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“I was and still am”: Narratives of Bisexual Marking in the #StillBisexual Campaign

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Abstract

This research investigated narratives of bi-erasure and bisexual marking by considering 53 video confessionals associated with the #StillBisexual campaign. #StillBisexual is a web-based campaign that targets myths about bisexuality and promotes bisexual identity visibility. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify emergent themes regarding the ways that individuals mark and make known their bisexuality. Three major themes of bisexual demarcation emerged including the enduring nature of bisexuality, defining bisexuality, and defining the self as a bisexual being. Discussion focuses on describing bisexual marking approaches by #StillBisexual participants and by analyzing the way bisexual demarcation challenges assumptions of monosexism and cisgenderism inherent to cultural conceptualizations of sexuality.

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Notes

  1. We use plurisexual to refer to identities that are not explicitly based on attraction to one sex and leave open the potential for attraction to more than one gender/sex; e.g. bisexual, pansexual, queer, and fluid. The term plurisexual is used instead of non-monosexual because it does not linguistically assume monosexual as the ideal conceptualization of sexuality (See Galupo et al. 2014).

  2. Gender/sex is used to reference a concept that cannot be understood as only biologically or socially constructed (See van Anders, 2014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Towson University, 8000 York Road, Towson, MD, 21252, USA

    Kirsten A. Gonzalez

  2. Department of Psychology, Towson University, 8000 York Road, Towson, MD, 21252, USA

    Johanna L. Ramirez

  3. Department of Psychology, Towson University, LA 2131, 8000 York Road, Towson, MD, 21252, USA

    M. Paz Galupo

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  1. Kirsten A. Gonzalez
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  2. Johanna L. Ramirez
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  3. M. Paz Galupo
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Correspondence to Kirsten A. Gonzalez.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Because data used in the study was archival data from a public site, informed consent was not required. Additionally, we did not use names of participants when presenting the data.

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Gonzalez, K.A., Ramirez, J.L. & Galupo, M.P. “I was and still am”: Narratives of Bisexual Marking in the #StillBisexual Campaign. Sexuality & Culture 21, 493–515 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-016-9401-y

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