a particular gender (male) and particular sexual
identities (bisexual and gay male) has been influential for many bisexual
men’s decisions with whom to have sex at all or with whom to practice
safer sex (Boulton et al., 1996; Davis et al., 1996; Stokes et al., 1996).
Risk perception may also explain many lesbians’ reluctance to get
sexually involved with bisexual women (Gorna, 1996; Wilton, 1997).
Research indicates that while some lesbians refuse to sleep with bisexual
women at all, others insist on ‘safer sex’ with bisexual women, but gener-
ally have non-protected sex with lesbian-identified women (Gorna, 1996;
Richardson, 2000). Sex between lesbians had been presumed to be ‘safe
457
Sexualities 8(4)
sex’ (even without protection) for quite a long time – in particular from
the mid- to the late 1980s. Apart from the (inherently normative) assump-
tion that most sexual acts between women carry a low likelihood of HIV
transmission, the perception that sex between women involves only low
or no risk depends on the condition that none of the partners has been
exposed to HIV. Screening or collecting the sexual histories of female
sexual partners has been part of many women’s safer sex strategies (Rila,
1996). The whole strategy, of course, rests on the confidence that partners
disclose their sexual identities or past experiences. It further builds on the
assumption that lesbians do not have sex with men (cf. Gorna 1996; Rust,
1995). Because the latter issue tends to be tabooed within most lesbian-
identified scenes and cultures, bisexual women appear as particularly risky
sexual partners, because they are assumed to have a history or even current
practice of sex with men.
Lynne, the only lesbian-identified woman in my sample, explains that
in particular with regard to one-night stands she does not go for women,
whom she assumes to have a lot of sexual partners. Despite having a long
history of relationships with men herself, she further particularly worries
about behaviourally bisexual female partners, that is, women, who have
been sleeping with men.
Lynne: And I suppose I tend to go for women who I don’t think will have
a lot of sexual partners, rather than, you know, someone who I
think is out to just pick anybody up . . . I suppose in terms of nego-
tiating with partners, I’ve never really talked about it. And I
suppose with women there’s not a huge risk, but then . . . there is
a risk. And that’s why I can quite understand that a lot of lesbians
don’t want to sleep with bisexual women. Because then that brings
a sort of a different risk, if someone’s been sleeping with men. And
I suppose I kind of think that as well in a way.
Whereas some of the women in my sample screen the sexual histories of
their partners or refrain from certain sexual activities with partners that
they do not know very well, other women fully endorse the discourse and
practice of ‘safer sex’. Other women, again, adopt strategies, such as
limiting their number of casual sexual partners, or constricting their casual
sexual practice to female partners.
Conclusion
Due to the pervasive sexism and heteronormativity in hegemonic sexual
and intimate cultures, women have to negotiate their sexuality in a
context shaped by a tension of pleasure and danger. The operation of a
‘double standard’ of gendered sexual morality does not condone female
sexual autonomy. This has specific effects on women, who decide to be
458
non-monogamous. The awareness and consideration of potential dangers

of an active sexual life (such as stigmatization, ostracization or the
exposure to acts of emotional, physical or sexual violence) has marked the
accounts of most women, who participated in this study. Yet still, they
refused to let themselves being defined and controlled by hegemonic
expectations. Their decision to identify as bisexual, lesbian, or queer, to
enter non-monogamous or polyamorous relationships, or to gain sexual
pleasure outside of relationship contexts is an expression of agency. Most
women developed particular strategies to deal with the risks and dangers
that they saw associated with non-monogamy in general and with casual
or public sex in particular. Through these strategies they sought to
minimize the dangers associated with an active search of pleasure. Some
women, for example, maintained multiple intimate and sexual relation-
ships, but avoided casual sex with people they did not know very well.
Some women restricted their casual sex to female partners only. Others
decided to have sex only in environments that they perceived to be fairly
safe, such as women-only spaces or sex clubs and parties that are organ-
ized by a known and supportive scene or group of friends.
However, the risk of being exposed to direct forms of harassment,
abuse, and physical violence does not exhaust all the factors of danger
associated with female non-monogamous ways of life. In this article I have
focused on the primarily disciplinary effects of the power articulated in the
(anti-)promiscuity discourses that are levelled at bisexual women who
practice non-monogamy (cf. Bartky, 1998 [1988]). Being identified as
non-monogamous or being seen as a ‘slut’ may have serious implications
for a woman’s reputation and her ability to socialize without emotional
risk in many cultural environments. Anti-promiscuity discourses build an
integral part of the complex and intersecting discursive formations of
sexism and heteronormativity (Klesse, 2003).
Throughout the article I have emphasized the context-contingency and
the differentialist character of promiscuity discourses. Hegemonic
discourses on bisexuality assume a peculiar interrelation between bisexual-
ity and non-monogamy. Bisexual women therefore are particularly likely to
be charged with promiscuity-allegations. The situation is aggravated for
bisexual women, who claim non-monogamous or polyamorous identities.
Because promiscuity discourses build upon the intersecting discourses
constitutive of gendered, classed, racialized and sexual differences, some
people are, depending on their specific social positioning, more likely to be
charged with being promiscuous than others. Moreover, the allegation of
being promiscuous may have particularly serious consequences in some
people’s social lives and thoroughly affect their standing in their different
social environments. Among others this has implications for the conditions
for women to ‘come out’ or to move and socialize without emotional (and
459
Sexualities 8(4)
physical) risk in sex-positive environments. For many, safe participation and

