Читать книгу Hybrid - Ruth Colker - Страница 15

Martin S. Weinberg and his colleagues report that one-fourth of self-identified bisexuals are currently “confused” about their bisexuality, with more than half of the women and three-quarters of the men reporting previous confusion.⁴ People who do not self-identify as bisexuals, yet have sexual relations with people of both genders, report even more identity confusion: “Some people who behave bisexually are confused and think that they may be in the process of becoming homosexual. Others simply deny their same-sex feelings and behaviors in order to preserve their self-image as heterosexuals.”⁵

The pressure to identify with a monosexual label of “gay” or “straight” leads to some odd results. Some women continue to identify with the label “heterosexual” despite the fact that they are intimately involved with a woman. Other women who have had prior intimate relationships with a woman continue to identify with the label “lesbian” even when intimately involved with a man. One of the best-known examples of this phenomenon was Holly Near, a very popular songwriter and singer among lesbians, who persisted in labeling herself as a lesbian despite her intimate relationship with a man.⁶ Alternatively, some women simply have felt immobilized by this need to fit into a category and have therefore chosen the “choose not to label” category.⁷

A bisexual perspective facilitates picking the “choose not to label” category rather than the static and bipolar categories of homosexual and heterosexual. Ruth Gibian describes the problematic, bipolar structure of the dominant sexuality categories: “The definition of a static sexuality is based on binary opposition. . . . Indeed, our entire Western system of thought is based on binary opposition; we define by comparison, by what things are not.”⁸ Bipolar injustice is of epidemic proportions; it is not limited to the area of sexual orientation. Although it is unrealistic to think that we can dismantle an entire system that is built on binary opposition, we can take small steps in the area of life that touches us most personally—our self-identity.

We should not allow our bisexuality to be invisible even to ourselves. When I ended an intimate relationship with a woman and began dating a man about fifteen years ago, I remember telling him, “It’s important that you recognize that I am a lesbian.” I insisted on the lesbian label because I did not want to acknowledge to myself the dynamic nature of my sexual orientation. I thought I had to choose between being gay and straight and was having trouble reconciling the gender of my current partner with those choices. Five years later, when I became involved with another man, again ending an intimate relationship with a woman, I told a friend that I was sure that I was now a “heterosexual.” My obsession with categorization precluded me from seeing the complexity of my feelings and the multiplicity of my prior relationships, harming the fullness of my self-identity.

The invisibility of bisexuals has had some profound social consequences. For example, it has rendered invisible the bisexual practices of many African-American men, thereby stalling our attempts to deal with the AIDS crisis. Although the Kinsey study⁹ is often cited for statistics about sexual behavior, it is rarely noted that the study included only white American men who had engaged in a homosexual act at least once.¹⁰ The statistics that do exist on the sexual behavior of African-American men are inconclusive but preliminary statistics suggest that African-American men may be somewhat more likely than white men to engage in both opposite-sex and same-sex sexual behavior.¹¹ These men, however, rarely identify as bisexual, in part because of disapproval of that status in their own community and in mainstream society.¹² A polarized straight/gay dichotomy and disapproval of bisexuals have caused us to ignore the sexual practices of this group of men. This lack of recognition has had profound consequences: it has deterred attempts to provide AIDS counseling to many African-American men who engage in same-sex sexual behavior, as well as to their female sexual partners. By rigidly assuming that people who primarily identify as heterosexual are not engaging in same-sex sexual behavior, health care professionals until recently have not targeted heterosexual African-American men and their female partners for safe-sex education. A bisexual perspective would make more apparent the sexual behavior of many African-American men and thereby would be more racially inclusive irrespective of what label these men¹³ apply to themselves.¹⁴

Similarly, feminist theorist Brenda Marie Blasingame suggests that some minority communities recognize that many people engage in both same-sex and opposite-sex behavior while not expressly labeling it as bisexual:

In talking with older people of color who are queer, I’ve found that they often say that in their community people had relationships with people. Some people chose to be involved with both sexes, whereas others chose to be exclusively involved with same-sex partners. They spoke of how some people were bisexual. That was not what it was called, but that was what was taking place. It was not a subject of conversation: people knew who was in a relationship with whom, that was how it was and life went on.¹⁵

Blasingame provides excellent insight into the bridges that must be crossed if people of color are to feel more welcome in the “gay” movement. When we can start talking about people who have sex with people of the same sex without making any assumptions about whether they also have sex with people of the opposite sex, then we may have a more racially inclusive politics. Our bipolar orientation about sexuality therefore contributes to a misunderstanding of how people experience sexuality and also makes people in various ethnic communities feel alienated from the gay rights movement.

How can we make more visible individuals who lie between sexual categories? One way is to embrace individualized storytelling rather than categories such as “bisexual”:

To compensate for the lack of an adequate label, which I know would have its limitations anyway, I find myself telling my story, or as much of it as the situation warrants. It gives people the chance to hear, not defector or fence-sitter, but process, struggle toward self-understanding, self-claiming. It gives them room to hear about feelings and to tell their own. It gives me—and all of us—room to be larger than a name.¹⁶

Categories suggest stasis whereas storytelling reflects our changing life experiences. The way for individuals’ sexual identity to become fully visible is not to embrace the new category of “bisexuality” but to explain fully the content of their sexuality. Sandra Bern embraces this perspective when she says that she has been involved intimately with a particular man for three decades but would not describe herself as having chosen him as a partner because of his biological gender. Her life description does a more complete job of explaining her sexuality than the label “heterosexual” or “bisexual.” This perspective does not force us to agonize over whether Bern properly could be considered a “bisexual” given the monogamous nature of her sexual relationship of the last three decades. Applying or not applying the label “bisexual” to Bern’s situation would not add to our understanding of her sexuality. Individualized storytelling, however, makes it clear how her sexuality differs from another woman who has also been married to the same man for three decades but who openly acknowledges that she organizes her sexuality around the biological sex of her partner.

There are times when we need categories for constructive purposes. The fact that categories may have pragmatic advantages in certain situations, however, should not make us forget that categorical thinking can also seriously misstate human feelings and experience. Where individualized storytelling is possible in addition to or instead of categorization, we should seek to promote storytelling.

Individuals who lie between racial categories often face similar dilemmas. As I will discuss further in chapters 5 and 8, some¹⁷ individuals feel that they have to make a false choice on job application forms, census forms, or even birth certificates about their racial identity. Parents complain that such false choices undermine the self-esteem of their children. Although we do not usually think of race as a thought process based on our feelings in the same way that we think of sexual orientation, these stories reveal the element of conscious choice of racial category for certain individuals. Our dominant view of race as a biological category (which, itself, is inaccurate according to scientists and anthropologists) is undermined when we see the ways in which some individuals can move between racial categories or make choices about the racial categories to which they belong.

Nonetheless, sexual orientation and race have basic dissimilarities. Most of us are told as young children, either implicitly or explicitly, that we are heterosexual. It is only through a conscious thought process that we can move beyond that bipolar category. Similarly, most of us are told our race at a young age and few of us ever question our racial identity. However, some individuals discover new information about their racial heritage later in life through comments from their parents or official public records such as birth certificates. Irrespective of whether an individual has been informed of her multiracial background from a young age or whether she discovers it somewhat later in life, she may make a choice as to whether to identify with a multiracial category or, instead, to maintain a monoracial identity. (Most individuals, however, who have multiracial backgrounds do not make a conscious choice about racial identification, because the “one drop of blood rule” has defined them as fitting a monoracial category.) Racial identity, like sexual orientation, can therefore have a cognitive component for some individuals. That component becomes particularly apparent when we focus on certain individuals with multiracial backgrounds.