Essentialism is both challenged and incorporated within sexually marginalized groups and politics.[1] Closed communities that seek political reform and the extension of human rights to all groups,will tend to rely on essentialist or ethnic[2] notions of identity. The rationale is that by claiming an identity politic, in the form of distinct group membership, a united and unified front can be established in order to build communities, challenge marginalization, fight oppression and produce change (Highleyman 74-75; Rust "Politics of Sexual Identity" 366-367; Paul 28). Essentialist explanations, in this case, provide the basis for naturalizing the group's identity, suggesting that change is not an option because the behaviour is rooted in part in human essence (i.e. sexuality is not a preference, choice or vice that needs to be corrected), and therefore this community needs to be extended the rights and protections that comes with being a unique peoples. Yet accompanying an essentialist identity politic are assumptions of universalism and fixity that can function to exclude and deny access to the identity and community based on definitional and behavioural disparities. This aspect of essentialism makes it possible for some people to become displaced through the tightening of the definition for the group's membership, identity, and community.

Bisexual women within North America, during the eighties and early nineties, are an example of a group of people who were dislodged and expelled from some lesbian communities due to the establishment of an essentialized lesbian identity politic.[3] These bisexual women were seen as a threat to lesbians personally, politically and socially (Klein "Bisexual Option" 41; Ault "Hegemonic Discourse" 205; Rust "Politics of Sexual Identity" 368). The feelings and experiences of segregation and alienation from some lesbian communities, paralleled with the suppression of bisexuality under heteronormativity, culminated in the necessity for some bisexual women in the west to start politicising, organizing, and theorizing their sexual identities.

In this paper, I will suggest that bisexual women, in North America during the eighties and ninties, predominantly utilized two strategies to combat experiences and feelings of alienation from within and outside of sexually marginalized communities. One avenue was the politicization of the identity "bisexual," which was pursued through the formation of communities and a movement to valorize bisexuality, while also countering discrimination. While applying the same strategy of community development, other bisexual women divergently sought an inclusive community for sexually marginalized people that did not require a bisexual identity as its basis. This second strategy employed a critique of identity politics and sexual essentialism through theorizing the ambiguity of bisexuality itself. This tactic dealt more with issues of sexuality as a practice that could potentially disrupt and challenge heteronormativity through a blurring of categories and by promoting a multiplicity and fluidity of identities.

However, as with all attempts to politicize a personal and social identity, dissonance between theory and practice arose. Theories that claimed bisexuality as inclusive and fluid, as acting as a critique of exclusive identity politics, fell victim to their own forms of essentialism in seeing bisexuality as universal, inherent, or immutable. This was caused in part by the very use of the culturally and historically specific label 'bisexual,' without critiquing and problematizing the binary it presumes. In this case, bisexuality as a word is unable to accommodate inclusion. Secondly, essentialism manifested in the practice of bisexual women's communities and movements as they sought a cohesive and stable membership, which resulted in the naturalization and restriction of the definition and practice of being bisexual. In order to understand the tension between incorporating and critiquing identity politics by North American bisexual women, I will begin by situating essentialism as a product of western binaries and then discuss the theoretical context in which the politicisation of women's bisexuality arose. I will follow this with a history of the changing definitions of bisexuality. I will move into an analysis of the construction of bisexuality as an identity politic and community, with its ensuing problems of essentialism. Lastly, I will discuss alternative approaches that bisexual women took in the form of inclusive sexual liberation movements, and the use of bisexuality as a theoretical perspective.

Inescapable Essentialism: Theoretical Context

Essentialism, in many ways, is a product of the western political and philosophical use of binary oppositions. Binaries have been used to produce socially meaningful categories in which to classify and understand the world, both human and non-human (Innes 65). Within the assumptions of binaries, however, is the tendency to see these categories as natural and unchanging. In addition to naturalizing or essentializing binaries,western philosophy has also tended to privilege only one side of the opposition while the other is disparaged. The final outcome of this logic is a limited and fixed understanding of the world that masks the political and social power in which the binary categories were created and sustained.

