#hi foucault how's your gay ass

[rollforjackass]

my paper, due in 3 months: please god just write something me, adopting yet another french philosopher to argue with: just a sec

[baravaggio]

hello i wanted to ask you a question and i hope i don't sound biphobic.. what do you think of bi people in a heterosexual relationship who say they're "queering" heterosexuality or that their relationship is still queer? as a bi person myself i don't really get how you can "queer" a straight relationship because being queer is an act, unless the other person is also bi and they engage in sex practices that are subversive of heterosexual norms.... but i don't know! are there more academic discussions about this? i would like to hear your more informed opinion!

Hi! So this is a whole can of worms, but I'll do my best to answer...not without adding a couple long ass caveats first though, as always 😭

First, I think it's helpful to draw a distinction between sexuality descriptors as they're used to describe our private, internal experiences of sexuality, the ones that are mediated by invisible qualities like our personal sense of identity and time, and the sexuality descriptors as they're used as a tool of social categorization and political organization. I'm not interested in arguing against the idea that regardless of orientation, a visibly M/F couple will typically be read as straight, a visibly M/M or F/F couple will be read as gay or lesbian, and each will materially be treated differently as a result - this is obviously true, we live in a cisheteropatriarchal culture.

As always, I also think it's important to remember that words like straight, gay, queer, etc. are historically & culturally determined terms with their own messy histories, and that they're not necessarily going to track perfectly onto our lived experiences of sexuality as a result. So let's momentarily put aside any complaints about people who will say this stuff out of personal insecurity surrounding their "place in the queer community," or because they want to disrespect the sexual boundaries or lived struggles of gays and lesbians - not saying that you're doing this or that these people don't exist, but I don't think this is where the majority of people are coming from (despite how loud they can be on the internet), so I just want to get ahead of it.

To answer one of your questions, there is some academic discussion about this - this is by no means exhaustive, just a couple papers I've read that touch on the topic:

"Queer Ethics; Or, The Challenge of Bisexuality to Lesbian Ethics" by Elisabeth D. Däumer

"Playing with Butler and Foucault: Bisexuality and Queer Theory" by April S. Callis

Both are really interesting and fairly accessible imo, even if you've never read Foucault or Butler! And if you didn't already know, you can read 100 articles per month for free on JSTOR.

Those papers aside, my perspective has been informed by my personal experience more than anything. The tl;dr is that I don't really care what others do, but that I also think bisexuality throws a significant wrench into what we otherwise consider to be a relatively stable sense of ourselves as gendered, sexual, political, and social beings. It's destabilizing enough to make categorizing the emotional, sexual, erotic, and social aspects of our relationships as strictly straight or gay difficult for some people. While some of our relationships will be categorized this way in order to render them socially and politically intelligible to the larger culture, I think we can afford be a little more creative when we talk about how our bisexuality makes finding the right language for our relationships difficult. This of course won't be everyone's experience, but I can really only speak for myself here - I'll elaborate more on my personal experience and feelings under the read more if you're interested.

I'm not sure how much you know about me, so I'll give you the run down: prior to identifying as bi, I identified as a lesbian, and for most of my life I have found that my attraction (social, emotional, sexual, and much later, romantic) has been directed almost exclusively towards women. So much of the way I relate to others and myself have been informed by this lifelong experience of loving & being loved by women as someone who is read as a woman. I no longer identify as a lesbian (or strictly as a woman), but those experiences continue to shape the way I approach casual and intimate relationships, the way I have sex, my politics, my understanding of my gender, etc.

I prefer to sleep around and am not interested in dating for the foreseeable future (slut rights!), so I can't speak specifically from the POV of relationships...but I have found that this lifetime's worth of "lesbian" experiences have intimately affected my sexual experiences with men. Sex between women has its own unique tempo and its own language of eroticism, having sex with women has shaped the way I understand the "goals" of sex, how I move in my body, how I touch my partner...my encounters with women are ever present in & relevant to my encounters with men. Likewise, my experiences with men, specifically queer men, have impacted the way I have sex with women - I participate in still different practices of eroticism, different ways of relating to the bodies and emotions of others, different ways of understanding & accessing my physicality, and those experiences make constant additions and edits to the way I fuck women.

The effect of all this has been that I personally don't find much meaning in categorizing any given encounter as gay or straight. I think of this quote from Epistemology of the Closet quite often:

Will I categorize things along gay/straight lines for the purposes of answering a sexual health questionnaire when getting tested at a clinic, for example? Sure. But privately, between me and myself and me and my partners, I find the language inadequate. Even when the kind of sex I'm having isn't technically "subversive of heterosexual norms," the totality of my queer experience and how it never stops impacting upon my understanding of myself as a gendered, sexual, emotional, social, romantic, and political being prevents me from understanding it as entirely straight. At the same time, I wouldn't be offended if someone who is not privy to this history would label that encounter as a straight one. It's just a byproduct of the vocabulary available to us in the culture we live in.

