#When Is Life Grievable?

[queerographies]

[Regimi di guerra][Judith Butler]

Le immagini della guerra ci sconvolgono, ma spesso ci lasciano indifferenti. È tempo di cambiare prospettiva. Scopri come trasformare l'empatia in azione concreta.

L’indifferenza ci uccide: perché non sentiamo il dolore del mondo? Titolo: Regimi di guerra. Quando la vita è un’istantaneaScritto da: Judith ButlerTitolo originale: Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?Tradotto da: Serena DemichelisEdito da: CastelvecchiAnno: 2024Pagine: 240ISBN: 9791256140152 La sinossi di Regimi di guerra di Judith Butler Perché restiamo indifferenti di fronte alle…

[septembriseur]

“Somewhere in the Mediterranean water between Turkey and Italy, not so very far from the beach where the Benjamin memorial’s exit is barred by a pane of glass, death subjected Torpekai to a transformation.

Prior to her death, the apparatuses of NGO and state had investigated and deemed her life a bad investment. The qualities that would make her death grievable — her bravery and defiance, her intelligence, her successful career, her perceived vulnerability as a Muslim woman — were not considered, while she was still alive, to have any value.

Only at the instant of death did her life accrue value, at the moment when it ceased to make uncomfortable material demands. Grief, after all, costs us nothing. It is cheap and very convenient to mourn the dead.”

[elwenyere]

"One way of posing the question of who 'we' are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others—even if it means taking those latter lives."

— Judith Butler, from Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

[katherinakaina]

Sadly, this is your worst video, @theabigailthorn . You spend more and more time promoting your other projects, instead of providing the substance for your videos. And it really hurts the quality of Philosophy Tube.

Here you raise an extremely important topic. And yet, instead of thorough philosophical examination, you uncritically accept one perspective on it, to the point where you just give the speaker to its proponent. And then you switch to talk about the societal and political issues, without even noticing that the death acceptance narrative completely undermines them.

Yes, human condition is simultaneously being the super special and unique spark of consciousness, capable of love, reason and art but also being a bunch of matter which is potentially just food for worms. And yes it's unpleasant to think about it for obvious reasons and therefore people usually don't, which often leads to bad consequences. But if you solve this cognitive dissonance by persuading yourself that death is good actually, and that you, and everyone else are not special or particularly valuable, then why would anyone care about the children of Gaza? After all they are also just food for worms, are they not?

The equilibrium of death acceptance, where everyone can look in the face of death due to not considering it bad anymore, isn't a world without horrors of war. It's a world where people do not even need to justify these horrors, where consideration of casualties doesn't even come to mind. It's a world where NO life is grievable at all! You've noticed yourself that trying to adopt this philosophy made you more callous. Now try honestly imagining what would it do to society as a whole, if everyone adopted it.

The reason why we do not even want to think about death, the reason why we are so shocked when an alligator ignores our natural rights is because death is REALLY FUCKING BAD. It's one of the worst thing there is, and it happens to everybody, and you can do very little about it. This is the horrible truth of human condition which you are not properly facing as long as you try to delude yourself into death acceptance.

Were you under impression that it's just such an obvious and therefore boring point? Is that why you managed to make an entire video about death without talking about immortalism? Well, if you thought about it at all, you might've noticed a lot of interesting implications connected to the societal issues you are concerned with. Like how modern society just assumes that lives of the elderly are not worth grieving, how it's just assumed that death of "natural causes" is somehow fine. How worries about existential risks and long term consequences of human activities, such as global warming, naturally much less consider people, who do not expect to witness them. How whole conservative ideology is based around human mortality. How obsession over fertility, enforcement of gender roles and treating women as walking wombs stop having ANY justification whatsoever when there is no need to constantly replenish the dying population. How people in their eighties would be much less motivated to shift into conservatism without age related cognitive decline and if more than half of their life would still be in front of them.

Humbleness is part of the answer. You do need to be humble enough to understand, that its not that likely that you in particular will witness the glorious transhumanist future where people do not have to die anymore, and still fight for this future for the sake of others. Being a soldier who will very likely die doesn't mean you can't still wish for victory.

But humbleness is never the whole answer. Imagine treating any other significant problem that humanity struggles with, like this video proposes to treat death. Imagine someone claiming that sexism is just natural state of affairs and we need to humbly accept this part of our existence, or even embrace it with ~curiosity~, while mocking every attempt to solve the issue as corporate HR culture, virtue signaling or wishful thinking. Isn't it immediately obvious how intellectually bankrupt this reasoning is? Then why do you suddenly treat the exact same approach as insightful in this case?