uncontested membership would be dependent on a collective effort to
minimize such risks. The differentialist character of anti-promiscuity
discourses and their persisting influence on hegemonic sexual ethics
demonstrates the necessity that an inclusive sex-radical politics has to draw
upon an awareness of discursive intersectionality and ought to ally itself
with feminist and anti-racist struggles. The practical difficulties of such a
political project are evidenced in the continuous conflicts about sexism,
racism and classism in the contemporary attempts to form coalitions or to
build inclusive social movements under the banner of ‘queer’ (cf. Cohen,
2001; Eng and Hom, 1998; Radclyffe, 1995). Such attempts may only ever
have a chance of being successful, if communities built around dominant
homogeneous identities overcome their self-complacency, actively welcome
and enable diversity, and move towards a ‘politics of difference’.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the research participants for their trust and for sharing their
experiences and ideas about non-monogamy. I would also like to express my
gratitude to Jinthana Haritaworn and the anonymous reviewers at Sexualities for
their insightful and critical comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
1. I conducted interviews primarily in London and the south-east of England.
Interview partners further resided in (or around) Manchester, Leeds,
Nottingham, Dublin, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.
2. With the term ‘interview partner’ I intend to acknowledge that the
production of knowledge in the context of qualitative interviewing is a joint
enterprise and an active collaboration between researcher and research
participants. Due to inherent connotations of differing degrees of
activity/passivity this aspect is not so well expressed in a terminology that
distinguishes between interviewer and interviewee.
3. I am talking here in particular about a specific branch of political lesbianism
that in the UK has been associated with the politics of the Leeds
Revolutionary Feminists (see Harne and Miller, 1996; Onlywomen Press,
1981). I am aware that lesbians with a very different sexual political agenda
also claim the term ‘political lesbianism’ for themselves.
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Biographical Note
Christian Klesse holds the Sociological Research Fellowship 2004/2005 at Keele
University. He is currently working on the publication of a book based on his
empirical PhD research thesis into bisexual and gay male non-monogamies,
power and heteronormatifity. His research interests fall in the areas sexuality,
gender, race/ethnicity, intersectionality, social movement politics, identities,
body modification, research methodology, and social theory. Address: The
Sociological Review, Keele University, Staffordshire ST5 5BG.
[email: christianklesse@hotmail.com]
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05 056620 Klesse (to_d) 24/8/05 8:34 am Page 445

Abstract Popular discourses on bisexuality assume a peculiar

Bisexual Women, Non-Monogamy

Klesse Bisexual Women

these risks were clearly associated with or at least seemed to be particularly

The construction of bisexuality and non-monogamy

Klesse Bisexual Women

declared that they would find it difficult to maintain a bisexual identity if

Differentialist anti-promiscuity discourses

Dealing with promiscuity discourses

Klesse Bisexual Women

When I ask Caroline whether these ‘external expectations’ would make it

Klesse Bisexual Women

Marianne’s rather optimistic account differs from Lynne’s emphasis of

Klesse Bisexual Women

Political lesbianism and differentialist promiscuity

While in theory it was possible for bisexual-identified women to claim a

Klesse Bisexual Women

discourse or politics. Such opinions work as a means of political censure

HIV/AIDS, gender, and ‘bisexual promiscuity’

Klesse Bisexual Women

non-monogamous. The awareness and consideration of potential dangers

physical) risk in sex-positive environments. For many, safe participation and

Klesse Bisexual Women

S. Seidman (ed.) Queer Theory/Sociology, pp. 311–30. Oxford: Blackwell

Ellis, M. (1999) ‘En-gendering a Race Perspective’, Bi Community News 34

Klesse Bisexual Women

(‘Bisexual Non-monogamy and Post-feminist Discourse’), in B. Haas (ed.) Der

Smart, C. (1995) Law, Crime and Sexuality. London: Sage.

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