Making bisexuality boring since 1992
It was Bisexual Visibility Day last week, and I posted this, then took it dow, fearing it was a bit rainbow-coloured-wholemeal-snowflake. But people said it wasn't as bad as that, so I'm putting it back up.
I'm interested in the way bisexuality gets used a lot as a complicating factor to show when Things are too rigid. It crops up in discussions of change, fluidity, indeterminacy (very much in books I read when I was about 21 - I recall one in particular with aquatic blotches on the cover).
It's a worthy cause: I do think that sexuality is culturally oversimplified, and that it often changes enormously along the life course. Also, that life is complex: that people's proclaimed identities have to be more clear-cut than their lived experiences. If you can point at a bisexual to make all this visible, maybe that's good, if you've asked nicely.
I find it amusing, though, because I am pretty un-fluid and immobile. I am a scorchingly monotonous bisexual. I realised I was bi at 16, and I still am, and the way I experience it hasn't changed much. I've mapped my context much further, which must have changed me, but not (that I've noticed) in striking ways.
So for me, bisexuality has never been the elusive, nebulous, shifting thing that slips out of systems and proves them too rigid. For me, it's been a fixed point.
It still proves Things are too rigid, though. I am, in minor ways, regularly wrongfooted, divided, squeezed, or not quite heard. However, I experience myself as steady, whole, solid, coherent. Like a fixed pebble that has been here for ages, which the stream seems permenantly surprised to encounter.
Posted on Dreamwidth also (http://slightlycanted.dreamwidth.org/1209.html, with
comments so far). Comment wherever you'd like to.
I'm interested in the way bisexuality gets used a lot as a complicating factor to show when Things are too rigid. It crops up in discussions of change, fluidity, indeterminacy (very much in books I read when I was about 21 - I recall one in particular with aquatic blotches on the cover).
It's a worthy cause: I do think that sexuality is culturally oversimplified, and that it often changes enormously along the life course. Also, that life is complex: that people's proclaimed identities have to be more clear-cut than their lived experiences. If you can point at a bisexual to make all this visible, maybe that's good, if you've asked nicely.
I find it amusing, though, because I am pretty un-fluid and immobile. I am a scorchingly monotonous bisexual. I realised I was bi at 16, and I still am, and the way I experience it hasn't changed much. I've mapped my context much further, which must have changed me, but not (that I've noticed) in striking ways.
So for me, bisexuality has never been the elusive, nebulous, shifting thing that slips out of systems and proves them too rigid. For me, it's been a fixed point.
It still proves Things are too rigid, though. I am, in minor ways, regularly wrongfooted, divided, squeezed, or not quite heard. However, I experience myself as steady, whole, solid, coherent. Like a fixed pebble that has been here for ages, which the stream seems permenantly surprised to encounter.
Posted on Dreamwidth also (http://slightlycanted.dreamwidth.org/1209.html, with
comments so far). Comment wherever you'd like to.