[violentdevotion]

wait ok if you did your dissertation on nlmg then you’re the EXPERT. would love your opinion on the angle i’m taking if you don’t mind!!!

basically i’m looking at how the text showcases how soft power/ideological structures like schools/church/media/art (specifically schools and art in this case) reinforce the status quo and cause people to internalise their societal roles etc.

i also think the way it plays with utopian/dystopian genres is sOoo interesting like. the pastoral idealised Boarding School Vibes feels very utopian but a lot of utopian ideals require some level of authoritarianism and. hmmm. like a homogenisation of ideals that pretty much always dismisses the wants/needs of more marginalised people. and i feel like nlmg Gets It because the way the world is described for non-clones is kind of utopian with the whole No Sickness thing. and even amongst the clones hailsham is considered a sort of utopia compared to other schools or whatever.

idk honestly i could talk about SO much but my essay is examining it through marxist literary analysis so i’m basically focusing on althusser’s concepts and how they apply to the text but there’s SOOOOOO much to examine from so many different angles i would love to know what your dissertation was about !!! feel free to dm me because idk what counts as spoilers anymore skdhsjd

that sounds super interesting and absolutely a valid angle to take it on. i am absoultely not an expert on it though lmao. my disso was how grief is portrayed in nlmg and one other book so I didn't touch on authoritarian power structures except in relation to who is considered grievable (which if you want to explore id recommend judith butlers frames of war)

I think there's a lot to say on the topic. At the top of my head there's how Tommy was ostracised because he was bad and art and later chose to not take part in the gallery. There's when he was mocked for his little animals. There's when they meet with madame and in the time prior he obsessively draws little animals in order to show her. When they touch madame as kids and she looks at them as if they're spiders. Their limited access to the outside world. Even as adults they have limited time to themselves either being too busy as carers or needing permission to travel. How there's never even rumours of people who escaped. Cathy never really mentions surveillance or something like they're chipped, they're just so indoctrinated that they don't even bother trying to escape the system.

I think boarding schools as well is interesting because it draws on school stories in historical british fiction. Some stories (jane eyre) present these schools as a place of suffering and a child's first insight to injustices in the world, but still preferable to her home life. whereas I think most often they were serialised stories that portray the growing character of a child/children. So I think looking at halisham is interesting as well in this dual place boarding schools hold in the canon and how it fulfills both in nlmg (kathy looks back at this time fondly but most of the stories she tells aren't very happy) I think isolation plays into this as well. I'm thinking of the abandoned bus stop they hang out ??? But I coukd be misremembering. Ya know they live in a pastoral heaven but they also live in the middle of nowhere.

I think it could be interesting to look at how there's the no sickness thing but when kathy and Tommy meet madame and their other teacher again (forgot her name) I think one of them is physically disabled? Or at least she is in the film. Like all ailments aren't eradicated and they can't feasibly be. I think a comparison to the child of omelas could be made, a utopia of sorts built off of the subjugation of a class of people, except instead of walking away the class is so dehumanised the idea of it they even have souls is put to question.

I think your topic is really interesting and like you said there's So Much you could say about it all of the time. I recommend the book to everyone I can and when they finish it I like to ask them what they think it'd About (the same question proposed to my seminar group when I studied it at uni) and everyone's answers differed somewhat but a Marxist reading of 'it's about how our bodies are reduced to our labour" was the most popular one i think. I'm not familiar with althusser and I have work in 10 minutes so i dont think id be able to find + read his work in time but overall I think your idea is incredibly thought out, unique and you could dor sure get an amazing grade in it

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

one thing i have been finding with books recently (especially fantasy, and especially YA fantasy, i think) is that so many of them treat life so cheaply. characters die and others immediately move on, skim past it, even if they were responsible or even if they cared about the person. the depth of grief isn't there, and because death is not given the weight it feels like it should have, all of the other emotions also seem... hollowed out, shallow somehow. like, if life is not precious and if these characters are not grievable, why does any of it matter?

and i guess. not every book has to be About Grief™. but books that treat death casually run the risk of making me not care about anything, because the lives of the characters are not valued, are not seen as worth grieving, and so therefore they are not worth my emotional investment, either. it's like they've told me i don't need to care if these people live or die, because none of the other characters will

on the flip side, it means when books DO dig deep into grief and death and the absolute profound awfulness of irreversible endings, i get a lot MORE emotionally affected than i would otherwise because i've got so used to skimming over the surface of characters and never being dragged down into caring, so it catches me out a bit more

