Thesis Proposal
92122008
Jessica, Shen
Pro. Nai-fei, Ding
Bisexual Practices as Queer Politics: Taiwan an Alternative
“Bisexual” has been an ambiguous sexual identity of contemporary sexual distinctions or whether it constitutes a sexual identity remains a controversial debate as well. Therefore, all the stereotypes and stigmatizations[1] towards bisexual reveal very important facts and complexities that we seldom pay attention to, the problems and oppressions of given sex/ gender system, the constrain of monogamy and ignorance of fluidity of human sexuality; thus these result in the dual violence of “compulsory heterosexual” and “compulsory homosexual.” But we could not deny the real existence of active flowing and fluidity of human sexuality. The frequent realization of my topic, “bisexual practices,” the sexual practices realizing either bisexual desire or bisexual behavior with or without sexual identity, including people who identify themselves as bisexual opens up the vision for us to reconsider and reexamine what constitutes such ambiguity and controversy of bisexual identity at present time. Through analyzing the representation of the historical trajectory of bisexual practices, I would like to present the dynamic transition of how people understand bisexual practices under different historical conditions since the understanding of historical transition of bisexual practices would be very crucial and meaningful for gender/ sexuality liberation movement at present time and in the future.
This proposal consists of three main parts. One tackles with how “bisexual” is defined and understood in Anglo-American world and in Taiwan’s context. The second part deals with the “categorization of bisexual” by reexamining Kinsey’s categorization on male sexual orientations and tries to reconsider the definition and the category of “bisexual.” The third part tackles the trajectory of my term “bisexual practices”[2] in Taiwan’s cultural context through representative theses dealing with gay/ lesbian issues as well as selected media reports; on the other hand, through appropriating Kinsey’s categorization of bisexual, I intend to reconsider whether the category of bisexual is proper or suitable in Taiwan’s context. That is, in the socio-cultural context of Taiwan, I attempt to discuss the frequent realization of bisexual practices through historical trajectory represented in the newspapers, other relative historical records, present given theses concerned with gay/ lesbian issues and certain internet forums on BBS boards expressing the realization of bisexual practices and discussing bisexual conditions. In view of the trajectory of bisexual practices in Taiwan’s context, on the one hand, it would provide an alternative perspective on how homosexual behaviors have been realized and understood under diverse historical conditions; on the other hand, it would empower the potential and emancipative conditions for the GLBT movement, not constrained within the frame of homosexual and heterosexual only, but challenged the given and recognized sex/ gender structure in accordance with the historical transformation.
In addition, this thesis also aims to assert that bisexual practices have been one of various sexual practices in Taiwan’s cultural context, instead of claiming that bisexual practices used to be the only mode of sexual practices. In other words, through exploring the trajectory of bisexual practices, the focus still keeps the same argument and ground base that the human sexuality has been multi-dimensional and it is the various forces especially in agreeing to become “modern” that make the process of categorizing come about. And this limited categorization results in painful costs since from then on people understand the world by the process of making distinctions and understand themselves through Others or Differences.
Brief introduction on the concepts of bisexuality and the formation of bisexual community in gender/ sexuality movements in Anglo-American world
In view of the original concept of bisexuality, it is quite different from how we know it today and has its transition in accordance with the contemporary understanding of bisexuality. According to Henry Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume I: Sexual Inversion, Ellis follows the earlier example of German sexologist Krafft-Ebing in categorizing men and women sexually desiring both sexes as ‘psychosexual hermaphroditism’ and the word “bisexuality” is used to refer to the existence of two biological sexes within a species, or to the coincidence of male and female characteristics within a single body (Bowie 1992; Storr 1997, 1998b). This usage of bisexuality changes in the third edition of Studies published in 1915 and Ellis extends its meaning to “cover not just sexual dimorphism but also the sexual desire for both women and men experienced by some of his subjects”(Storr 16). Such extension of the term is following the popular usage of the time and this therefore suggests that the term ‘bisexuality’ began to be widely used in this sense in English during the first few years of the twentieth century (16).
