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Too much? Excessive sexual experiences in bisexual women’s life stories

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Abstract

This article explores bisexual women’s sexual experiences at the edges of or between relationships. It draws on the follow-up interviews of a longitudinal interview set conducted in 2005 and 2014–2015 with bisexual women and their partners, who do not identify as bisexuals. Bisexual women’s spontaneous, detailed and affective narrations of sexual experiences in the follow-up interviews caught the author’s attention. Although the experiences were often narrated as pleasurable, they could be overwhelming, and women also expressed concern that they were excessive, “too much”. The analysis of the women’s accounts utilizes and develops a psychosocial concept of excess. It reveals that the excessiveness of the women’s sexual experiences is constituted by bisexuality and monogamy-related norms that restrict women’s sexuality, and also by the non-rational psychic dimensions of these experiences. Within the normative limits of feminine sexuality, sexuality’s excess often plays a propulsive role as the women strive to become sexual subjects.

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Notes

  1. Sometimes my use of the term bisexuality is questioned and other terms such as pansexuality, sexual fluidity or queer are suggested instead as they are thought to be more inclusive and convey attraction to more than two genders. Bisexuality, because it has bi in it, literally two, is thought to refer to a two-gender structure (Eisner 2013, p. 49). However, the usage of the term bisexuality has developed in concordance with the development of queer theory of gender. In the current academic discussion, and already in one of the earliest interdisciplinary collections on bisexuality, bisexuality was defined as an attraction to more than one gender (Firestein 1996). I do not see bisexuality and pansexuality as opposed to one another, but rather at least partly overlapping terms. Yet, often bisexuality is a more commonly known concept than pansexuality, which is the reason why I chose to use it in this research. Furthermore, participants of this research were originally recruited to the couple interviews in 2005 through a research request aimed at bisexual women and their partners.

  2. While most partners reported similar sexual identities in both interviews, there were some fluctuations. Bisexual women’s cis and trans male partners all identified as heterosexual in both interview rounds. Female partners often did not label themselves, but implied that they were lesbians rather than bisexuals. One who did not label herself at all in the couple interview identified strongly as a lesbian in the follow-up interview. One former female partner said in the follow-up interview that she was now also attracted to men.

  3. In the psychoanalytic literature, affective intensity is seen as a signal of where to look for important material (Baraitser and Frosh 2007). Coming from a different theoretical framework, from Deleuzo–Guattarian thought, MacLure (2013) suggests that affective intensities, which refuse to settle to decisive meanings, can be treated as glowing data hotspots also in qualitative research (Ringrose and Renold 2014). Encouraged by these scholars I chose to concentrate on these sexual hot spots in my analysis(see also Lahti submitted).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Gender Studies, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, 40014, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Annukka Lahti

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  1. Annukka Lahti
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Correspondence to Annukka Lahti.

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Lahti, A. Too much? Excessive sexual experiences in bisexual women’s life stories. Subjectivity 11, 21–39 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-017-0042-x

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