Bisexuality: beyond the binary?

A History of Bisexuality. By Steven Angelides. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 281 pages. Paper, $20.00.

Reviewed by Deborah Gambs, Ph.D. Candidate, CUNY Graduate Center, Department of Sociology, 365 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10016: e-mail: [e-mail].

One of the most enjoyable aspects of reading Steven Angelides' A History of Bisexuality was the work required on my part in deciding whether I agreed with his argument. This was not an easy task because his book is a combination of three fairly detailed histories and a complex theoretical argument. Can one effectively argue that bisexuality produces a trinary configuration of sexualities, or that more than simply reinforcing the traditional, oppositional, and dichotomous relationship of heterosexual-homosexual it is also disruptive of this traditional view and therefore must be considered in the same fashion?

Angelides considers himself to be writing in between the history of lesbian and gay studies and queer theory, as well as between deconstruction and post-structuralism. He makes it clear that it is not his desire to reclaim some existing history of bisexuality, but rather to question the notion of sexuality itself. Are we to understand bisexuality as on the same plane epistemologically and in a trinary relationship with homosexuality and heterosexuality? This is the argument Angelides makes, and he takes a risk in making this claim, differing from both Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick. It is a question worth asking, because the theoretical and political consequences are not small. It would be a significant contribution to Sedgwick's argument that the heterosexual-homosexual relationship is at the heart of much of Western thought since the 19th century.

Most historians have seen bisexuality as dependent on and defined by the opposition of heterosexual-homosexual, which reinforces rather than troubles this binary perspective; thus, bisexuality is erased from queer theory and lesbian-gay history. It is well worth taking Angelides' historical trip through 19th century science and sexology, Freud's theories and his followers' later repression of bisexuality, and the Gay Liberation movement, to connect the points where Angelides argues bisexuality was elided, erased, and repressed.

After his introduction in chapter 1, Angelides divides the book into two sections. The first, "Constructing Sexual Identity," details how conceptions of sexuality have been constructed. This is where he presents the historicity of the discussion. Chapter 2, "Science and the Invention of (Bi)Sexuality," traces the emergence of the economy of heterosexuality and links it to questions of masculine identity and race. It was necessary for scientists to instantiate heterosexuality to prop up evolutionary notions of progress and development. The existence of the intersexed was a sign to Darwin that human embryos were hermaphroditic, and thus proved bisexuality as the originary point on the evolutionary scale. From this point, White men would evolve through sexual differentiation, whereas women and Blacks remained sexually immature. The sexist/racist leanings of science in the second half of the 19th century, the anxieties about sex and race difference, and the reforms being made around women's rights were contained in Darwinian debates over the original state of humans. Thus bisexuality is at once acknowledged and erased.

Chapter 3, "The Unsolved Figure in the Carpet," shows the repression of bisexuality after Freud's initial argument that all people are bisexual at birth. Freud was never willing to stick with this thought, Angelides points out, because it threatened the Oedipal configuration. The final chapter of Part 1, "The Pink Threat," traces the shift in psychoanalytic theories of sexuality and the drive to secure the unstable boundaries of the heterosexual-homosexual divide. Through this process, bisexuality was repudiated as a scientific anachronism and homosexuality was pathologized.

Part Two, "Deconstructing Sexual Identity," consists of four chapters. Chapter 5, "The Repressed Returns," analyzes the early 1970s gay liberation movement. Bisexuality as a concept was revived, Angelides argues, but still always elided in the present tense. Angelides suggests, however, that the bisexuality presented in the studies of Kinsey, Ford, Beach, and Hooker was integral to the movement to contest the psychomedical constructions of human nature and homosexuality. However, this notion was always framed as a future utopian ideal, rather than something that actually existed in the present tense.

Chapter 6, "Sexuality and Subjection," overviews labeling and symbolic interaction theories and then looks closely at Foucault's social constructionism, arguing that his theories of sexuality also foreclose a discussion of bisexuality. Foucault's historicization of sexuality and critique of psychoanalysis produced his argument that we should be liberated from sexuality altogether and focus rather on bodies and pleasures. Angelides suggests that Foucault moved away from identity politics too quickly, and thus lost rely grounds for resistance.