Diana Fuss describes essentialism as being "commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the 'whatness' of a given entity . . . [which] are identified as such on the basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable essences . . . " (xi). As applied to human society, essentialism naturalizes and stabilizes our behaviour, assuming the dominant discourse and behaviour, i.e. heterosexuality, as 'the normal' and everything else as pathological in one sense or another. Sexual essentialism, particularly in the west, is also based on discrete binaries which prevent mixing of categorical opposites; an essence is this or that,but it cannot be both. Essentialism is also dependent on distinct spatial and temporal dimensions,[4] which are developed through repetition, in order to locate and stabilize patterns of desire and behaviour.

Many theories, however, challenge essentialism within western philosophy and politics. In response to the dichotomous assumptions of modernity, postmodernism alternatively posits knowledge of the world as subject to multiplicity and blurred boundaries, including the conceptions of an unchanging and universal nature. It suggests that reality is not as clear cut as it has been presumed to be and therefore provides a ground in which the critique of binary thinking can be waged in order for difference to be recognized. In general, queer theory applies these critiques of categories to sexuality in order to argue against the essentialism of desire and to suggest a fluidity of experiences and practices, that are found in both local and global contexts and histories. In seeking to destabilize and disrupt naturalized categories, postmodernism and queer theory point to a multiplicity of voices and selves that are not grounded in dichotomous structures and binaries (Hemmings 193). These theories being situated within a constructivist framework assume that identity and desire are social products of a specific historical and cultural context (Storr 100; Highleyman 90; Kaplan 270-271). Postmodernism and queer theory contest universal claims of truth, the transportability of western concepts of sexuality, and problematize language that tends to stabilize and fix identity rather than allow for multiple and changing expressions of desire.

Bisexuality, as a movement and a theory in the West, has grown up within postmodernism and queer theory (Pramaggiore 147). Through the language and discourse of postmodernism and queer theory, bisexuality as a theory and practice seeks to rupture the dualism of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and critiques the exclusive assumptions of a kind of sexuality which categorizes people in an either/or position. Theories and practices of bisexuality suggest that essentialism, when applied to sexual identities, depends on static binaries of sexuality (heterosexual/homosexual) and gender (man/woman). These essentialist dichotomies exist in a combination of bipolar and categorical thinking, placing people's sexuality in two discrete boxes, thus causing the theoretical erasure of bisexuals who fail to choose to identify with either pole (Kaplan 267). Within an essentialist framework, movement among categories is conceptually impossible because sexual desire for more than one type of gendered body and sexual activity defies the underlying notions of difference and separation between homosexuality and heterosexuality. However, bisexuality challenges these notions because it demonstrates that sexuality is fluid and desire is capable of flowing in more than one direction (Heldke 175).

Thus these theories of bisexuality, like postmodernism and queer theories, were skeptical of essentialist notions of identity and desire. In order to combat sexual essentialism, the need to fix desire and practice to heterosexuality or homosexuality, women's bisexuality was described as a sexuality that is able to be fluid and inclusive since it was not grounded in a predominantly singular sexed and gendered sexual orientation. Writings about women's bisexuality functioned as a critique of the exclusivity of some lesbian-identified politics and communities, which was seen as being based in essentialism. This was the notion that women that desired and engaged in sexual activity with other women only came in one way, and that was not in the form of also loving and sleeping with men. Bisexual women's political organizing and theorizing during this period posed a challenge to unified identity politics of lesbians and heterosexual women through showing that women did not need to occupy a singular sexual identity ('lesbian' or 'straight'), and that a sexual politics and community could be based on a more fluid understanding of desire and practices.

However, essentialist rhetoric is also apparent in newly-forming bisexual identity politics. This becomes evident through crystallized definitions and territories of bisexuality, or in theories that subsume all sexual expression within a universal concept of sexuality as (bi)sexuality while not simultaneously disrupting the word bisexual. The limitations of language are inherent in both of these strategies, political as well as theoretical. Words, having both specific cultural contexts and histories, are unable to accommodate infinite inclusion. In this case, the term 'bisexuality' is either stretched to the point of incomprehension, or it demarcates through exclusion in order to fix meanings and delineate a category which can be socially meaningful. Therefore, in order to understand the limits of language, cultural and historical context is needed to situate the shifting meanings of bisexuality.

