On the Lack of Dialectics in Queer Scholarship, Part 2: BI

Continuing the Survey of LGBTQ+ Books

Jun 06, 2024

This is a continuation of last week’s post on the lack of dialectics in queer scholarship. I recommend reading the first entry of these posts for an overview of this series and a general introduction.

BI by Julia Shaw

The second book I want to discuss is Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality by Dr. Julia Shaw from 2023. I came to this book because it felt like bisexual as an identity always got shafted in books looking at gay, lesbian, and general queer history. I was interested since this book’s title implied it was going to discuss the history of bisexuality and bisexual people.

Overall, the book has a lot of useful information regarding bisexual history and aspects of the bisexual experience I never thought of as a non-bisexual, such as how bisexual people are treated when immigrating or seeking asylum, for example. There were two sections, however, that stuck out to me on how the lack of dialectics in an analysis leads to the pitfalls of subjectivity, one-sidedness, and superficiality.

The first section is at the beginning of the fifth chapter, about halfway through the book. Dr. Shaw begins the chapter with a story about going on a date with a lesbian friend to a lesbian bar. She writes:

The date was going great. But then the table next to us got involved. Two women, presumably both lesbians, snickered. Unprovoked and uninvited, one of them commented, “I don’t believe you.” It was a comment dripping with malice and unfortunately we knew exactly what she meant.1

This scenario obviously sucks and does illustrate how lesbians or other sapphic women can and do police how sapphic women perform. Speaking as a trans woman, I know how awful it feels not to be taken at face value even within supposedly queer safe spaces. Shaw continues her story, “Only an hour later, as we waited for the bus outside the bar, we were again accosted, this time by a group of young men.”2

Shaw recalls the fear and ridicule she felt when dealing with these men:

We were no longer in the relative safety of the Friendly Society and holding hands and exchanging the occasional kiss was now riskier. Even in Soho, the part of London probably most associated with queer culture, these men took this as an invitation to harass us, to catcall us, to molest us with their greedy eyes.3

It’s genuinely terrifying and uneasy, illustrating how despite the progress we’ve made and the spaces we’ve created for ourselves, patriarchy and heterosexism still present a clear and present danger to women and queer/trans people.

But it’s the conclusion Shaw draws from this experience and the way she frames this entire sequence that confuses and troubles me:

We could sense that, like the women in the bar, they also didn’t believe us. They too reacted as if our relationship was somehow performative, for them, that we weren’t actually lesbians. […] Whatever the reason, two of the young men stalked us halfway across London, almost until we were home.4

I’ll try to explain what confuses me about Shaw’s conclusion. She seems to view the harassment and stalking by this group of men as the result of her and her date not looking queer or lesbian enough, thus these men didn’t believe they were queer/lesbians. So, if I am reading this correctly, Shaw is assuming the men only harassed and followed her and her date because they thought Shaw and her date weren’t really queer and were just holding hands and kissing for male attention. And if said men had believed Shaw and her date were lesbians/queer, then they would’ve minded their own business.

I’m sorry, but I don’t see how she came to that conclusion. Even if Shaw and her date did look queer, that wouldn’t have prevented or stopped any street harassment from men, and it might have escalated it, if I’m being honest. Patriarchy doesn’t teach straight men that every woman attracted to men is theirs, but if she’s a lesbian, then you have to stay in your lane. It teaches straight men that every woman is theirs.

Just because you look queer or uninterested doesn’t matter. And the men most invested in maintaining patriarchal hegemony are the ones most likely to pursue or punish those who don’t already “act properly.” It’s why a lot of MRA and Manosphere media celebrate the turning of “wild women” into “proper ladies” rather than going after those deemed proper already. It’s why so-called “pick-me girls” never get picked.

So, the issue wasn’t that these men didn’t believe Shaw and her date were gay and thus didn’t stay in their lane. The problem is that men feel entitled to all women, even if the women are gay. Shaw not acknowledging this is weird because she later has a section on corrective rape, a violent tool used by the patriarchy to “convert” suspected or out lesbians to heterosexuality. I have more to say about her section on corrective rape in general, actually, but I want to discuss the other part of the above section that troubled me.