Angelides then traces the role of queer theory in deconstructing sexuality in chapter 7, "The Queer Intervention." Here the author claims that bisexuality is again erased from the present tense, this time through queer theorists such as Sedgwick, Butler, Fuss, and Edelman, who leave it outside the constitutive terms of the heterosexual-homosexual binary. Analyzing the debate surrounding the intersection of gender and sexuality, Angelides locates bisexuality at their axis, and thus at the nexus of feminist and queer theories. Finally, chapter 8, "Beyond Sexuality," suggests that bisexuality can serve as a useful concept in furthering the "(queer) deconstructive project" and that it must be taken seriously as part of any queer or antihomophobic discourse. I think he is absolutely correct, and his book is an extremely impressive beginning.

Angelides implicitly and explicitly questions disciplinary boundaries--the discipline of history's use of social construction to understand the historicity of identity, and deconstruction as the privileged method of queer theory. I believe he is correct in pointing out that the denaturalization of identifies performed by social constructionist historians has shown us that these categories of sexuality are not universal. However, I am not sure he fully admits how social constructionist arguments absolutely rely on the refusal of a foundational plane of nature, and therefore implicitly relegate it outside the discipline to the natural sciences, thereby both maintaining and displacing it. So in this sense, his critique remains in the social sciences and humanities, although I think he is continually pulled toward questions of science and nature.

I found this book to be excellent reading for several reasons: Angelides' arguments take the reader through a modern Western history of studies of sexuality, he adds depth and dimension to the debates on bisexuality and bisexual identity, and the book provides a great overview of social constructionist and Foucauldian thought. I will leave it to the individual reader to determine whether he or she believes Angelides has successfully argued that the relationship of hetero-homo-bi is a trinary one, rather than Butler and Sedgwick's claim that bisexuality simply props up the hetero-homo opposition.

A History of Bisexuality provides a thought-provoking, queer, historicized look at bisexuality. The examination is timely in its address of one potential site in current debates within queer, postcolonial, feminist, race, and poststructural theories over the necessity of rethinking the relationships between nature and culture, human and machine, organic and inorganic in a new way which does not rely on the opposition between social construction and biological reductionism. It is unfortunate that Angelides limits his argument to one of epistemology and identity politics, fearing that ontological questions will bring him back to essentialism. By now, the debates between social constructionism and essentialism have begun to move to a different level, as scholars look to flame the debate beyond this opposition. Angelides dislikes Foucault's move away from identity politics, and this is a common fear for anyone looking for a political framework. I would suggest, however, following the thought of Patricia Clough, that reading Foucault next to the work of Gilles Deleuze teaches us we can no longer think in terms of identity politics, and that in the shift from a disciplinary society to a control society, we must look for a different kind of political thought based on modulation of the forces of control.

I do like Angelides' recognition of the fundamental difference and indeterminacy at the heart of what we call sexuality. This, I think, is his most successful point, and one that I wish he had explored further. Admittedly, the introduction of a third term to any binary relationship is exciting; for me complexity is always exciting, and we are beginning to see the influence of complexity theories in the social sciences and humanities. Still, I am not sure that the notion of bisexuality that retains its troublesome character can be seen as a third term in this relationship. "Homo" and "hetero" are so easily defined, and bisexuality in that relationship seems to want to take on that simplistic either/or nature, purely a movement between heterosexual and homosexual, female and male. In his discussion of the relationships between feminist and queer theory, Angelides begins to approach this question. However, I think that as queer theory has begun to be influenced by the theory and activism of transgendered and transsexual folks, even the notion of three terms becomes problematic.

Why not conceptualize sexualities and genders in terms of multiplicities of singularities'? If sexuality is fundamentally indeterminate, as Angelides argues, why continue to work within the framework of three terms? Angelides is smart in not feeling a need to strictly define bisexuality; thus it remains a very queered category as he reads it throughout the various discourses. However, the notion of physiological bisexuality, or hermaphrodite or intersex, clearly refuses a notion of bisex as a third term. It is among intersex, transsexual, and transgendered people that we start to see the singularities of gender or sexuality or sex, and we begin to need fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh terms.