Definitions and Practices of Bisexuality

Historically in the west, bisexuality has been defined in psychological and behavioural terms, both relying on essentialism. Essentialist frameworks of sexuality view bisexuality, and especially bisexual identity, as confused or in conflict.[5] Zinik places these conceptualizations of bisexuality within a conflict model, which "explains bisexuality as characterized by indecision and the inability to choose a sexual/gender preference" (13, emphasis in the original). This model relies on the belief that gender and sexuality are situated within a dichotomy, especially as viewed in the west, that situates the categories as mutually exclusive (for example, male/female, masculine/feminine, hetero/homosexual), and that it is thus impossible to desire both men and women and/or heterosexual and homosexual behaviour or relationships. It also conflates gender and sex, assuming men to be masculine and women feminine, without regard to the variety of gender identities and expressions, which can operate independently of each other. It describes the bisexual identity as temporary or in transition, arising usually out of internalized homophobia, which prevents bisexuals from admitting their "true" homosexuality (Zinik 9).[6]

A clear understanding of bisexuality is further confused by the lack of a cohesive definition. Early psychological conceptions of bisexuality, arising in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century, saw it as relating to maleness and femaleness, since all sexual behaviour was conceived as being rooted in biology and anatomy (Storr 3, 15-16). Havelock Ellis, for example, thought of bisexuality in terms of "psychic hermaphroditism" (Greenberg; Paul 24). A bisexual, in his view, had both male and female characteristics. This perspective, however, usually conflates sexual orientation, social sex-roles and gender identity (Paul 24; Weeks 73).[7] Later, within the psychoanalytic approach, (bi)sexuality took the form of combining the desire of/for masculinity and femininity. For example, Freud felt that everyone was born with bisexual potential (Hutchins and Kaahumana 7; Paul 25) and that it was only later, during puberty, which heterosexuality and homosexuality developed as specific and exclusive sexual practices (Freud 26; Storr 15-16).[8]

While Freud did see bisexuality as a potential predisposition, Stekel, a later follower, was even more adamant about the universalism and naturalism of bisexuality. Stekel, more like contemporary theorists, conceptualized bisexuality as composed of both heterosexuality and homosexuality (Storr 28). He further believed that bisexuality was the natural state of humanity and that monosexuality, referring to both heterosexuality and homosexuality, was potentially neurotic (Stekel 29). Between these three theorists, the "bi," or two parts, of bisexuality changed and shifted, leaving traces in later theories of bisexuality.

Sexual theories that were developed later in the century also pointed to the naturalness of bisexuality, but this time from a behavioural perspective. In the middle of the century, Kinsey, conceptualizing sexual behaviour on a continuum, showed that almost fifty percent of men in the United States had engaged in both heterosexual and homosexual activities (36). Zinik, similarly, suggests that bisexual behaviour is more common than exclusive homosexual behaviour (7).

Rust, writing in the 1990s, claims that bisexual behaviour is prevalent amongst women who identify as lesbian. She suggests that at least 85% of lesbian-identified women have also had sexual contact with men ("Politics of Sexual Identity" 369). However, behavioural concepts of bisexuality are problematic. For example, Rust points out that this figure does not account for the fact that the sexual contact with men might have not been consensual or neglects the associated problem of compulsory heterosexuality, which places heterosexuality as the normative sexuality.

