ABSTRACT

Originally published in Rose, S., Stevens, C. et al. /Off Pink Collective (eds) (1996) Bisexual Horizons: Politics, Histories, Lives, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Reproduced by permission of the author. This article offers a particularly succinct and direct argument for the analogy between bisexual identity and ‘mixed-race’ identity, and for the political insights to which it might give rise. Prabhudas is by no means the only author to advance this view: Tracy Charette Fehr (1995), for example, has offered a similar account of her own ‘dual nature’, while June Jordan states emphatically that ‘the analogy is interracial or multiracial identity. I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial world view’ ( Jordan 1992b:193). As Pramaggiore points out in Chapter 15, the interdynamics of ‘race’ and sexuality have been an important feature of bisexual thought, and analogies between the two have been especially prevalent; examples in this volume include Eadie’s use of the figures of ‘miscegenation’ and ‘hybridity’ (see Chapter 13), and Klein’s invocation of the ‘one drop of blood’ rule of racial categorisation in the USA (see Chapter 5). Other authors have drawn on the notion of ‘passing’ —appearing to be something or someone other than one’s ‘real’ self-to make an analogy between, for example, Jews ‘passing’ as gentile or Christian and bisexuals ‘passing’ as either straight or gay, not always voluntarily (Tucker 1996). The use of such analogies creates an epistemological perspective which emphasises the importance of interconnection and the blurring of divisions-themes which, as previous chapters have illustrated, are common features of bisexual epistemologies.