[chicago-geniza]

Thinking about The Thing again

Tl;dr Just Weed Pill Thoughts

The sick person as "cursed amulet" who keeps their loved ones in thrall to anticipatory grief, or a private, present-tense grief, a purgatorial grief, for one's past relationship with the person-before-disease [just as the sick person, too, grieves their own Before-Self, Before-Life, & in more timorous, hypothetical tenses, the Self-Life-That-Could-Have-Been-If-Not-For]. This grief, whose public working-through as mourning is uncouth in the present tense, thus looks more and more like oasis, like catharsis, as it collapses into the horizon of the death that will make it publicly permissible, that will make the loss grievable instead of appearing obscene. Anyway my mom was grieving my aunt for the entire time she had terminal cancer but couldn't acknowledge it and just got more and more depressed until she experienced my aunt's death as an unburdening of her own suffering, as a witness to suffering she couldn't alleviate, and a bearer of unbearable anticipatory grief. My stepdad used to tell me as a teenager and young adult that my illness and hospitalizations were making my mom bedbound with depression and her misery was my fault; it made me suicidal. When there is illness and suffering for years without end, and you see others' deaths come as a relief to their loved ones, and that relief gets RHETORICALLY sublimated into obituaries about the DEAD--who so often clung to life--being "released" like a sigh from "their burdens" or "their pain" or "their suffering," when does it mostly mean--their death makes material what everyone has felt about them all along, has, by literalizing the metaphor of social death, enabled COMMUNAL mourning, absolved the mourners of their guilt for preemptively grieving a living breathing person & feeling like illness sapped--stole--something vital, perhaps even a part of their innate 'I'? Perhaps--as Agnes puts it--the part of the healthy mourner that belongs to the sick person? To the person they were before they got sick? To the person the mourner was in-relation, to whatever they built between them, as they were to each other, AS those two people, one of whom no longer exists, in terms of mental or physical capacity, changed personality? Is this ontology, phenomenology, epistemology? Is it material or not? Aw jeez didn't Pinter write a gay-ass play about this. Did I just invent Old Times but for longue duree Disease

[disabled-dragoon]

One of my classes this semester has essentially been about life politics and “grievable lives” in literature and, for obvious reasons (👩‍🦼), it’s really piqued my interest. Even when disability isn’t the main focus of whatever text we’re doing there’s always an overlap where it can be threaded in and it’s fascinating.

[slayercain]

If indeed, as [Diana] Leong forcefully argues, “Blackness [...] is the specter that haunts the Anthropocene and its possible futures,” it is imperative that we incisively revisit the conditions that make “blackened” life and death unregisterable and therefore un-grievable. And if indeed grievability and the imperative to survive constitute, as [Claire] Colebrook suggests, the “we” of the Anthropocene, it behooves us to attend to those ungrievable lives for which even survival requires facing death. That is to say, those lives for which existence requires suicidal decisions such as deadly expeditions across the Mediterranean Sea, the Mexico-United States border, and the many “border-fortresses” of the EU. How can we possibly ascertain to possess an “adequate cartography of our real-life conditions,” when we continue to sidestep considering the precarity of “social practices of human embodiment,” which necessitate one to gamble with one’s own death in order to envisage the possibility of a future?

Axelle Karera, Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics

[pompompurin1028]

Thanks for the tag Nyusa @nnakahara <33

Rules: in a text post, list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you

Disclaimer: Quite a few of them are not exactly books but like essays or short stories or poetry lol

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

2. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (a letter and self-reflection, trying to find himself again after being sent to jail)

3. A Valediction Forbidden Mourning by John Donne (love poem)

4. The Setting Sun by Dazai Osamu

5. Truth and Lying in the Non-Moral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche (essay)

6. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable / The Forces of Non-violence by Judith Bulter

7. Whatever Hegel is writing about lol (I hadn’t finished his books at all orz but I have learnt about it and I am very intrigued but I don't quite understand it... :') I want to though and he's always on my mind)

8. Blue Bamboo by Dazai Osamu (short story, rewrite of a Chinese tale)

9. The Portrait of Mr W. H by Oscar Wilde (underrated short story)

10. 思考的蘆葦 by Dazai Osamu

open tags <33

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

I appreciated this one SOOO much. As an antizionist Jew I’m always grateful for creatives standing up for Palestinian human rights, obviously - but Abi did it so artfully. She illustrated the method of cold gaslighting of politicians and corporations to cover their complicity, and cited Judith Butler’s “Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?” and April Rosenblum’s “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere” - both excellent resources.