Behavioural explanations can also trivialize and marginalize bisexuality. This is demonstrated in the assumption (or accusation) that bisexuality as a label is only used by women during periods of non-involvement to keep their options open (see Rust, "Politics of Sexual Identity" 370). Bisexuality, defined strictly as behaviour, also leads to the charge that bisexuality rarely exists, the logic being that if one is engaged in sexual activity with the same sex they are seen as homosexual and if they are with the opposite sex, they are heterosexual (Daumer 158; Rust "Politics of Sexual Identity" 368). Bisexual behaviour, in this case, only occurs if one is having sexual activity simultaneously with members of both sexes! Writing in the early 1970s, Louise Knox expresses the frustration of being "othered" within this behavioural determinism, stating that: "I am told that what I think I am . . . doesn't exist. For all the credibility I get, I might as well be calling myself a centaur or a mermaid" (qtd. in Donaldson 37). Christina similarly expresses, "I am not straight with men and lesbian with women; I am bisexual with both" (161). These criticisms point to the negation of bisexuality as an active self-perception or identification. They also challenge and renegotiate the denial of bisexual agency and subjectivity, which is erased if they are defined only by others or through their partners and not by themselves. Behaviour as identity is also problematic because it is reductionist in that it ignores other variables that influence sexual identity which may be both sexual and non-sexual (Klein and Wolf "Introduction" xv).

In reaction to being classified and described by others, bisexuals themselves have started to claim the right to define themselves. Because bisexuality is displaced as Other within lesbian politics (Ault "Dilemma of Identity" 313), as well as within heterosexuality (Udis-Kessler "Present Tense" 243), bisexuals are challenging conceptions and stereotypes of themselves and creating their own meanings. While writers such as Freud, Kinsey and Margaret Mead did look at bisexuality and saw it as natural, most studies of bisexuality have been conceived in a monosexual framework,[9] thus suggesting either that bisexuality does not exist, or that it is rare, it is perverted, or it is a path to something else (Hutchins and Kaahumuna 6-7).

Some theories of sexuality also subsume bisexuality under homosexuality (Rust "Politics of Sexual Identity"; Paul). Hansen and Evans point out sex research on bisexuality has been inclined to focus on genital behaviour and "intrapsychic incongruencies," but that "genitality is not all of sexuality" (2). Conversely, Zinik suggests that bisexuality should be defined as eroticizing or being aroused by both females and males; engaging or desiring activity with both; or being self-identified (8). Though this definition is still assuming a dichotomized association between sex and gender identity, it does address multiple factors that contribute to the development and maintenance of a bisexual identity and allows for diverse forms of behaviour and desire to exist. This is a more complex and comprehensive conception of bisexuality, which does not value behaviour and experience over fantasy and desire.

Bisexual-Identity Politics and Community

Bisexuality, in theory, is usually defined (by bisexuals) as fluidity,[10] with the ability to feel sexual desire, not purely based on the gender of the person, but on more general kinds of attraction. Bisexuality claims a broad and open definition (Board 285). For example, it is neither a "third choice" nor "the best of both worlds," but is inclusive and open to multiple sites of sexual desire (Hutchins and Kaahumana 3). However, as bisexuals develop a distinct community and movement organized around identity politics many bisexuals fall back on universal and essentialist rhetoric. For example, in the 1970s, Money and Tucker asserted that all people are born bisexual and that it is culture that dichotomizes people's desire (qtd. in Zinik 12). While this view recognizes sexual categories as a social construct, it essentializes bisexuality by claiming that it is the natural and universal sexuality that everyone possesses. Christina also declares bisexuality as distinct asserting that: "It is a unique and integrated sexuality, with profound differences in degree and kind from hetero- and homosexual forms of monosexuality" (163). Hutchins and Kaahumana, at the beginning of their anthology Bi Any Other Name, also suggest that: "Once you've read a number of the coming out stories [from bisexuals] you'll begin to have a better idea what we mean about how different, and yet how universal, we are" (4). They continue to suggest that most of the cross-cultural studies of homosexuality are really about bisexuality (Hutchins and Kaahumana 9). These assertions use essentialist notions of bisexuality as a means to legitimate and normalize it. They are locating bisexuality, spatially and temporally, as an innate and immutable identity/behaviour within the sexual landscape.[11]

Rust, nevertheless, optimistically points to the potential of bisexual identity as disruptive to categorical binaries. She claims that bisexual identity, by definition, has the ability to rupture the dichotomy between heterosexuality and homosexuality, suggesting:

By way of claiming a territory, which is fundamentally that of bisexuality, bisexual women are also threatening traditional lesbian space. As Udis-Kessler comments: "Quite a change in twenty years-from an implicit universal bisexual potential to an explicit bisexual minority group, from a hope for the end of categories to the creation of a new category and, indeed, a movement claiming, 'a history, a culture, a community'" ("Identity/Politics" 52).