The other thing that bothered me about Shaw's story is how it’s framed. It seems like she’s using this personal anecdote as a microcosm of the oppression bisexuals face on both fronts—queer and hetero. Shaw constantly compares the rude encounter with the lesbians and the harassment and stalking of the men: “…as we waited for the bus outside the bar, we were again accosted, this time by a group of young men,” “We could sense that, like the women in the bar, they also didn’t believe us,” and “They too reacted as if our relationship was somehow performative...”5

Listen, the two “presumably both lesbians” women being rude to Shaw and her date (her date was a lesbian herself and not bisexual, by the way) was shitty. But to put it on the same level as a group of men harassing and literally stalking her feels disingenuous. The couple who were rude to Shaw and her date were policing them, and that’s not good. But the men wanted to subjugate them, which isn’t just a “not good” but a form of violent oppression.

Shaw’s narrative of this story equates lateral violence with violent oppression as though they’re equal. Upon reading this passage, a friend of mine insightfully remarked how if the lesbian couple did believe Shaw and her date, they would have said nothing, but even if the men believed them, it wouldn’t have stopped them. There’s nothing wrong with discussing intracommunity issues and violence, but to try and equate lateral issues with vertical ones simultaneously lessens the oppression and oversells lateral issues. Had Shaw been forcefully excluded from the lesbian bar or violence erupted, I could see how that would have added nuance in Shaw’s favor, but it didn’t happen.

This is all made weirder by the fact this whole story introduces Shaw’s chapter on what it means to look queer and more specifically, bi. Knowing that makes me more confused as to why she shared that story specifically to introduce that concept. Likewise, I’m confused how she didn’t even reflect on that story further in the chapter, perhaps looking back on why traditionally-feminine queer women often face pushback in queer spaces, but she doesn’t.

And before people point out that I said lesbians could oppress trans women in the previous post despite both being queer, it’s not that lesbians can oppress trans women, it’s that Bornstein mistakes the division between TERFs and trans women as between lesbians and trans women whereas it’s actually between cis women and trans women. Bornstein also downplayed or omitted how cis women oppress trans women, namely through expulsion and exclusion from queer, lesbian, and feminist spaces which also robs them of resources and community, as well as the fact Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire has been used to justify systemic trans oppression medically, politically, and economically.

Shaw fails both to name the oppression she and her date faced in her story and to provide examples of said oppression that isn’t lateral violence. To give an example, a gay man cannot simply wield their homosexuality against lesbians to oppress them, but they can wield patriarchy against lesbians. A gay man going up to a lesbian and saying, “I don’t think you’re really a lesbian” is shitty but not oppression. A gay man using misogynistic language to demean a lesbian is oppression.

Next, I want to discuss Shaw’s section on corrective rape. Shaw writes:

Watson found that some of her bisexual participants, all of whom lived in the US, also experienced corrective rape. However, the reason given for this wasn’t always to make them heterosexual. A Black cisgender woman said, “I believe it was a case of ‘corrective rape’ meant to make me a ‘full lesbian.’” Another participant, who identified as white and gender-fluid, stated: “I feel like maybe they each thought that they could change my identity to fit what they thought it should be. The woman thought she could turn me gay and the man thought he could turn me straight. Neither believed bisexuality was its own identity.” Such attacks show that bisexual people may be at risk specifically for being bisexual, rather than being targeted for the homosexual aspect of their behavior or identity.6

What I find frustrating about this passage is, again, the framing. Shaw quotes two survivors of corrective rape, both of whom were raped by queer women to turn them “full lesbian” to conclude “that bisexual people may be at risk specifically for being bisexual, rather than being targeted for the homosexual aspect of their behavior or identity.”7 I am not here to deny that the sexual assault mentioned above did not happen or imply that lesbians are incapable of grotesque and deplorable acts.

I am, however, questioning why she chose to frame this conclusion the way she did and use the evidence she used. She quotes two out of the 532 participants in the article “‘I Was a Game or a Fetish Object’: Diverse Bisexual Women’s Sexual Assault Experiences and Effects on Bisexual Identity” from the Journal of Bisexuality yet provides no statistics of how prevalent correct rape to turn bi women “full lesbian” is.

Not to mention, I’m skeptical of any Journal of Bisexuality article because it’s the official journal of the American Institute of Bisexuality (AIB), the same institute that funds Queer Majority, a homophobic, transphobic, and anti-feminist magazine, which has published about feminism being the new religious right, how men suffer from more hiring biases than women, radicals are virgin losers and centrists are giga chads (this is literally their wording), and incels aren’t a real problem and actually, it’s our fault they act that way.

