Bi

Julia Shaw Dr

Description

A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2022: POLITICSSignificant strides have been made in recent years in the movement for LGBTQ+ rights, visibility and empowerment, but the conversation is far from over. After years of feeling the crushing dearth of information on bisexuality, psychological scientist and bestselling author Dr Julia Shaw dug deep and found a colourful and fascinating world that she is bringing out of the shadows. It is a personal journey that starts with her own openly bisexual identity, and celebrates the resilience and beautiful diversity of the bi community. In Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality, Shaw explores all that we know about the world's largest sexual minority. From the hunt for a bi gene, to the relationship between bisexuality and consensual non-monogamy, to asylum seekers who need to prove their bisexuality in a court of law, there is more to explore than most have ever realised. This rigorous and fun book will challenge us to think deeper about who we are and how we love.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Popular science
• Human sexual activity

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 02 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786898777
• Langue: English

Extrait

Also by Dr Julia Shaw
The Memory Illusion
Making Evil
 
 
 
First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Dr Julia Shaw, 2022
The right of Dr Julia Shaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 876 0 Export ISBN 978 1 83885 416 4 eISBN 978 1 78689 877 7
Sexual freedom is magnificent and fragile
CONTENTS
Introduction: I want more
1. The Bi Option
Inventing bisexuality
Blunt questions
The Klein Grid
Middle ground
2. Our History
We’re here, we’re queer!
The obscene book
Sexual inverts
Decapitated angel
The unwelcome visitor
3. Nothing but Mammals
Born this way?
Gay giraffes
Darwinian paradox
Ramifications
Bent bars
Come play with me
4. The Bisexual Closet
Coming out into
Family secrets
Work it
Troubled
Biversity
Why us?
Freedom
5. Invisi-bi-lity
Do I look bi?
Our own space
Sex perversion
Parasocial
Sexy but deadly
6. It’s Political
Where love is illegal
Sexuality on trial
Can’t change me
Loophole
No promo homo
Political powerhouses
7. Free Love
Cherry ChapStick
Everybody loves threesomes
Compulsory monogamy
Chain reaction
Intimacy transformation
Conclusion: Bidentity
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION: I WANT MORE
I AM BISEXUAL , and I have long felt myself wanting more . I have yearned to tether myself to a solid foundation of history and research, to find bi representation in politics and pop culture, and to generally answer the question: Where are all the bisexual people?
When I began my search, I found a crushing void and wondered whether my quest for more was a waste of time. Then I began to familiarise myself with the language of queer scholarship, and slowly the world of bisexual research revealed itself to me. I came to realise that incredible work has been done, but that tragically almost all of it remains concealed from the public. With this book, I want to change that, to bring the colourful world of bisexual scholarship out of the shadows.
I also want people to stop treating bi identities and bi lives as a perversion. To do that we don’t just need to better understand bisexuality, we also need to call heterosexuality into question. Bisexuality isn’t mysterious, threatening, or performative . . . or even cool, woke, or transcendental. It is a normal part of human sexuality. Even in the twenty-first century most of us assume that people are straight until proven otherwise. We centre heterosexuality as the sun of our sexual solar system, blinding our exploration of other sexualities. I don’t think that everybody is bi, as is so often half-jokingly stated, rather I believe that it is time to queer our world-view by destabilising our assumptions about sex and sexuality.
There are those who will tell you that this has already happened, that we’ve awoken from our sexual slumber. As one publisher said to me as their reason for rejecting the proposal for this book, ‘We’ve already had that conversation.’ They meant we as in the whole country . The fire this ignited in me is hard to explain. It wasn’t just that this publisher had never actually brought out a book on bisexuality that made me so upset, it was the realisation that there are probably lots of people who agree with this statement; people who think that seeing more bi-positive social media posts, or for the first time knowing someone who has come out as bi, or has won some legal rights and protections, means that the conversation is over . How can conversations about identity, love, and sex ever be over? Humans obsess over these constructs.
We also need to stop introducing drama into bisexuality where there is none. Commonly misunderstood, and at times wilfully misconstrued, is the idea that bisexual people reinforce a strict gender binary. This is neither historically accurate, nor true today. Most bisexual activists and researchers define bisexuality as attraction to people of multiple genders. Notably this definition is inclusive of trans and nonbinary people.
