ABSTRACT
In this much-cited article, Däumer considers both the usefulness and the limitations of bisexuality, firstly as an identity and secondly as an epistemological perspective. Her contention is that not only are these two instances of bisexuality extremely different, but they may actually be incompatible-in other words, that if one wishes to exploit the insights yielded by a bisexual epistemological perspective, one should not also attempt to claim it as an identity. Identities must always be, in some sense, fixed and stable, if only relatively so; but the radical epistemological potential of bisexuality derives precisely from its ambiguity and self-contradiction. In many ways this argument chimes with those presented in Chapters 13 and (more particularly) 14, although Däumer’s argument is more squarely situated within feminist and lesbian-feminist debates. The notion of ‘bisexual perspective’ with which these extracts close has subsequently also been taken up by a number of other theorists, notably by Clare Hemmings (1997).