Queer Majority’s editor-in-chief, who’s also a producer for bisexual.org and an organizer for amBi, is on the advisor board for the libertarian consortium the Institute for Liberal Values (ILV) and libertarian PAC Project Liberal. The AIB has also funded J. Michael Bailey, the author of the offensively transphobic The Man Who Would Be Queen, and some of its board members have expressed transphobic, nonbinary-phobic, and panphobic opinions.891011

The original article itself may be fine, but this context adds to skepticism since I couldn't get my hands on the original article because it’s behind a paywall, but to use only two quotes if there was more evidence is questionable on Shaw’s part. Especially since she previously mentions, “According to the organization Human Rights Watch, in some African countries including South Africa and Uganda, ‘corrective rape is a widely reported phenomenon in which men rape people they presume or know to be lesbians in order to ‘convert’ them to heterosexuality.’”1213

It’s not that every instance of evil doesn’t matter, but when writing about the systemic, wholistic experience and oppression bi people face, using anecdotal evidence at best to conclude that lesbians corrective rape bi women enough to be “a widely reported phenomenon” feels lesbophobic at worst and thoughtless cherry picking to fulfill a conformation bias conclusion at best. Again, this is equating lateral violence with systemic oppression. I saw someone use the perfect metaphor to describe this on Twitter: there’s a difference when your sibling hits you and your parent. Both suck, but there’s power, control, and dominance behind one and not the other.

It brings to mind when conservatives over-emphasize the half-dozen or so mass shooters who are trans when over a thousand other mass shootings in the United States are committed by cis people. It feels sensationalist and like Shaw is trying to spin a narrative where there is none. While personal experiences are not free from adhering to stereotypes, using anecdotal data that happens to reaffirm a negative lesbian stereotype that lesbians are trying to steal away straight and male-attracted women from men is irresponsible at best. It’d be like if I quoted two people who happened to have bi women cheat on them and concluded, “Such betrayals of trust show that bisexual people may be at risk specifically to be unfaithful.”

Likewise, discussing sexual assault only through the experience of bi women and gender-expansive people and not including any bi men implicitly collapses the bi-woman experience into the bi experience. Thus, in Shaw’s framing of her conversation on corrective rape, men and lesbians become the two main villains of bisexuals. And, weirdly, she discussed the erasure of bi men in her book, only to not include anything on the sexual violence bi men face. Like, you’re going to put a magnifying glass on two experiences related to lesbians and not even entertain the idea that gay men and straight women are also capable of the same for bi men?

Indeed, one of many issues with Bi is its insistence on framing the entire struggle of bisexuality and bi people as monosexuals versus polysexuals. This is not to dismiss that bisexuals have unique oppressions not felt by gay men and lesbians. Biphobia exists. But to assume the contempt for bisexuals systemically by the patriarchy or even personally by monosexuals is solely because they’re attracted to multiple genders ignores the actual ways bisexuality is policed.

For example, how about how other polysexual labels, such as pansexuality, have (erroneously, but I digress) slandered bisexuality and bisexuals as transphobic, un-inclusive, or not progressive enough, or vice versa? (Not that I have anything against pansexuality and pansexuals, but I have things like this happen in real time.) This is another example of lateral violence within the community, but Shaw doesn’t discuss it at all.

Also, conceiving gay and lesbian as “monosexual” is itself a reductive way of describing each sexuality. While everyone’s self-conception of their gay or lesbian identity is different, both usually include a spectrum of gender, not just binary men and binary women, respectively.

While this isn’t how everyone defines them, the working definition of gay is non-women loving non-women, and lesbian, non-men loving non-men. Lesbian sexuality, for example, has included many genders other than binary women: transfems, demi-girls, nonbinary people, agender people, bigender people, genderfluid people, transmascs, and so on. Of course, every lesbian’s attraction and boundaries will vary, but as a historical group, lesbians have never been “monosexual.” The same goes for gay men.

I am not going to accuse Shaw of being lesbophobic. I want to believe she isn’t, but placing this section next to her bar-date story shows a pattern of antagonism toward lesbians in her book, at least. That’s not proof or anything; rather, it’s important to point out these patterns if we see them, so we can hopefully correct any subconscious or unaware biases. It’s also a lesson on how often we can frame non-antagonistic contradictions as antagonistic, which is unhelpful in uniting against actual antagonistic contradictions.

Intracommunity contradictions and issues deserve space to be discussed and resolved, but they can’t be when they are treated as antagonistic and primary when they are not. In my opinion, Bi fails in this regard because it’s only thinking about things as monosexuals versus polysexuals and nothing else, so it can only conceive of contradiction as both the primary and antagonistic. This leads to subjective, one-sided, and superficial analysis.

Next week, I will finish this series of posts by looking at Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen!