The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure 1

Abstract

Teaching a seminar on Sexual Orientation and the Law, I faced an old inconsistency so frontally that it became difficult to avoid giving it sustained attention. I began the course in what appears to be a common way,(1) by posing basic questions about sexual orientation. I asked why contemporary American society(2) organizes people according to their sexualities;(3) why we do so on the basis of sexual orientation in particular;(4) and why, when classifying by sexual orientation, we insist on doing so with the binary system of and homosexual.(5) In discussing the last question, I adduced the view--powerful in modern American culture from at least the publication of the Kinsey studies(6) onward--that sexual orientation arrays itself along a continuum from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality.(7) I noted that this view encouraged us to think of the straight/gay binary as defining the ends of a continuum that could be stretched, accordion-like, to accommodate ever finer gradations of cross-sex and same-sex desire. This meant recognizing a group often called bisexuals-on the intermediate stretch of the continuum, as well as the possibility of a group--sometimes called asexuals--not represented on the continuum at all.(8) Indeed, I argued that sexual orientation classifications that only used the two monosexual terms(9) heterosexual and homosexual were unstable and naive.