Women who came to lesbianism as a political conviction in the 1970s were excluded as the definition of lesbian changed from woman-identified/loving-women to "a woman who did not sleep with men" (Udis-Kessler, "Identity/Politics" 55-56). As more women who had identified as lesbian started acknowledging their desire/attraction to men and started to identify as bisexuals, lesbian communities tightened their boundaries, excluding those who no longer fit the new definition. Some lesbians began to police their cultural space, expelling bisexual women as being only interested in sex while lesbianism is political (O'Connor 184; Udis-Kessler, "Identity/Politics" 55; Zinik 11). Bisexual women were stereotyped sometimes as "failed" lesbians (Highleyman 84), sexual predators (O'Connor 185), fence-sitters (Queen 151; Udis-Kessler, "Present Tense" 247; Paul 22; Zinik 17), promiscuous (Ault, "Dilemma of Identity" 314; Queen 151; Hansen and Evans 3) and unreliable and untrustworthy (Heldke 174).

Bisexuality, especially, is sometimes equated with hyper-sexuality (Christina 165). This is a means to trivialize and condemn bisexuals as sexual deviants and cast them as the abnormal Other to the heterosexual or lesbian norm (Christina 165; Queen 151; Hutchins and Kaahumana 3). As Ault summarizes: "Lesbians stereotyped bisexuals as sexually promiscuous, personally deceived, immature, in denial, perverted, and unable to form stable familial bonds-all constructions that echo the terms stigmatizing lesbians themselves as deviant relative to heterosexual society" ("Dilemma of Identity" 314). As a consequence of these negative stereotypes and assumptions, bisexual women can feel pressure to suppress, deny, or change their identity in order to remain within the political arena of lesbian feminism. Others may drop out of activism all together (Ault, "Dilemma of Identity" 318; Paul 30). Through the creation of a deviant "other" and with the subsequent dislocation of bisexuality, lesbians seek to center and unify their own identities and communities.

The exclusion of bisexual women from within lesbian communities and politics leads to two different strategies of resistance. First, it leads to the formation of a bisexual movement, and secondly, to the rejection and critique of identity politics altogether. The former strategy borrows the politicization of sexuality from lesbian feminists and claims bisexuality as a unique and oppressed identity. This new identity politic privileges bisexuality as the ability to desire without exception and pathologizes monosexuals as rigid and closed-minded. It also seeks to challenge biphobia[12] and gain acceptance for bisexual rights. Bisexual identity, both as a basis for a community and as a political movement, allows the adoption of similar strategies that lesbians use in creating and policing their cultural space.

The second reaction to bisexual diaspora, from some lesbian communities, is a critique of binaries and categories which led to the creation of homogeneous sexual identity and exclusionary politics in the first place. Such people avoid reclaiming a new sexual identity, as bisexual, and instead fight for an inclusive movement for all sexually marginalized persons on the basis of consensual sexual practices, not on confining labels.

The exclusion of bisexually-identified women from many lesbian communities has led to the politicization of bisexuality within newly forming communities and movements. Many politically active bisexual women coming from lesbian-feminist communities already have a politicized sexual identity that provides them with the language to start naming and challenging the oppression that they are facing, both by heterosexuals and by lesbians (Udis-Kessler, "Identity/Politics" 55). As Trnka reflects: "My bisexuality is not only emotional and physical, but also political, precisely because I live in a society that constructs sexuality as political" (291). These movements and communities see bisexuality as a having membership organized around a distinct and unique position with a new identity politics. Tucker suggests:

