ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there are important parallels between the contemporary psychoanalytic and bisexual epistemologies, as well as between the cultural functions bisexuality and psychoanalysis have performed, respectively, for the society at large. Bisexual epistemologies, articulated by bisexual theorists, have been collectively named “epistemologies of the fence”, as a tribute to as well as to establish a differentiation from Kosofsky Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet. Bisexual “epistemologies of the fence” emphasize openness to various possibilities. The feminist writer Elizabeth Daumer proposes to think of bisexuality as “an epistemological as well as ethical vantage point” for developing an ethics of difference. Acting in hybrid and incoherent ways, bisexuals upset the working of the regulatory mechanisms that rely on the subject’s following the rules by confessing the expected truth. Like bisexuality, psychoanalysis has, from its inception, assumed an ambiguous position in the culture, somewhere “on the fence” between the sciences and the arts.
