Inescapable Essentialism: Bisexually-Identified Women's Strategies in the Late 80s and Early 90s

Abstract

In the formation of new sexually-identified groups the rhetoric and language used becomes of paramount importance. Who is defined as a member? Who is not? What do the members have in common? What is different? The rhetoric used by bisexually-identified women, in forming communities, political movements, and theory in the late eighties and early nineties, provides an opening in which to analyze the essentialist notions employed to define and police developing bisexual women's territory. What had hoped to be a challenge to traditional identity politics, such as 'lesbian' and 'straight', ended for some in a narrow innate definition of what bisexuality is and how it is to be expressed within a new bisexual-identity politics and community. Others tended to throw bisexuality into abstraction and see it not as a lived sexuality or identity politic but a theoretical perspective in which to disrupt dichotomous sexual categories. However, in both approaches the language used renders 'bisexuality' as an identity and concept limited and problematic. It appears what has been thought of as a 'third-space' for the disruption of sexuality does not, in this case, escapable essentialism.