ABSTRACT
Originally published in Pramaggiore, M. and Hall, D.E. (eds) (1996) RePresenting Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire, New York: New York University Press. Reproduced by permission of New York University Press and the author. This article, which originally appeared as an introduction to a collection of essays on bisexuality, gives an overview of the developing field of bisexual scholarship during the 1990s. Pramaggiore frames her discussion with the idea of an ‘epistemology of the fence’ —an image which has occasionally appeared elsewhere in discussions of bisexuality (Bell 1994) but which Pramaggiore develops at length in the extracts below. The ‘epistemology of the fence’ takes its inspiration from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s celebrated Epistemology of the Closet (1990), which interrogates the ways in which ‘the closet’ renders homosexuality and homosexual desire both visible and invisible at the same time. Pramaggiore suggests that the image of the fence can offer a similarly potent metaphor for understanding the cultural meanings of bisexuality-in particular, the puzzling but widespread heralding, in 1990s US popular culture, of bisexuality as a ‘new’ form of sexuality, when in fact it is not new at all.