As always, Abi delivered a heartfelt, nuanced, and many-faceted examination of her subject with just enough humor. Also, amazing outfits, the incomparable Caitlin Doughty, some absolutely rapturous poetry, and the most heartrending eulogy I’ve heard in a long time.

NEW EPISODE IS HERE!

It's about death, including mass death (Gaza, COVID, climate change) and why we ignore it. And it's a collab with Caitlin Doughty AKA Ask A Mortician!

[hadasse]

Grievability and Humanity

Image by Jacques GAIMARD from Pixabay The philosopher Judith Butler has developed a concept they call “grievability” – the idea that if someone is grieved when they die, it means their life was considered worth living. In particular, not just by family and friends, but as a generally acknowledged loss, noticed by the dominant society. While Butler does not, to my knowledge, quote Joni Mitchell,…

[cmspl348wtv]

Blog 6: The Suffering of Others and Precariousness and Grievability

Susan Sontag's "Regarding the Suffering of Others" examines the representation and interpretation of violence, suffering, and pain in art and media. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the history of war photography and its impact on society.

Sontag explores the early development of photography and how it relates to memory, preservation, and mortality. Sontag argues that a person's perception of the world and how they view reality can be changed through photography. The history of war photography is then explored, beginning with Roger Fenton's 1850s photographs of the Crimean War and continuing with Matthew Brady, Robert Capa, and others. She highlights the tension between the aesthetic beauty of war images and the brutality and horror they depict. Sontag also criticizes the idea that photographs have the ability to tell the whole truth and convey the full experience of war. She notes that images can be manipulated, edited, and censored, and that the context in which they are presented can significantly affect their meaning.

She draws attention to the conflict between the brutality and tragedy that wartime imagery portrays and its artistic beauty. Sontag also takes issue with the notion that images can fully capture the truth and the experience of conflict. She points out that pictures can be changed, modified, and even censored, and that the setting in which they are displayed has a big impact on what they signify.

The third chapter examines how war photography influences public opinion and furthers political agendas. Sontag states that photographs of war have been used to create a heroism of vision, a myth that suggests that the act of looking at images of suffering and violence is an act of courage and moral superiority. She notes that this myth can obscure the complexities of war and reduce it to a simple binary of good vs. evil.

Sontag looks at how the Vietnam War affected photography and the growth of the anti-war movement. She points out that depictions of conflict have the ability to mobilize public opinion and influence historical memory, and that they may be both empowering and disheartening.

Sontag's analysis of war photography highlights the complex and often contradictory ways in which images of suffering and violence are interpreted and used in society. She emphasizes the importance of context, perspective, and critical thinking when engaging with such images and encourages readers to be mindful of the ways in which they are manipulated and used for political purposes.

Judith Butler's essay "Precariousness and Grievability: When Is Life Grievable?" addresses the question of why some lives are considered more valuable than others and thus, more grievable when lost. She explores the reasons why some lives are valued higher than others. She contends that "precariousness" is a key notion in comprehending why some lives are not considered worthy of mourning or recognition.

According to Butler, precariousness refers to the intrinsic human state of vulnerability and exposure to damage. All lives are precarious, but some are more precarious than others due to social, economic, and political factors that affect their access to resources and opportunities for self-determination. Butler contends that the social construction of identity is based on the differential distribution of precariousness among groups, and this leads to the marginalization and oppression of those who are deemed less worthy of recognition and protection.

Butler also examines the concept of "grievability," which refers to the ability of a life to be mourned and recognized as worthy of protection. She argues that the notion of grievability is socially constructed and that certain lives are not deemed grievable due to their perceived lack of value. Butler gives the examples of migrants, refugees, and those who are victims of police brutality as examples of lives that are often not considered worthy of mourning or recognition.

Butler contends that political advocacy and action are the best ways to counter the societal construction of precariousness and grievability. We can build a more just and equitable society by acknowledging the interdependence of all lives and fighting for the defense and acknowledgment of those who are marginalized and oppressed.

Butler's essay emphasizes how precariousness and grievability are socially constructed and how they affect how power and resources are distributed in society. She contends that in order to build a more just and equitable society, it is crucial to understand the intrinsic worth and interdependence of all lives.