Except for the transition of the term, bisexuality, psychoanalysis provides alternative dimensions towards “bisexuality” as well. The widespread popular concept that all persons are bisexual comes from the ideas of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel, a follower of Freud. Stekel develops Freud’s ideas by presenting bisexuality not as the combination of masculinity and femininity as what Freud asserts but as the combination of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Therefore, such ideas about bisexuality influence Fritz Klein’s grid on human sexual orientation that would function as the supplement in explaining the fluidity or continuum of human sexuality, which is quite vague in Kinsey’s scale on male human sexuality.[3]
The concepts on bisexuality have diverse discourses and the common and popular understanding of bisexuality in public nowadays has been referred to the sexual practices of people who have the sexual relationship with their same or opposite sex. It is under such understanding of bisexuality that provides the foundation for the development of the bisexual community.
In view of the historical development of bisexual movement in Anglo-American world, before the essentialistic and exclusionary mechanisms got involved, according to Stephen Donaldson’s description on historical nuances of that time, the bisexual practices were rarely singled out or criticized and had been working to “challenge existing sexual assumptions and restrictions”[4] (Donaldson 32; Tucker, “Bay Area Bisexual History” 48-49). In a sense, the bisexual practices were allowed and empowered potential subversive forces towards gender/ sexuality liberation movements.
It was in the 1960s that the gender/ sexuality liberation movements started to define their terms and politics. Gay and lesbian communities had been entangled with the women’s movement in their political positions and political claims at this historical moment. Thus, it was under such condition that gay and lesbian communities, especially the lesbians, reconsider their relationships with feminists and their own position politically. In a sense, the lesbian community faces two crucial problems. One was the relationship with feminists externally, while the other was the coming up issue on differences in the community internally. The existence of bisexual and other sexual minorities gradually had become the crucial issues in gay and lesbian communities. Therefore, the appealing and powerful trend of essentialistic and exclusionary notions of identity politics[5] in the gay and lesbian communities revealed the internal differences of gay and lesbian communities. In other words, this concerned the reflexive ideas of “what constitutes identity.” Thus, the problem of differences came up and debates on monotonous sexual identity allowed gay and lesbian communities the chance to rethink the given distinctions of sexual identities between homosexual and heterosexual.
However, the essentialistic and exclusionary trend indirectly categorized and constructed what bisexuality was as Udis-Kessler noted that such tendencies might “change bisexuality from a potential-for-either to a requirement for both identity…”(“Bisexuality in an Essentialistic World” 60). Obviously, here shows the existing gender/ sexuality prejudices and refinements of homosexual and heterosexual that produce diverse effects on the bisexual subjects in the essentialistic and exclusionary trend.[6] In addition, the moral evaluations and judgments on the bisexual subjects would be more intensive and severe than those on the heterosexual and the homosexual since the distinctions of sexual categories require the definite sexual orientations and sexual identities without any ambiguity. In a sense, the pressure from dual sides conveys the embedded and deep anxiety and insecurity towards bisexuals who are taken as the potential corruption of monogamy of the heterosexual and whose position threatens the active construction of sexual identification of the homosexual community.
Finally the bisexuals separated themselves from the gay and lesbian communities. That is, while the bisexual became aware of their needs to voice for their difference in GLBT, their voices were silenced at the same time. Therefore, it was at that historical moment that the bisexuals reexamine their own existence in the gay and lesbian communities and became aware of the necessity to have their own communities to state for their own diversity and clarify their stigmatizations and misunderstandings of the public. Thus the first bisexual group developed in the 1970s in large U.S. cities and initiated the sexual liberation movement quite actively.
In addition to the establishment of bisexual communities, the different experience of bisexual in terms of diverse sexes could be seen in the frame of the given gender/ sexuality; that is, some arguments would resort to such diverse perceptions to “the harsh realities of existing gender inequality.” It seems that it has no avoidance in facing the entanglements of differences in communities since the specificities of individual have been divided so fragmentarily and specifically that we could only understand the world by categorizing with cruel and limited categories like what religions we keep, what classes we belong to, what races we are and so on. The process of categorization extends everywhere in our living world and the human sexuality is no exception in this “modern” world.