In forming communities based on identity politics, bisexual women are also forming an "ethnic" identity. As an "ethnicity," bisexuals are developing a separate and unique space, defining themselves as culturally, historically, and philosophically distinct, and in the process attempting to normalize and naturalize themselves. Hutchins and Kaahumana claim that bisexual women are taking pride as a minority and naming their own reality (xxii). They continue, "We too must identify the obvious, reclaim our writers, poets, painters and activists. By doing this, we will gain a sense of pride in ourselves which will strengthen our understanding of what we mean by bisexual community" (128). Bisexual communities, as they organize around "cultural artifacts" (Udis-Kessler, "Identity/Politics" 57) such as those advocated by Hutchins and Kaahumana, crystallize the identity that bisexuality is assumed to cause and the behaviour that is assumed to follow. This is a noticeable closing and solidifying of the definition of bisexuality, and works against inclusive understandings of sexuality as fluid and dynamic. It also excludes those bisexuals who do not politicize their sexual identity.

In the effort to gain power and validation bisexuals are relying on the tried and true method of defining themselves in relation to another group, celebrating bisexuality, while the other is disparaged. In describing bisexuality as the normal expression of sexuality and desire, bisexuals are using "monosexuals" as their model of deviance. Through the process of "othering" monosexuals (both heterosexuals and homosexuals), bisexuals normalize and universalize their own sexuality, which they privilege as free and subversive, thereby forming group solidarity. Ault explains that bisexuality " . . . posits lesbians, gays, and heterosexual men and women as a monolithic 'semi-sexual' collective composed of those sexually limited by a pathological preference for intimacy with members of only one sex-people disparagingly labelled 'monosexuals'" ("Dilemma of Identity" 324). Board supports Ault's position that bisexuals define themselves against the sexually repressed "monosexual," as she asserts that bisexuals are more aware of sexual choices, "[having] more gender options than monosexuals and asexuals" (285). Hemmings reveals the inevitable binary construction of identity politics and confesses the complexity of negotiating any sexual identity:

Ault also suggests that individuals with a "core" bisexual sexual identity construct a marginalized and stigmatized bisexual "deviant" as another means to define themselves against what they are not, i.e. sleazy, non-politicized, oriented toward heterosexual marriages, and trendy ("Dilemma of Identity" 323). Opposing inclusive conceptions of bisexuality, Heldke suggests:

As bisexuals seek to move from the margins to the center through stigmatizing the "other"-the monosexual and the "deviant" bisexual-they perpetuate essentialist assumptions of sexuality as universal and innate. They also continue the construction of binaries that place sexual identity within a hierarchy of normalcy. For example, in a study by George, one respondent utilized essentialist understandings of sexual identity to explain, "Everyone is bisexual -- but they don't admit it, they repress it" (104). This statement both naturalizes the individual's identity and pathologizes those who do not share it, because they "repress it." This is recontextualizing the "other‚" the non-bisexual, as psychologically inept, echoing the views of Stekel who viewed all monosexuals as mentally disturbed (Stekel 29).

Not all people, however, who could be described as bisexual claim the label or identity. Many people seek the freedom to transcend labels (Som 94). Clausen, for example, suggests labels and sexual identities become problematic when people confront a change in their sexual behaviour (453). The proposition that language is not capable of accommodating change and especially the fluidity of desire and sexuality poses a challenge for those who are attempting to live with a desire that is dynamic and in constant motion. These people object to the use of language to limit and categorize. As Klein asserts: "Labelling is the tried and true method of eliminating the threat of uncertainty, ambiguity and fear" ("Bisexual Option" 42). However George also suggests that:

Inclusive Sexual Movements: Potential and Problems

Many of the bisexual women who do not seek a bisexual identity politic or bisexual movement have campaigned instead for an inclusive movement for all sexual minorities. They avoid the use of bisexual as an identity and conceive of a movement based on consensual sexual practices and an understanding of diversity, rather than pathology, which liberates all sexually marginalized people (Highleyman 89; Queen 159; Sweeney 185). An inclusive bisexual movement emphasizes fluidity (Pramaggiorre 149) and challenges the traditional notions of sexuality and gender through the incorporation of "leather folks‚" polymorphists, and transgendered persons (Highleyman 79). An inclusive bisexual movement is also based within a feminist critique, fighting for women to make their own erotic choices (Queen 157).

