bidyke:

gohomebiphobia:

bidyke:

[Image: Heart shape in floral pattern overlaid with bi flag colors. Text inside the heart: “heterosexuality is a lie”]
<3
For more about the concept of compulsory heterosexuality, click here.

So I started off wanting to say something about how uncomfortable this graphic makes me. Because my first reaction really was, oh, icky, this is wrong.
But as I wrote my response, I started to realize the whole point of this post.
I do think that compulsory heterosexuality is a thing. A great way to look at it is that little kids are encouraged to explore their emotional connections and attractions, completely on the lines of heterosexuality, man/woman attraction. We don’t encourage kids to explore other attractions to other genders. When a little girl says she wants to marry her best friend who is a girl, we laugh and go “Oh isn’t she adorable? So silly! Marriage is for a mommy and a daddy, not two girls!” and it’s a hot mess.
To a degree, heterosexuality is certainly a lie. The idea that heterosexuality is the default is certainly a lie, and it’s pressed upon all of us. The concept that tab A goes into slot B and that’s the way it is, no ifs, ands, or buts, is certainly a lie.
This graphic made me so uncomfortable, though, because of its literal statement heterosexuality is a lie. But the whole point is to MAKE people uncomfortable, and to make them think.
Do you view queer people as sexual deviants? Do you view us as being estranged from the norm? Do you refer to us as “gay/lesbian/bisexual people” but refer to straight people as merely “people”?
Think about it.
Also, it slaps the straight people into the shoes of us, as bisexual people, and tells them that their sexuality is a lie. And look how angry they’re all getting.
So yeah.
This graphic is really cool, because there’s a whole shit ton of meaning in four words and a heart.
Well done Shiri!

Thanks you!

Did You Know? Heterosexuality is celebrated – in film and television, in pop songs and opera, in literature and on greeting cards – and at the same time it is taken for granted. It is the cultural and sexual norm by default. And yet in pre-modern Europe heterosexuality was perceived as an alternative culture. A great deal of the reason for this were the differences in the status and place of men in women in society. The practice of heterosexuality may have been standard, but the symbolic primacy of the heterosexual couple was not.As explained by Professor Louis-Georges Tin, in his Lammie nominated book “The invention of heterosexual culture”, there is certainly far less scholarship exploring heterosexuality than the pantheon of queer sexuality that is taken to be the ‘other’. But actually it is better to understand heterosexuality as a ‘blind spot’ which being ‘assumed to be ever-present as a matter of course and has escaped analysis as if transparent to itself’.

gohomebiphobia:

bidyke:

[Image: Heart shape in floral pattern overlaid with bi flag colors. Text inside the heart: “heterosexuality is a lie”]

<3

For more about the concept of compulsory heterosexuality, click here.

So I started off wanting to say something about how uncomfortable this graphic makes me. Because my first reaction really was, oh, icky, this is wrong.

But as I wrote my response, I started to realize the whole point of this post.

I do think that compulsory heterosexuality is a thing. A great way to look at it is that little kids are encouraged to explore their emotional connections and attractions, completely on the lines of heterosexuality, man/woman attraction. We don’t encourage kids to explore other attractions to other genders. When a little girl says she wants to marry her best friend who is a girl, we laugh and go “Oh isn’t she adorable? So silly! Marriage is for a mommy and a daddy, not two girls!” and it’s a hot mess.

To a degree, heterosexuality is certainly a lie. The idea that heterosexuality is the default is certainly a lie, and it’s pressed upon all of us. The concept that tab A goes into slot B and that’s the way it is, no ifs, ands, or buts, is certainly a lie.

This graphic made me so uncomfortable, though, because of its literal statement heterosexuality is a lie. But the whole point is to MAKE people uncomfortable, and to make them think.

Do you view queer people as sexual deviants? Do you view us as being estranged from the norm? Do you refer to us as “gay/lesbian/bisexual people” but refer to straight people as merely “people”?

Think about it.

Also, it slaps the straight people into the shoes of us, as bisexual people, and tells them that their sexuality is a lie. And look how angry they’re all getting.

So yeah.

This graphic is really cool, because there’s a whole shit ton of meaning in four words and a heart.

Well done Shiri!

Thanks you!

Did You Know? Heterosexuality is celebrated – in film and television, in pop songs and opera, in literature and on greeting cards – and at the same time it is taken for granted. It is the cultural and sexual norm by default. And yet in pre-modern Europe heterosexuality was perceived as an alternative culture. A great deal of the reason for this were the differences in the status and place of men in women in society. The practice of heterosexuality may have been standard, but the symbolic primacy of the heterosexual couple was not.

As explained by Professor Louis-Georges Tin, in his Lammie nominated book “The invention of heterosexual culture”, there is certainly far less scholarship exploring heterosexuality than the pantheon of queer sexuality that is taken to be the ‘other’. But actually it is better to understand heterosexuality as a ‘blind spot’ which being ‘assumed to be ever-present as a matter of course and has escaped analysis as if transparent to itself’.

It is often proposed that bisexuals should deal with issues concerning same-sex relationships and express same-sex attractions within gay and lesbian environments, and deal with issues concerning other-sex relationships and express other-sex attractions within heterosexual environments. Yet many bisexuals do not see their sexuality as “half gay and half straight” and cannot neatly divide themselves this way. They do not want to always have to hide part of who they are according to context. True inclusion of bisexuals requires the acceptance and validation of both our same-sex and our other-sex attractions and relationships, for that is what bisexuality is.

Liz A. Highleyman - Identity and Ideas: Strategies for Bisexuals (from Bisexual Politics)

Vegan Sexual: Bisexual Thought Experiments

vegansexy:

Pretty much the only talk about bisexuality on my dash lately is what we do in bars and if we’re gonna catch shit for it or not and it is d r a i n i n g

So I decided to resurface some thought experiments on biphobia and homophobia I had typed out in a long reblog chain a while back (I think among kiturak, myself, Maria, Sara, Shiri, and others) so that people can interact with them with a fresh perspective now. Just to be clear, these are ideas/thought experiments that if you take one as truth, you flesh out the world that accepts that statement as truth and see what that world looks like, what other truths exist in that world, etc. Maybe you run a test case through each and see what happens.

I’ve done this technique a lot for my particular graduate program (philosophy of education) and I’ve found it very helpful when thinking about abstract concepts and seeing how they make sense when applied to your life or the practical lives of others, etc.

Perhaps one of these scenarios will end up looking more attractive than another, perhaps they’ll all be unsatisfactory, perhaps there will be insights gleaned from each that will help us better understand what we go through as bisexuals. So, your thoughts, please!

1. Bisexual people experience biphobia and homophobia. We experience bits that look the same and function the same as other queer folks, and we experience things specific to bisexual identity/experience. We are capable of internalizing and spewing that on other people, as they are to us, regardless of their identity.

or

2. Bisexual people experience only homophobia. It is the only functional effect in a society organized by heterosexism. Even if gay and lesbian folks escape specific sorts of homophobia, everything we experience as queer people at the hands of a heterosexist system is homophobia and your mileage may vary which would render “biphobia” as a concept unhelpful (obviously not my favorite explanation)

or

3. Bisexual people only experience biphobia, because that is the only oppression bisexual people can endure because of their bisexuality. We are not homosexual, and cannot experience homophobia. It may often look exactly the same (and our hetero oppressors may not recognize the difference - in fact they likely almost never do) but it never feels the same, the flavor is different because we are situated as bisexual 100% of the time. The circles containing homophobia and biphobia may be a heavily overlapping venn diagram, but since we are bisexual, we only experience biphobia. That includes things that are specific to bisexual people, and those things many queer folks endure and have in common.

Claiming that people who use the term bisexual must be touting a rigid binary view of gender, or denying the existence of gender variant people, is as presumptuous as assuming that people who use the term “bicoastal” must be claiming that a continent can only ever have two coasts, or that they are somehow denying the existence of all interior, landlocked regions of that continent.

Julia Serano - “Bisexuality and Binaries Revisited” (via sightlesseyesofeternity)

bidyke:

[Image: A pink outline of a wedding cake and bells on a black background. From below and up to the top, a fire is cradling the cake. Text: “I am BISEXUAL and I think MARRIAGE is STRAIGHT CAPITALIST PATRIARCHAL BULLSHIT”]

Response to HRC’s terrible campaign.

For further reading: Fuck marriage, fuck equality

One of the great strengths of the Bisexual Community is it’s long tradition of (graciously!) welcoming a wide variety of voices, opinions and people.

riley-ferretboy-konor:

*posts photos of my face and random art pieces*
Gain followers.

*posts anti-HRC and anti-assimilation discussions*
Lose followers.

Hmm.

fliponymous:

A Quick Look At Biphobia In Dominant Culture, or, Why Bisexuality Threatens Guys Who Say Things Like “No Homo”

Because we disrupt the binary. Since we don’t fit into a mutually exclusive gay/straight black/white this/that framework, we are unclassifiable without the addition or invention of another category.

But, more importantly, our very existence makes it impossible for anyone to fit neatly into a bifurcated system of irreconcilable and mutually exclusive opposites, because bisexuals prove that such a system does not even have any grounding in reality, any independent existence.

time for another of amo’s random bi audits!

amoammo:

bialogue-group:

amoammo:

yay! time for another of amo’s random bi audits!

Flicking through Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (third edition, naturally). Still have it from a course that I ended up not doing, ages ago.

Anyway, heterosexuality, homosexual, homosexuality, lesbianism, and queer theory all get indexed (most of them many, many times). Bisexuality and related words get zero mentions in the index.

That’s despite Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, Oscar Wide, Alice Walker, Gore Vidal, William Shakespeare, ~~Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick~~, Vita Sackville-West, Kate Millet, Byron and Aubrey Beardsley all featuring. (As well as probs loads of other bis / bi-ish ppl whose names I don’t recognise.)

Just a small FYI for an otherwise excellent item. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was a self-described sexually vanilla’ person in a happy, long-term heterosexual marriage. It might in fact, be more correct to perhaps think of Kosofsky Sedgwick in terms of a straight woman who enjoys slash fiction, who was held in some disrepute by the lesbian community and who returned the favour herself.

It is sometimes supposed that becasue of her field of study as well as various comments attributed to her using the words queer and pansexual that Kosofsky Sedgwick might have been lesbian or at least bisexual/non-monosexual. But this is actually a misunderstanding. First in the commonly accepted slang of the time “pansexual” was until fairly recently used to primarily refer to the mostly straight but kinky BDSM community and then her ideas about queerness as an identifier, which she described in “Tendencies ” as “One of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”.

Your note doesn’t seem to attempt to support the claim that she was heterosexual, never mind determined. That’s disturbing.

*Looks Confused* I put in a variety of links, (wikipedia, guardian,et. al.) and a direct quote from one of her books to all of that for you (and others) to check and verify for yourselves.

Yeah I’m being a bit snarky, but as a long time bisexual queer activist who followed her work and that of those who attempted to bring her omissions to her attention when she was alive, I really dislike the damage she she helped cause to both the bisexual and trans* communities as well as the queer women’s community with her dismissal of anything that wasn’t strictly an eroticized view of cishomonormative gay men that IMHO she panted after in the same way that many straight men fetishize lesbian porn. As quoted, “Sedgwick’s homosexual identity is actually rooted in gay male culture, aesthetics and politics”. And as an original active member of Queer Nation I was also not thrilled with the assistance she gave to the, non-vanilla kinky hetrosexuals who immediately set about recolonizing the reappropriated word “Queer”.

time for another of amo’s random bi audits!

amoammo:

yay! time for another of amo’s random bi audits!

Flicking through Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (third edition, naturally). Still have it from a course that I ended up not doing, ages ago.

Anyway, heterosexuality, homosexual, homosexuality, lesbianism, and queer theory all get indexed (most of them many, many times). Bisexuality and related words get zero mentions in the index.

That’s despite Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, Oscar Wide, Alice Walker, Gore Vidal, William Shakespeare, ~~Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick~~, Vita Sackville-West, Kate Millet, Byron and Aubrey Beardsley all featuring. (As well as probs loads of other bis / bi-ish ppl whose names I don’t recognise.)

Just a small FYI for an otherwise excellent item. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was a self-described sexually vanilla’ person in a happy, long-term heterosexual marriage. It might in fact, be more correct to perhaps think of Kosofsky Sedgwick in terms of a straight woman who enjoys slash fiction, who was held in some disrepute by the lesbian community and who returned the favour herself.

It is sometimes supposed that becasue of her field of study as well as various comments attributed to her using the words queer and pansexual that Kosofsky Sedgwick might have been lesbian or at least bisexual/non-monosexual. But this is actually a misunderstanding. First in the commonly accepted slang of the time “pansexual” was until fairly recently used to primarily refer to the mostly straight but kinky BDSM community and then her ideas about queerness as an identifier, which she described in “Tendencies ” as “One of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”.

Like, bless tumblr, I’ve learned so much from people on this...

vegansexy:

javiolet:

vegansexy:

Like, bless tumblr, I’ve learned so much from people on this website

But in both classes I went to today for my presentation on queer grammar, I asked people what they thought “bisexual” meant (because I have this bit on why latin roots of words don’t always lead us in the right direction with…

I still disagree with your definition of bisexual, but I do think its important to acknowledge the fact that a lot of pansexuals think that being pansexual makes you more open minded than anyone else, and while identifying as pan obviously means that you acknowledge and accept nonbinary identities it doesn’t make you better or more accepting necessarily. Nor does it make you any less cissexist

Are you bisexual? If you aren’t, you have no business “disagreeing” with my definition of it.

If you are, I don’t understand what there is to disagree about when I say that being bisexual means you are capable of being attracted to more than one gender.

So while it’s cool that the rest of your commentary agrees with my point about labels not meaning anything about your commitment to undoing cissexism, I do have to wonder why it was necessary for you to say you “disagree” with my definition of bisexuality.

Like

what