[johntitusford]

Hauntology week 13? shadow of the absent body

This week in Hauntology, we watched Judith Butler make an argument about Doris Salcedo's exhibit Shadow of the Absent Body. Butler begins the talk by discussing how there is a difference between "counting the dead" and "making the dead count". Individuals who have suffered violent deaths in genocides are often "summed" up as death tolls. But the value of life is incalculable and counting does not equal morning. Butler lets us know that justice is the measure of the incalculable. Salcedo's art is and is not, the body, the violence and the memorial.

One of the exhibits within Shadows of the Absent Body features blouses. The blouses are constructed of needles/ sharp objects. The empty form of the blouses point to the absent body. They become animated this way. They are haunting distortions of the ordinary. Salcedo begins most of her works from nothing. She relates to the victims she memorializes through her artistic process. These victims are stripped of everything. Often even their lives. Salcedo and her team painstakingly create their work with no templates.

Butler ends their speech by saying, "The object bear the untellable, the incalculable, in material form. They obstruct oblivion and bear it's force.". <- god damn. These objects that Salcedo has created establish grievability where governments have failed.

How does Salcedo's work relate to my own? yikes. Ill let you know when Judith Butler can talk about my work for 90 minutes. But for real - how privileged am I to not have to make this sort of work. I watched an interview with Salcedo where someone asked how she can manage the grief that she must encounter in her work. Salcedo responded by saying that she does not manage it. Managing it implies putting it aside. She puts it in the center of her life. Otherwise would feel immoral, to Salcedo. She says that if we were all paying attention, then these things would not be happening. These artists (I can name Doreen Garner in this moment) who do "heavy" work impress me so much. What can I offer in the context of this immeasurable work and drive?

Heres a picture of my painting that i just cut up.

AAAAAND a pic of my dog in the studio cuz why not?

[librarycards]

"One way of posing the question of who “we” are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others—even if it means taking those latter lives."

—Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

ALSO the way soooo many people are showing pictures of palestinian children locked in cages, palestinian men being stripped and whipped in public, pregnant palestinian women being brutalized, palestinian children looking up at air strikes, and labeling them israeli and circling them around online as propaganda to support an apartheid is ridiculous.

they call these acts evil when they think the victims are israeli, and yet stay silent when the reality is that those images are of palestinians being oppressed, displaced, and abused.

[hellomynameisbisexual]

As I understand the context of queer spaces I find it beneficial to first begin with the understanding of orientation, or being oriented towards objects of any sort. In understanding attraction orientation — be it sexual, romantic, or otherwise — there are multiple lenses that must be taken into account. Freud’s sexology, while ultimately problematic, serves its purposes here. In his essays on sexuality, Freud takes the position that inversions are not the “natural” state of sexuality and come from various interruptions, or experiences, that deter the proper development of an individual into heterosexuality. As a presumed condition for inversion, Freud points out in his essays that bisexuality arises from cases of anatomical hermaphroditism. However, he goes on to posit that this form of hermaphroditism belongs to normal sexual behaviour (i.e. heterosexuality) to some varying degree. This means that in the traditional male and female paradigm there are traces of the opposite sex — meaning there are traces of woman in man and vice versa. Freud places the phenomenon of bisexuality as one that is necessary in understanding the sexual development of women and men. With Freud’s research and understanding of sexology here it is very simple to understand the way that sexuality is understood as fundamentally bisexual. Rather, it is more appropriate to refer to it as bisexual in the sense that it is torn from monosexuality (the idea that one’s sexuality is oriented in only one direction). This understanding of sexology is the best way to understand the framing of traditional sexuality, as well as the contemporary understanding of sexuality. This also provides context to the displacement of the Bisexual community within a modern LGBTQ+ population.

Sara Ahmed offers another effective means of understanding attraction orientation that takes Freud’s analysis a step further by utilizing a phenomenological method. Ahmed discusses the conflation of the term “queer” with non-hetero and non-normative sexualities, but for my purposes I will refer specifically to non-heteronormative sexualities. This distinction between the normative and nonnormative sexualities is shown, historically, by Foucault to have translated from having an sexual attraction orientation to being that orientation. However, Ahmed highlights that in this understanding of orientation, it is the non-heteronormative that has an “orientation.” This is very much tied to the ideas of Freud, that the non-normative orientation is equivalent to an inversion. This kind of being, for Ahmed, becomes sexually oriented — spatially pointing to how someone relates to, directs themselves towards, and takes towards objects. Being oriented has, in this context, developed into something of an inclination, deviation, pervesion, or drive when viewing non-heteronormative sexualities.