Introduction of the Bisexual in Taiwan’s context
Situated in particular cultural context, it is the specific historical condition that makes the emergence of bisexual identity possible in Anglo-American world. In Taiwan’s context, “bisexuality” remains as a quite ambiguous and vague concept and even further, whether bisexual constitutes as a sexual identity or not is quite controversial. The term appears quite recently relating to the report on the social events about the homosexual on the one side and the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s on the other side in the newspaper. Therefore, the term “bisexual” simultaneously is no escape from the process of pathologizing as what had happened towards homosexual before. However, the bisexuals are perceived quite differently from the homosexual and attendant stigmas, prejudices and misunderstandings such as the swingers and the homosexuals who are in the closet, etc; they have been put under the oppressions from both ends, the homosexual and the heterosexual.
However, the researches on the historical development of bisexual practices in academic field are quite insufficient in Taiwan and it is one of the expectations of this paper to dig out and map the appearance and transformative conditions of bisexual practices in Taiwan’s context. Therefore, this research aims not to represent the static social fact of the frequent realization of bisexual practices, but to present the dynamic and “continuous” condition of bisexual practices. It is through the representation of such continuous condition of bisexual practices that render us the visions to understand the present sexual practices or even reconsider how the present sexual distinctions come into being by reexamining the interaction and struggles among various forces. By using the term “bisexual practices” has its significance since the sexual identity of bisexual remains as a controversial issue and faces the crucial and turning point if taken it as an alternative sexual identity. That is, if taken bisexual as an alternative sexual identity, it may constrain within the prison of identity politics without seeing the oppression of given sex/ gender system. And the paper aims not to define what bisexual is or to discuss the potential emergence of bisexual community in the future, but on the one hand to present the frequent realization of “bisexual practices” in our daily life no matter with definite sexual identity or not and on the other hand to try to map out the trajectory of bisexual practices in Taiwan’s context and thereafter reconsider the emergence of sexual identity of homosexual in its developmental process. Owing to the serious lack of the research materials, I select some given bisexual discourses and the represented bisexual subjects from the gay and lesbian discourses and try to construct the ways how the bisexual have been represented and understood in terms of diverse viewpoints.
The representative condition of bisexual in Taiwan’s GLBT movement and in other discourses
Unlike the development of the bisexual in Anglo-American world who organized their own communities under its specific historical condition, the conditions of the bisexual within the gay and lesbian communities in Taiwan would have been represented as more subordinate and invisible[7] nowadays since people’s understandings of sexual identities and sexual orientations have been limited to homosexual and heterosexual; the alternative sexual identities and sexual orientations are relatively unimaginable, let alone that the bisexual subjects be given the chance or political contingency to develop their communities. Therefore, the diverse sexual stigmas and discriminations could be seen in accordance with diverse classes, sexes, ages, sexual orientations and ethnics. The given representative discourses about bisexual have lots of various dimensions such as the discourse in terms of the GLBT movement, the bisexual subjects articulating their ambivalence by demonstrating the violence of “homosexual hegemony,” the discourse in terms of counseling perspective, the concern about the bisexual subjects interact with ideological state apparatuses, and the discourses about the married gays who experience similar conditions as bisexual males.
According to Gian Jia-shin’s statement on the condition of the bisexual in lesbian community, it is said that the lesbian communities have avoided the exclusion of the bisexual since the lesbian communities attempt to corrupt the binary opposition between the homosexual and the heterosexual by containing the heterosexual experience of the members in the communities. Such avoidance of exclusion for Gian could be understood as the expression of “politics of difference,” but this avoidance of exclusion also results in the reliance, constrains and oppressions for the condition of the bisexual. This is probably why the condition of the bisexual in Taiwan still remains under the situation of subordinate and invisible and the possibility of constructing the bisexual communities remains lots of complexity to consider.