I use the term bisexual throughout this book not because I think this is the term that everyone must use, but because it has the broadest application, longest history, and is the most readily recognisable. In this book I hope to unite the sexual family, no matter what term people feel most suits them, whether it’s bisexual, plurisexual, pansexual, omni-sexual, polysexual, fluid, unlabelled, or any related label.
Most of the topics discussed in this book transcend bisexuality and teach us about the core constructs of human sex, love, and relationships. No matter who you are, I hope that this book will enrich and challenge your thoughts on these topics.
As part of my own quest to better understand bisexuality I got in touch with the academic bisexual community in various ways. I started a bisexual research group with regular meetings, spearheaded an international bisexuality research conference which had 485 attendees and 70 researchers presenting their work, and I completed a master’s degree in queer history. I already had a PhD in psychology, but to get to where I wanted to be I needed researchers and lecturers to hold my hand and guide me with great patience and care to the information in this book. I now know that there is way more research, history, and scholarly writing on bisexuality than any one book could ever contain. Although necessarily incomplete, I hope that this book does justice to some of the incredible scholars and activists who commit their lives to understanding and protecting bisexual people.
In this book I explore how people have defined and measured bisexuality, uncover its surprisingly long and important history, and learn about some famous bi activists and scholars whom everyone should know. I go on safari, figuratively, to look at behaviourally bisexual animals, and try to understand whether there is a bi gene. I examine why it still feels inappropriate in many places to talk about bisexuality, including at work, and the mental and physical consequences of staying in the big bi closet. I also come to understand the devastating reality of criminalisation and human rights abuses that so many bisexual people around the world face, and how we can use our anger to fuel a bisexual revolution. Following this, I try to figure out what a bisexual person looks like (and whether that’s even a thing), try to find bi-visibility on screen, and explore the colourful world of bisexual communities. In the last chapter I jump into perhaps the sexiest topic in the book, threesomes, and look at research into the fun and thorny topic of consensual non-monogamy.
Whatever your reason for picking up a book that is unapologetically bi, I hope that, like me, you have come here because you want to know more about the history, culture, and science of bisexuality.
1
THE BI OPTION
T HERE HAVE BEEN suspicions that bisexuality is probably just a trend for almost fifty years. The US magazine Newsweek has even declared this boldly twice . In 1974 it published an article titled ‘Bisexual Chic: Anyone Goes’. 1 Two decades later, in 1995, it ran a cover story with the headline ‘Bisexuality. Not gay. Not straight. A new sexual identity emerges’. 2 New again ?
These two articles have been widely mocked in bisexual forums. This is particularly true of the 1995 cover, which includes bright white lettering atop a photo of a woman with short hair wearing an oversized black suit and with her arms crossed. She has a guarded expression on her face and is positioned in front of two men in casual grey t-shirts who stare with emotionless expressions into the camera. The photo is so weird, and so over-the-top 90s that it seems almost satirical.
The article itself proclaims things like ‘bisexuality is the hidden wild card of our erotic culture’, suggests there is ‘an independent bisexual movement’, and allows a fifteen-year-old to debunk the myth of the hypersexual bisexual while simultaneously reinforcing it with the bizarre quote, ‘A bisexual . . . doesn’t have any more sex than the captain of the football team.’ Given that a key benefit of being the captain of the (American) football team is having lots of sex, I guess this kid is trying to make it clear that he is promiscuous, but not sexually excessive . The article also in various ways conflates polyamory, promiscuity, and gender fluidity with bisexuality. And it taps into the idea that bisexuality is on the rise with the sentence, ‘Many college students, particularly women, talk about a new sexual “fluidity” on campus,’ and quotes a bisexual person saying, ‘It’s not us-versus-them anymore. There’s just more and more of us.’
What I find astonishing is that this article could have been written today, with the exact same misconceptions, uneasy feeling of change, and echoes of optimism. Particularly, this idea that there are just more and more bisexual people is still popular today. But is it true? Before I try to answer that, I need to define what bisexuality is. To do that we are going to head back in time to see where the term came from, and three men with similar sounding names who were fundamental in establishing bisexuality as an academic and popular concept: Krafft-Ebing, Kinsey, and Klein.
INVENTING BISEXUALITY
It may surprise you that the use of the term bisexual to refer to human sexuality is almost as old as the term heterosexual. In his book The Invention of Heterosexuality , gay history pioneer and activist Jonathan Ned Katz argues that ‘the idea of heterosexuality is a modern invention, dating to the late nineteenth century’. 3 The first recorded