The status of “normal” that is ascribed to heterosexuality by early sexologists such as Freud is one that develops presumptions about sexuality and creates a line of desire. “The line of straight orientation takes the subject toward what it “is not” and what it “is not” then confirms what it “is.” Ahmed calls this discontinuity with, what I will refer to as the straight line, as going “off-line.” This is an orientation that goes towards one’s own sex, gender, or any non-conforming/non-binary gender and away from the other. Alongside the straight line are straightening devices that posit an ideology, moralistic or otherwise, that maintain heterosexuality as natural, right, normal, or good. I suggest that we consider homosexuality and homonormativity. Through a sort of inversion of my own, I assert that the same criteria allow for the naturalization of homonormative thinking.

Judith Butler’s concept of framing in her book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? is a means to understand homonormative and heteronormative modes of perception towards the bisexual community. Butler’s concept of framing relies heavily on various forms of representation and portrayal that I will address later on. However, framing is important, in the phenomenological sense, for the othering of the bisexual community. Framing is a literal and theoretical way in which information and images are portrayed and perceived respectively. The literal framing refers to various forms of imagery that appear as they are, and the theoretical framing refers to the various ideological or psychological dimensions that influence how the information is understood. The former implies a context with the information or imagery as it is immediately present, and the latter is specific to how the subject interprets that information or imagery. Theoretical framing is more divorced from the content and is more interested in how the content is seen rather than how it is presented.

The theoretical framing of gender and sexuality as homonormative and heteronormative is best illustrated by the Kinsey Scale. The scale takes that literal representation of a line. However, rather than being a line with one direction toward heterosexuality, it has an opposing end of homosexuality. In this model everything else becomes an iteration or manifestation of one or the other as shown by falling in-between the two points. The other sexualities fall into-line — into a straight line. That is to say that the non-normative is now normalized by the straightening of sexuality. Straightening devices, in this context, continuing to be (quite literally) a force of naturalization and a creator of binary structures. This is similar to Jacques Derrida’s use of centrism and marginalization; where heterosexuality was a text constructed to exclude anything unlike it, an external space for everything unlike it is created. Thus, homosexuality develops a text of its own in a similar way after existing in a marginalized space and, ironically, comes to create a new marginalized area. This, however, is not an argument for the inherent negativity, or harm, of marginalization, but crucial to understanding what Butler understands as an inherent exclusion of populations when framing not only identities, but issues as well as being.

Exceptions

Bisexual stigma often includes this idea that “bisexuals don’t exist” or this mis-identification of being identified by the gender of a bisexual’s partner. This easily creates a space of ambiguity in which bisexuals are always in. Similar to the Freud’s ideas around sexuality, the Kinsey Scale posits a direction towards one sexuality or another in a fixed expression. This fixed identity, this “having as being,” best explained through a framework offered by Falguni Sheth. Her position on race is that it is constituted by legislation — by the law. She uses the concept of exception to articulate this in a way similar to Derrida. Sheth’s position on exception asserts that race is created by identifying and isolating a particular population in order to determine who has access to rights, recognition, or what have you. What I suggest is taking this framework and applying it to the LGBTQ+ community. I have already explained the way in which the framing of gender and sexuality has allowed for the marginalization, but now I will explain how this law of exception applies to bisexual displacement.

Individuals that are queer in their attraction orientation are generally identified by their partners. For example, lesbians are identifiable by their partnerships with women, gay men with other men, and heterosexuals by their partnerships with the opposite gender.

Falguni Sheth’s position of race as created through the laws of exception is another framework I wish to apply to this issue. By utilizing this framework and applying it to homonormativity and heteronormativity I will provide a lens for examining the exclusion of bisexuals from the queer community, as well as the ambiguity that is inherent in the empirical verifiability of one’s attraction orientation identity through the recognition of the presentation of one’s partner.

While this is not a legislative law by any means, both homo and hetero norms of recognition determine the what is “properly” queer on the straight line — a fixed line. These kinds of being aid in developing a normative claim to attraction orientation that relies heavily on literal framing. It relies on the empirical representation of a person’s being as seen by an other. Bisexual individuals cannot be identified by this particular method of recognition and verifiability. An inability to present one’s attraction orientation results in a kind of violence that forces a bisexual individual into a literal frame through theoretical framing, or completely outside of either frame altogether.

