ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that bisexual practice needed to be studied phenomenologically it could usefully be studied psychoanalytically, and that the experience-near theorizing on bisexuality that was required could best be carried out in disciplines whose perspectives on bisexuality were not as theory-laden and experience-distant as its psychoanalytic understandings. Complex relationships that individuals form with bisexuality as an identity marker raise broader and more profound questions about the role of sexual identities in contemporary society. Bisexuality has been conceptualized as both a specific sexual identity and a challenge to the very idea of sexual identity. The broader context for thinking about bisexual identities in the developed world includes the numerous deeply ingrained mechanisms through which bisexuality is continuously made invisible – a phenomenon bisexual activists and theorists refer to as bisexual erasure. A theory that had among its central concepts this kind of dried out, old, inactive and altogether unsexy bisexuality could easily pass as respectable.
