Reclaiming Sexual Difference: What Queer Theory Can't Tell Us about Sexuality

Abstract

This article argues that both queer theory's erasure of bisexuality and the masculine bias within the field can be attributed to scholars’ overreliance on, and problematic extension of, the Foucauldian theory of sexuality that has come to dominate the field of sexuality studies. By ignoring the fundamental antagonism between sexuality and meaning and overlooking not gender but sexual difference (i.e., the internal, nonsymbolizable alterity within all subjects), Foucauldian-influenced queer critics are unable to conceive of a subject whose constitution does not depend upon the repudiation of difference and the disavowal of internal and symbolic limits. Drawing on a psychoanalytic conceptualization of femininity, this article theorizes bisexual subjectivity and sexuality as a distinct lived relation to the limits of symbolic identity and knowledge, and attempts to show how the concept of sexual difference is critical if bisexual theorists are to challenge the logic of the universal that accounts for the erasure of bisexuality.