Reading Yourself Queer Later in Life: Bisexual Literacies, Temporal Fluidity, and the Teaching of Composition

Abstract

Because bisexuality, even within queer spaces, is often made invisible and erased, here I argue that bisexual literacy practices are also often similarly invisible and erased. Additionally, I ask that we consider bisexual survival and literacy in terms of age and sexual fluidity. Creating space for people to identify as queer throughout their lives—and to recognize sexual fluidity as an embodied literacy practice that challenges normativity—is, I argue, also necessary for survival. Yet as I tried to read myself queer later in life, the literacy practices that had once sustained me were no longer life-affirming. When even queer texts fail to sustain us, what options do we have for survival? How do we teach, how do we live, when we know that literacy and composition practices are often simultaneously a means of both survival and risk? In this essay, I interrogate how bisexual and later-in-life literacies challenge normative reading practices and contribute to queer literacies and possibilities for survival. I argue that we need more possibilities for bisexual and later-in-life reading and writing practices, both to affirm who we are and to help navigate the binaries that insist we deny part of our identities.