Different conceptualizations of an inclusive bisexual movement are proposed in order to account for differences and similarities of the people involved. One conceptualization centres on "idea politics" instead of identity politics. Idea politics is based on shared beliefs, commitments, values and goals, rather than innate characteristics and oppressions (Highleyman 74). Hemmings similarly suggests a politics of location in order to highlight the overlap in differences and similarities among individuals (198). Another proposes that we conceive of desire and attraction as "clusters," with individuals celebrating differences and similarities without borders separating the two (Kaplan 277). These three models of sexuality are an attempt to overcome the perceived differences that are fracturing sexual liberation movements and that lead to exclusive and rigid identity politics. As Board optimistically proposes: "Bisexual is to our sexuality what human is to our species. It is inclusive. . . . There are no walls, only a fluid range of possibilities, open to everyone" (284). However, the problem of a bisexual movement, which centers around inclusion and values diversity, is that it still holds on to the term "bisexual‚" which is exclusive in and of itself.

An inclusive sexual liberation movement needs new terms,[14] without essentialist connotations, if it hopes to avoid subsuming other individuals' identities under a limiting definition. Bisexuality‚ as a word, does not easily escape its culturally and historically constructed meanings. An attempt to create inclusive sexual movement using the term bisexual falls victim to the same criticisms that bisexuals charge against queer as a label and a politics. Bisexuals are quick to point out that queer is not interchangeable with bisexual. Ault points out that the problem with bisexual women assuming the label queer is that "While in an overtly heterosexist context, the label 'queer' may mark the bisexual as critically non-heterosexual, within gay and, especially, lesbian contexts, bi women's use of this identity marker works as a 'queer cloaking mechanism'" ("Dilemma of Identity" 322). Queer, like bisexual, as an umbrella identity is able to shift, reveal, or subsume the identities of the individuals using as social and personal climates dictate. In this way, queer, as does bisexual, swings back and forth between subversive and assimilation stances, any of which may not be agreed upon within the group. Queers are, therefore, able to erase differences and provide a label, which assumes a homogeneous group with all the same interests and goals. Bower suggests that queer implies maleness and questions the representation of feminist issues within a group that is presumably dominated by gay and bisexual men (103). As well, queer, as a label, is accused of masking biphobia, both internally and externally (Tucker 4). In trying to represent a diverse range of people with different behaviours, identities, desires, genders, sexes, and so on, queer, like bisexual, is rendered problematic.

Bisexuality as Theoretical Perspective

Another strategy of bisexuals is to forego formations of communities and political movements and instead treat bisexuality as a trope or tool with which to deconstruct and challenge dichotomous constructions of sexuality and explode labels in general. Storr suggests that bisexuality as an epistemology threatens the categories heterosexual and homosexual through its inability to be permanently fixed within a temporal and spatial location (8). Daumer goes on to claim that bisexuality as a perspective has four functions: 1. it shows gaps and contradictions in all identity, 2. it exposes distinctive features of politicized sexual identities, 3. it problematizes heterosexuality beyond criticism of compulsory heterosexuality to show resistance of heterosexism in heterosexual relationships, and 4. it serves as a bridge between identifications and communities (159-161). Bisexuality challenges assumptions of desire and identity, allowing for difference and fluidity of sexuality.

Bisexuality, by the very fact that it occupies an ambiguous position, disrupts binaries through blurring the boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Heldke explains: "Bisexuality throws into question the legitimacy, rigidity and presumed ontological priority of those categories by challenging the notion that bisexuals consist of two 'halves' forcibly glued together to make an ungainly and necessarily unstable whole" (175). Eadie conceptualizes bisexuality as a hybrid: not as part heterosexual, part homosexual, but as a blending and fusing. Quoting Bhabha, he suggests that: "the paranoid threat from the hybrid is finally uncontainable because it breaks down the symmetry and duality of self/other, inside/outside," (qtd.in Eadie 135) - and homosexual/heterosexual. Eadie elaborates, "There is no redemption from plurality. Deviance persists in the culture which is trying to expel it, thereby disrupting the myths of any authority's heritage as an always homogeneous past, and its persistence as an always identical future" (136). Bisexuality challenges the predictability of the heterosexual future, but it also challenges those of homosexuals because bisexuality revels that identity is not rigid and stagnant but multifaceted and in constant flux. By not locating themselves at either end of the continuum of sexuality, bisexuals throw into question the very boundaries that separate heterosexuals and homosexuals as separate and opposite.