I think it's important to understand that outside of the context of group sex or mixed gender polyamorous relationships, there is no way for us to meaningfully "perform" bisexuality. The origins of our modern sexuality labels lie in medicine and psychiatry, which has positioned heterosexual and homosexual acts as a dichotomy, with the goal of pathologizing homosexuality for the purposes of social control. In the article by Callis I linked above, she points out,

...the medicalization of "homosexual acts" forbids the creation of a bisexual person, because all individuals who were sexually active with others of the same sex were labeled as homosexual. Eadie (1993) stated that "bisexuality simply cannot exist as a category in discourses which name all male-male and female-female sex 'homosexual' and all male-female sex 'heterosexual'" (p.146) [...] Because "bisexual acts" did not exist within the medical discourse, there was also no corresponding bisexual species. A group of individuals could not be labeled as "bisexual" if there was no action they could perform that was read in this way. (p. 225)

I've discussed it some on here, but I highly recommend reading the Foucault section of that article for more context. Callis is talking about bisexuality as a personal identity descriptor, but I think the point extends to our descriptions of relationships as well. Another personal example - I have a fwb who is a cis bi man, a strict bottom who primarily has sex with other men. The way we understand ourselves and our relationship with sexuality and gender have been shaped by our sexual histories and preferences. The sum total of those experiences paired with the type of sex we have prevents both of us from understanding our arrangement as a strictly straight one, but if we were in a relationship, how would an outsider who might see us walking down the street hand in hand know that? Another quote, this time from the Däumer (p.96):

Anyway...maybe this wasn't the most direct or objective answer, but I think that the limitations of our language of sexuality mean that lengthier explorations are required - half the problem is that we don't have a succinct shorthand for this stuff! Like I said above, I can't really find it in myself to care what other people do. And I don't particularly care whether other people insist on calling my relationships gay or straight...I might not always agree, but I find it more amusing than distressing. The only thing I really care about is mutual respect and intellectual honesty, which is why I bother to be open about my personal experiences in the first place.

Hope this answers your question even a little bit 😭

[dieofthatroar]

Story-a-day #8: The New Hedonism (part 1?)

Am I storytelling? Or simply procuring extraordinary sensations?

Here’s a parlor trick that you can try with your friends: ask them to sign their name with both hands at the same time. They must be mirror images.

You’ll find that they can only do it if they aren’t thinking about it.

Once you actively try to control it, it all falls apart.

Katie learned this in her intro psychology lecture in her second year of university. Something about the subconscious and Freud and Surrealism, blah, blah, blah. She was only taking the class to fulfill her science requirement and the misadvised foray into art history made her want to run back to her English major tent of solitude. Give her a 19th-century British novel and an endless cup of tea and she would never leave her blankets. Instead, she had to drag herself to a half-assed class that was neither science nor social science. They should have just picked one. No, she should have just picked one. If she had taken Rocks for Jocks at least she would have been able to shut her brain completely off. Maybe check out a few morning boners rising from the sweats of the hockey players, nodding off to sleep after a morning workout. Instead, she gets this vaguely annoying buzz of frustration each time the professor talks about Foucault without the social context of his time.

And this class had discussion sections.

There were twelve of them in a hardly used back room in the physics building. The air conditioners “worked” but only in that they were loud. Katie turned one on in the middle of the hour because she was sick of the mouth breathing coming from the pockmarked freshman by her side.

“Allergies,” he said.

“I don’t care,” Katie said.

She drew cartoons of brains in the corner of her worksheet.

The grad student teaching their section was cute, at least. His name was Basil and all Katie could think of was Dorian Gray and part of her hoped that this particular one wasn’t gay. Curled hair that he definitely did up in the mirror every morning, but probably insisted to his friends just fell that way. He dressed nice, but it might be the pressure of being in front of undergrads that’ll do that - slim fitted shirt all buttoned up, tailored pants. He drew his lines of chalk on the board with swift and precise gestures, though clean lines don't make an artist. He had nice hands, though. Long and limber. She wondered if he played an instrument.

When the class was dismissed, Katie lingered. The air conditioner was the excuse. She could fiddle with the knob and sigh with the distilled drama of three years of Shakespeare summer camps. She followed the cord to the wall and unplugged it. Then, she trekked back to her bags and packed up her things.

“Seems a Sisyphean effort, don’t you think?” Basil said.

Katie straightened and smiled. This would be more fun than she anticipated. “Are you going to teach us Greek Myth along with Dali?”

“God, I hope not,” he said. “They torture us enough as it is.”

“Are you talking about us students, or you TAs?”

“TAs of course. Do I look like an empathetic creature to you?” He put the last of his papers into his messenger bag and slung it over his shoulder. “Katie, right?”

“Basil,” she said. “Tell me, is the double life as terrible a pleasure as they say?”

Basil laughed. “Most people go the herb route,” he said. “I enjoy Wilde quite a bit more.”

“True namesake?”

“I wish,” he said. “In fact, it was the Great Mouse Detective.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“My parents were fans.”

“You’ve got a lot to live up to.”

Basil held the door open for Katie and they walked side by side down the hall and up the cream and fluorescent stairs. She tried to calculate how old he was. Undergrad… 3 years more… he was at least a second year Ph.D. candidate… maybe time in a lab in between. What year did that movie come out again?

Katie realized that Basil had asked her a question only when they had stopped moving outside the doors of the building. His hair was stiff in the wind, she was right about the gel. His eyes glowed a strange olive green in the sun. She had thought they were brown.

“Sorry?”

“Which way are you going?” he asked, for what she assumed was the second time.

“I was thinking of doing some reading,” she said, quickly trying to remember which side of campus the psychology graduate department was housed. Or was he on his way home? Shit. “I’m thinking of branching out. What library do you suggest?”

“Besides Peterson?”

“You know I won’t get the smell of anxiety out of my clothes for days.”

He gave her a smirk. “Since my masters, I got in the habit of studying in Wilkin. Charge up your computer, though. Not a lot of outlets.”

Masters, huh? Her age estimate rose two years. “The philosophy library?”

“The lighting is nice.” Basil checked his phone, hesitated over the screen, and pocketed it again. His next suggestion sounded more like a question. “But I also like Cafe Susan.”

And there it was. Katie thanked the ghosts of dead authors, this boy liked girls. “I’ve been craving something sugary,” she said. “Let’s give in to temptation, shall we?”