Reflexive interventions: from damage-centered to desire-based bisexuality research

Abstract

Research about bisexual communities is scarce, demonstrating a need for continued scholarship focusing on their experiences. Much of the qualitative research about LGBTQ communities, and bisexual communities more specifically, center narratives of invisibility, marginalization, and exclusion. It is critical to examine the ideologies that undergird this type of knowledge. In this essay, I draw from Indigenous scholars to reflect on the ways I privileged damage-centered narratives in my own work about bisexual college students. To do so, I engage in an unsettling reflexivity as both an intervention to hegemonic ways of producing knowledge about bisexual communities, and an invitation to other qualitative researchers to embark on this reflexive journey to consider the ways we can turn our gaze back to power, and tell stories that aim to capture more holistic, expansive, and desire-based stories of our communities.