ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that what is in fact immature and undifferentiated about bisexuality is not its actual condition but rather its signifier. In the 1990s, a trend emerged among analysts with feminist sensibilities to employ the concept of bisexuality in the service of loosening polarized gender norms and expanding the range of acceptable attitudes and behaviors, particularly for women. Bisexuality of the chosen object – namely, how the object integrates its masculine and feminine qualities – is highly important to the chooser. The signifier of psychological bisexuality has never fully differentiated itself from that of physical bisexuality, which is in stark contrast to other psychoanalytic signifiers pertaining to sexuality. The primordial signifier of bisexuality, connoting gender as well as sexual dedifferentiation, is a signifier of not being bound by gender. Bisexuality, represented as an early, undifferentiated, infantile condition, was seen as an aspect of the primitive mind.