Pramaggiore uses the "epistemology of the fence" to conceptualize the subversive qualities of bisexuality (146). Fencing-sitting is used to stigmatize bisexuals, yet Pramaggiore utilizes it as a position in which to destabilize polar binaries (146). She challenges that, "Fence-sitting is a practice that refuses the restrictive formulas that define gender according to binary categories, that associate one gender or one sexuality with a singularly gendered object choice, and that equate sexual practice with sexual identity" (146). By being articulated as a place of in-betweenness and indecision, bisexuality is able to challenge the apparent static and fixed nature of sexual identity and practice, and is able to open up the possibility of producing multiple forms and expressions of desire.

Though bisexuality as a perspective and vantage point can offer insights into how categorical dualisms, like that of heterosexual and homosexual, are constructed and maintained, it too falls prey to the limitations of language to conceptualize identity and difference. Words by their very nature are an attempt to fix an idea, identity, object, and so on. As Hemmings warns, "Unless transgression actually disrupts the underlying forms of the discourse being challenged, the attempt runs the risk of becoming yet another partner in the endless spiral of binary oppositions" (195). Through the conceptualization of bisexuality only in the abstract, theorists are failing to recognize its limitations.The very "bi" in bisexuality signifies a duality (Hall 11). Though the two parts have changed within the history of the term, duality is still implicit in the word. Hall summarizes, "Clearly 'bisexuality' is highly problematic term as it attempts to (or has been deployed to) embrace the dauntingly wide variety of [sexualities]" (10). "Bi" can never be as inclusive as it would like as a movement and as a theory because it can only imply two of something (gender, sex, sexual desire, etc.), thus falling back into binaries.

Neither does bisexuality escape the traps of essentialist rhetoric. As a distinct community and movement bisexuals require an "ethnic" identity in which to trace out their borders and territories. As an inclusive movement or theoretical perspective bisexuality suffers two problems of language. Either the term is so inclusive that it loses all signs of comprehension and recognition, or it subsumes, or to use Ault's term, "cloaks" everyone into a universal sexuality. I think sexuality has to be reconceptualized altogether with new words to accompany it. Sexuality as fetishism has conceptual emancipatory potential (J. Litwoman, qtd. in Hutchins and Kaahumana 5; Herdt 58). While the term "fetishism" itself is problematic and lacks connotations of liberation, conceiving of desire through its dictates allows for a layering that does not place desire within a continuum, with extremes, but can occupy different spaces at different times and allow for the fluidity for which bisexuality calls.

Other terms for sexual multiplicity also have greater disruptive potential than bisexuality, such as polysexuality and pansexuality. Though these may be jargon-ridden,[15] they move beyond the prefixes of a mono- or bi- sexuality. They imply a diffusion of eroticizism with no reduction to categorical binaries or stable identities. So, for those who seek a sexual liberation for minorities, perhaps the banner should read "pan" or "poly" and skip the binaries and essentialism of "bi." In finding a new word or model to conceptualize sexuality, I think we need to consider how new technology will change our understanding of desire and erotic practices, as Kaloski questions:"What can bisexuality mean when latex and phonesex and cybersex are displacing sexual difference and producing new erogenous zones?" (210). Is this pointing to polysexuality? Pansexuality? Who is to say? The future possibilities of an open sexuality are conceivable, but it is time we claim sexuality as a sense of knowing ourselves, our desires and not as an identity politic. As Som directs, "We can't live bisexual; we have to live our lives. I say get on with it" (97).