The law of exception, as it applies to bisexual displacement, functions in this way: it excludes a population that does not align with the way of life of the dominant population. That is to say that bisexual individuals threaten the epistemological framework of sexuality; they do not fall under either homosexual or heterosexual. Whereas the verifiability of attraction orientation lies within a set of norms and literal frames, the bisexual population exposes the flaw in this way of understanding the phenomenon. Similar to the notion of the pariah as presented by Hannah Arendt, bisexuals pose the threat of exposing the weak foundations to the sexual determinism (being either straight or gay) that places them at the margins.

I think that this is fortified through norms of exception and exclusion through the idea of “human, but not human like us” rhetoric used by Sheth in her arguments around race. Bisexuality has been seen/argued as a challenge to monosexual views of sexuality; it exists as a challenge to views of attraction orientation by interrupting the binary understanding of sexuality and gender that has been established by hetero-normative and homo-normative structures of recognition.

The Rupture in LGBTQ+

“ I’m not sure at what point it was deemed progressive or acceptable to solely talk about gay issues and then think adding the tag “and bisexual people” would actually do any damn good but it’s gone on for too long.”

— Stephanie Farnsworth

These conditions of framing and exception establish epistemological issues that extend into areas that do not adequately service the bisexual community. While fields such as a sexual and mental health can continue to account predominantly for the disparities of lesbian and gay communities, there is a lack of research for that of the bisexual community due to this focus. However, it is common practice for the bisexual community to be continually conflated with the lesbian and gay communities through research and studies conducted towards groups of WSW (Women who have Sex with Women) and MSM (Men who have Sex with Men). Since there is limited research available surrounding the health of Bisexuals this population experiences greater sexual health disparities as compared to the aforementioned populations. Due to this lack of information Bisexuals continue to experience bi-invisibility and biphobia when approaching healthcare providers. Bisexuals are often targeted as transmitors of HIV and STI’s into heterosexual and lesbian communities. This stereotype predominantly affects bisexual men; however, it is difficult to determine rates HIV and STI’s among Bisexuals due to studies failing to make the distinction between bisexual identity and behaviorally bisexual people.

These particular epistemological issues in healthcare perpetuate the lack of care extended towards bisexual communities. These disparities in sexual healthcare attempt to address a community similar to the way the Kinsey Scale is constructed: there are means of treating the homosexual community and the heterosexual community, but nothing to account for the in between. This paradigm of binary monosexual identities can only account for issues that perpetuate their particular needs and way of life. In a study conducted by April Callis in Lexington, Kentucky it was reported from a sample of behaviourally bisexual individuals, heterosexual, and homosexual individuals that understandings of bisexuality only influenced gender and sexuality binaries. Some of Callie’s interviews affirmed prejudices towards bisexuals, mistrust, as well as biphobic perceptions. The study also revealed that the displacement of bisexuals from respective heterosexual and homosexual communities was so traumatizing that it prevented people from identifying as bisexual at all. Not only this, but the conceptions continue to prevent people from accepting bisexuality as legitimate altogether.

In another study conducted by Tanya Rubinstein, Shiri Makov, and Ayelet Sarel, biphobia (or bi-negatviity, as they refer to it) has revealed itself to be more of prominent due to the presence of monosexism (discriminator, or prejudicial practices of non-monosexuals). This study also revealed the possibility that gender binary structures interfere with the acceptance of bisexuals and bisexuality. However, those personally acquainted with bisexuals were less inclined to bi-negative attitudes and perceptions. What does this reveal? It unveils an aspect of relatability to the other that aids in de-centering certain structural norms that contribute to the displacement and discrimination towards the bisexual community. This affinity for binary sexuality and gender structures, as well as the contributions of monsexism, contributes to the tension that comes with a shared identity with dominant queer identities.

Shared Identity

The concept of the “shared identity” is one that is crucial in understanding the framing of bisexuality as an attraction orientation. Bisexuality is disjointed from a shared Queer/LGBTQIA identity. This shared queer identity is constituted by monosexuality (i.e. the central focus of gay/lesbian or straight identities) that the bisexual identity has difficulty fitting into due to the inherent fluidity that is incorporated into their attraction orientation identity. The gender and sexual binary structure that perpetuates monosexism allows for the continued displacement of bisexuals in not only social settings but health care fields as well. This attracts the question of: how much diversity can you have within the shared identity before diference threatens that identity? Earlier I spoke of the pariah as posited by Hannah Arendt as that which poses a threat by looking through the cracks and exposing the contradictions of the systems, or structures that it is built upon. When understanding the role of the bisexual when facing the frame of monosexual attraction orientation identities it is easy to understand the reason that bisexuality exists as an epistemological threat in terms of gender and sexuality. To include, or consider, the bisexual population in this binary structure would disrupt the various systems geared towards monosexuality. A system that takes into account homosexuals and heterosexual, cis-gendered individuals cannot account for its inability to service bisexual trans and cis-gendered individuals due to a distinction of needs within a community that exists beyond their literal and theoretical frame.

