Syllabus: Bisexual Women and Christian Theology (original) (raw)
Related papers
2009
This study contributes to the development of nascent bisexual theology by examining bisexual women’s lives in relation to the stereotype that bisexuals desire concurrent male and female partners. Building on qualitative email interviews with forty bisexual women in the Greater Toronto Area, this thesis finds that monogamy and polyamory function as strategic identities. If bisexual theology is to speak authentically to the needs of bisexual women, it must provide a critical analysis of these identities, understand and respond to their role in shaping communities, moral agency and theological knowledge.
Annukka Lahti is a Doctoral Student (Gender Studies) in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland1. Before starting her doctoral studies, she taught psychology at The Open University of the University of Jyväskylä. In her Doctoral studies, she explores how bisexuality – which is persistently culturally associated with temporariness, multiple partners and promiscuity – fits, fights and expands the normative cultural understandings of relationships. Her research specifically examines how a sample of Finnish bisexual women and their (ex-)partners of various genders negotiate bisexuality in their relationships, as psychosocial subjects. She considers how intersecting cultural constructions of relationships, genders and (bi)sexualities shape those negotiations and analyses her interview data through a psychosocial lens. Her analysis shows that negotiations around bisexuality and relationships are made not only through discursive regulation, but are also shaped in interaction with affective, non-rational psychic dimensions of being in a relationship. She has recently published on bisexual women’s and their partners’ relationships in Feminism & Psychology and has a number of papers under review. She is currently finishing her dissertation and plans to start her post-doctoral research project focusing on the separation experiences of LGBTIQ persons. Nikki Hayfield had an email discussion with Annukka over the summer to find out more about her research and interest in bisexuality.
“All the World is Queer Save Thee and ME…”: Defining Queer and Bi at a Critical Sexology Seminar
Journal of Bisexuality, 2009
On November 7, 2007, the UK Critical Sexology seminar series (www.criticalsexology.org.uk) hosted a one-day event focusing on international perspectives on bisexuality. This seminar drew together academics and activists from several different countries and disciplinary approaches, most of whom were informed, to some extent, by queer theory. As part of the day the authors chaired a discussion considering the potentials and pitfalls of bringing together queer theory and bisexuality research, and the links between these issues and the agendas of queer/bi activism. This article reports on the main themes emerging from this debate and discusses them in relation to wider writing on queer theory and bisexuality. One specific tension that emerged was the usage of the word queer and what this meant to participants. Another was the tension between a bi identity politics agenda of giving a voice to a largely silenced sexuality and a queer agenda of challenging dichotomous understandings of sexuality and gender. It is clear, from the discussion and other work in this area, that rather than polarizing this as an either/or debate, it is more productive to consider the possibilities of both/and conceptualizations and to view this as a creative tension. In this article we explore these possibilities in depth, considering the way queer theory can open up multiple and fluid sexual, gendered and self experiences, though remembering the lived experience many have of fixed identities and the importance of these for achieving visibility. We also explore the links between academic research and theory, and real-world practice.
Polyamory & monogamy as strategic identities.
Journal of Bisexuality 13 (1), 21-38., 2013
Increasingly, challengers to antipolygamy legislation have framed polyamory as a sexual orientation, arguing that some people are immutably predisposed toward forming multiple relationships. Drawing on a qualitative study of 40 bisexual women in Toronto, Canada, this article argues that polyamory and monogamy are better viewed as strategies of sexual expression rather than as immutable orientations. Such an approach accommodates identity shifts between monogamy and polyamory that enable women to manage and negotiate their visibility as bisexuals. Viewing monogamy and polyamory as strategic identities can help health care practitioners more accurately assess their clients’ needs and health risks.
Monogamy and Polyamory as Strategic identities
The emerging concept of relational orientations makes shifts in sexual identity difficult to accommodate and may mask women’s actual sexual practice. Drawing on a qualitative study of 40 bisexual women in Toronto, this paper argues that polyamory and monogamy are strategies by which bisexual women explore their sexuality, rather than cohesive identities or behavioural orientations. Nearly a quarter of the monogamous-identified women reported having previously identified as polyamorous. Among total participants, 12.5% reported shifting between monogamy and polyamory more than once. These shifts enable women to manage and negotiate their visibility as bisexuals. There was a significant disjoint between self-identity and sexual behaviour. The majority of the polyamorous women were not dating multiple partners at the time of the interview, while over a quarter of the monogamous women reported having threesomes in their current relationship. Viewing monogamy and polyamory as strategic identities can help health care practitioners more accurately assess their clients’ needs and risks, within a social determinants of mental health framework.
MA Thesis: The Influence of Gender Construction on Catholic Approaches to Same-Sex
2001
My thesis traces the Catholic response to same-sex erotic attachments, from its roots in the active/passive gender system of classical antiquity, through the characters of the kinaidos and the medieval sodomite, to the “homosexual” as a medical case study, and ending with present day identity politics. I argue that gender expectations have played a foundational role in the Christian position on same-sex attraction and sexual activity. I suggest that as gender roles change, so too could the Church’s understanding of the meaning of same-sex relationships.
Fluid Stability: Bisexuality and Non-Unary Language, Sexuality and Identity
This thesis arose out of a problematic within the discourse of bisexuality. There is a tension between a fluid conception of bisexuality and the desire of some to promote it as a concrete identity. In other words, bisexuality’s ability, as a concept, to deconstruct identity, conflicts with its own potential nature as an identity. Using an approach which draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, linguistic theory and the insights of bisexual writers, I explore the mechanics of this tension between the fluid and the stable. I conceive of this tension as related to our heavy investment in linguistic categories and their concomitant definitions. I pursue this line of inquiry through the deconstruction of concrete sexual identity within queer theory and a reconstruction based in part on Jeffrey Weeks’s radical pluralist framework for understanding sexuality. Armed with these insights and a notion that identity – like sexuality – is radically plural, I explore bisexuality as the interplay of multiple (and potentially mutually exclusive) affiliations and affinities. I read bisexual identity as fluidly stable or stably fluid both by nature and in practice. I conclude that this inherent tension between fluidity and stability within bisexuality is merely an artifact of the unary way we conceive of language, sexuality, and identity, and that, as such, this tension can be harnessed as productive.
Journal of Homosexuality, 2006
This essay explores the notion that bisexuality and contemporary bisexual political movements both align and trouble canons of queer theories of sexuality and gender. This project provides an historical review and assessment of recent bisexual theorizing to highlight key themes in its evolution as well as a discussion of how these themes have shaped the relationship of bisexuality and queer theory. Drawing on this assessment and a wider discussion of GLBT scholarship, we invite critical inquiry regarding the implications of bisexual theorizing on queer theory and vice versa. We address questions of bisexual epistemologies, its discursive roles within queer theory, and its impact on queer politics and organizing. Noting bisexuality's absence in much of this research and scholarship, we suggest these projects have been limited in their ability to fully and effectively address sexual subjectivity both in theory and in its everyday lived experience.