ABSTRACT
Originally published in Sociological Quarterly 37, 3:449-463. Copyright 1996 Midwest Sociological Society. Reproduced by permission of the University of California Press and the author. Ault’s article closes Part III with an examination of the real-life epistemological tactics deployed by bisexual women in their everyday lives. Like Garber and Däumer in previous chapters, Ault concludes that the reification of bisexuality as an identity is incompatible with the allegedly transformative potential of bisexuality as an epistemological force. Ault analyses data from her own questionnairebased research to reveal some of the ways in which bisexual women cope with this incompatibility in relation both to their sense of identity and to their stated positions within feminist, lesbian or bisexual political debates. While many of her respondents do believe in the transformative potential of bisexuality as instability, anti-binarism, and indeed fluidity, the ways in which they describe their own bisexual selves constantly undercut that potential by reinscribing bisexuality within binary frameworks of gender and sexuality. Ault paints a complex and perhaps troubling picture, in which bisexual identities and bisexual politics-or at least certain aspects of them-appear ultimately to be at odds with each other. This issue reappears, in a slightly different guise, in Part IV.