The inclusion of the distinct bisexual population to accommodate for this shared identity is two fold. Firstly, the inclusion of bisexuals must start with exclusivity. This is not to say that bisexuals ought to be recognized as separate from the queer community at large. However, it is necessary that like their monosexual counterparts (i.e. homosexual women and men) bisexuals must be allowed affectively assert their identity through various means of framing themselves and information surrounding their community. Bisexuals must have medical literature tailored to their specific needs, environments that do not hinge on linear monosexual frames of identification, and a recognition of the legitimacy of the inherent presentation of fluidity of gender and sexuality in the bisexual identity. All of these, while not primary solutions to bisexual liberation, contribute to a re-framing of sexual and gender identities that reveal the fragility of monosexuality and its binary strucutre. De-centering these literal frames and re-framing the theoretical frames aid in resolving these norms of exclusion that prevent bisexuals from consideration in various institutions. This could extend from informal norms of social institutions that constitute common behvaior and understanding into government institutions that politically determine the identity of certain populations as juxtaposed to their queerness to the normative, or the natural. Secondly, bisexuals must be recognized instead of validated.

The distinction between recognition and validation is tied heavily to the issues of framing that I mentioned earlier. Validation as a political and social activity is one that invokes a particular passivity that works to continue to marginalize certain groups without taking into account their activity and identity as it is distinct and individual. The act of validating through political and social discourse does not work in the favor of the validated population because in all instances of framing they are subjected to conflation with dominant populations (the conflation of bisexuals with hoosexuals, for example). This validation makes light of a presence rather than affirming its overall individuality as constituted by its difference to the dominant population. The act of recognition juxtaposes validation by affectively asserting the presence of a population or community by taking their individual needs, identities, and positionality into account. Recognizability affirms a mode of distinguishing a singular entity from that of all other entities. This does not imply that recognizability deconstructs the presence of overall community, local or global, but it does imply that the distinctions that serve to accommodate dominant populations must be applicable to all populations. The bisexual community requires recognition in this way; it requires that their identity becomes a vehicle for destruction of a structural understanding — a centrism — that disenfranchises their population.

Conclusion

The bisexual community faces an insurmountable gap in their expression and actualization in a society that privileges monosexual identities and pejoratively stigmatizes and represses their specific attraction orientation identity. Within not only the heterosexual and homosexual communities, to identify as Bisexual is to be assumed to be sexually promiscuous, a carrier of HIV/AIDS and STI’s, and that your orientation is invalid alongside experiencing erasure through programs, research, theory, and other epistemological structures that are geared toward homosexual communities.

Considering that bisexual research and overall consideration, are scarce, it is imperative that individuals that fall under the umbrella of the bisexual identity be understood and accepted as a community that is different and distinct from gay, lesbian, and heterosexual identified communities. This includes medical and communal spaces targeting women who have sex with women (WSW) and men who have sex with men (MSM) instead of the appropriate women who have sex with women and men (WSWM) and men who have sex with men and women (MSMW).

Re-framing monosexual perceptions of bisexuals and bisexuality that dispel the epistemic hold or gender and sexual binaries are necessary to tackle the issue monosexual centrism. The way this form of authorship shapes the various modes of knowing influence what populations are considered. Exposing the issue of validation versus recognition is a crucial method of establishing the means necessary within queer spaces for bisexuals to assert themselves as recognizable through their ambiguity. The Ardentian identity of the pariah, as it pertains to bisexuals, is necessary for this assertion into, and deconstruction of institutionalized monosexism in various modes of politicized and socialized frames of attraction orientation and gender binaries. Ultimately, while how the bisexual community is understood in terms of the social and the political, it is an issue of framing that disenfranchises an entire population. Bisexual liberation requires a kind of visibility that is recognizable due to its active participation in a community and not simply valid on the basis that is simply is. The recognition of those communities that exist under the dominant populations is a necessary in order to readjust the paradigm that places them beneath dominant populations.