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his chapter is divided into two major parts, the first theoretical, the sec- ond empirical. The first part is itself twofold. We first attempt to decon- struct the conventional wisdom about “bisexuality,” and second,propose a way of thinking about sexuality (indeed, all of social life) that takes into account that the ways in which scientists or intellectuals think about conduct and the conduct that is being thought about share a common and interactive terrain. Our goal in the theoretical segment of the chapter is to offer a “temporary” or “local” theory of the variety of patterns of sexual conduct that are discussed in the second part of the chapter (Geertz, 1973, 1983). In the second part of the chapter there is discussion of some of the wide variety of the socially and culturally situated ways in which it is possible for persons to have sex with both men and women in the contemporary United States and the lack of fit between this variety of sociosex- ual practice with any unicausal or multicausal conception of “bisexuality.”

We do this not because there is any particular pleasure in being a cultural or intellectual vandal, but because it is our view that the cultural constructions that we use to think about and to contain the sexual practices that are organized by the term “sexual object choice” or sexual orientation or sexual preference are profoundly coercive and profoundly muddled. If we simply substitute the term “gender” in each of these phrases, as in gender object choice or gender orienta- tion and gender preference, it would provide a modicum of clarity about what it is that we choose, orient toward, or prefer in erotic relations (Gagnon, 1988).

Sex with Both Women and Men as Ideology

The contemporary conception of “bisexuality,” here in quotes to indicate its equivocal status, is, like all scientific ideas, the result of a long process of historical and cultural construction and deconstruction. Its current status, like that of those

terms that are its conceptual ancestors and that frame it like a pair of parenthe- ses, homosexuality and heterosexuality, is the result of ongoing intellectual and sociocultural changes that have their roots in the hegemonic growth of medical, psychiatric, and sexological thought since the middle of the nineteenth century. Similarly, the collection of diverse and unlike sexual practices that we attempt to contain by uncritically applying the term “bisexuality” to them are the result of other social and cultural processes that are quite independent of the scientific conceptions of bisexuality.

To understand the contemporary status of the concept requires taking a few steps backward in time to try to historically and culturally situate not only bisexuality as an ideology and a practice, but “homosexuality” and “heterosexu- ality” as well. It is now a commonplace observation to point out that the term “homosexuality” emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century as part of the larger medicalization of the domain of the sexual (Weeks, 1981). In a paraphrase of Foucault, this was one element in the medical psychiatric occupation and reconstruction of a terrain of knowledge and practice that was previously part of the territory controlled by an alliance between the state, as embodied in the legal system, and religion, as embodied in dogma and institutional practices. This specific reconstruction was part of the general scientificization and secular- ization of all of social life in the nineteenth century (Foucault, 1978, 1979). The “otherness” represented by the social practice of men who had sex with men and of women who had sex with women created a world of perverted biological or psychological development with a new nomenclature and practice that would reach its culmination in the diagnostic manuals of psychiatrists in the middle of the twentieth century (Bayer, 1981).

The early and primitive social constructions of the unnatural or abnormal categories of the “homosexual” and “homosexuality” logically required the con- struction of its natural or normal opposite, the “heterosexual” or “heterosexual- ity” (Katz, 1983; Gagnon, 1992). While no one, at the time that these terms were invented, thought of themselves as heterosexuals or homosexuals, it is one of the signal successes of the radical medical profession that this terminology and the social practices that flow from such a dichotomy between the normal and the abnormal represent the dominant modes of discourse and practice about these matters at the present time.

Most contemporary “heterosexuals” rarely think of themselves as “het- erosexuals,” except in moments when they think about “homosexuals” or “homosexuality.” Perhaps none conceive of the sex that they practice as a con- tingent domain of social practice called “heterosexuality.” “Heterosexuals” sim- ply act in a gendered sexual manner, without reflexivity, as if their gender preference in erotic relations were unproblematic. This is true despite the fact that it is clear that the “normality” of their sexual conduct is in part dependent on the abnormality of the sexual conduct of those who have same-gender or mixed-gender sexual preferences or practices. The unproblematic or unmarked

status of opposite-gender erotic preferences and the problematic or marked sta- tus of same-gender erotic preferences and practices in daily life and in science has resulted in a research program about the origins and practices of men who have sex with men and those women who have sex with women, but only a minuscule interest in the origins and practices of the majority category: persons who have sex with the opposite gender.

This massive positivist research program about homosexuality has obscured the fact that these polar categories, the heterosexual and the homosex- ual, are themselves based on a changing discourse and practice related to the larger set of social relations between women and men. The nineteenth century was a period in which the transformation of social life by the market, the factory,

the city, and new forms of social stratification—in a shorthand phrase, the rise of

hegemonic capitalism—included the transformation of all relations between

women and men. Heterosexuality was the medical term that came to be fitted to the folk categories of correct sexuality that emerged in the new middle classes, folk categories that were themselves based on a newly constituted polarity (what feminists have identified as separate social spheres) between women and men. In the medicalized (and ultimately biologized and psychologized) language of gender, there emerged a newly defined dichotomy between masculinity or male- ness and femininity or femaleness (Tavris, 1992; Fausto Sterling, 1985).

In this medicalized version of the sexual world, heterosexuality was the natural outcome of the sexual attraction between gendered opposites, homosex- uality the unnatural outcome of the sexual attraction between gendered simi- lars. Therefore, men who had sex with men were insufficiently masculine or excessively feminine, women who had sex with women were insufficiently fem- inine or excessively masculine. It is the conflation of these two dimensions, that of gender discourse and practice (the ideology and practice of social relations between the genders) and of gender preference in erotic relations (the ideology and practice of sexual relations between the genders) that has been the con- founding element in thinking about sexuality for nearly a century.

It is this confusion between gender preferences in erotic relations and masculinity and femininity as they are constituted in gender definitions that resulted in Hirschfeld’s invention of “intermediate sexual types” as a way to map “homosexuals” and “homosexuality” onto the gender continuum between com- pletely masculine men and completely feminine women. It was a resistance to and acceptance of these typologies of gender and sexuality that led (not only in Germany) to a belief in and practice of a “classical homosexuality” in which pure masculine men would have sex with each other uncontaminated by femi- ninity or the penetrations of the body celebrated in heterosexuality and effemi- nate homosexuality (Oosterhuis, 1991).

Freud’s observation, which is so often quoted today, represents the nine- teenth-century culmination of this belief in the new dominance of gender in defining the normality of sexual relations:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress on the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object . . . We despise the instinctual activity in itself and find excuse for it only on the merits of the object. (Marcus, 1975, xxvii) The merits of the object in this case are the appropriately gendered actor with whom intercourse occurs only in marriage and with the correlative goals of reproduction and a muted pleasure. The virtuous object serves to legitimate and channel the instinct.

This conception of a polarized heterosexuality and homosexuality mapped upon a polarized masculinity and femininity became the taken-for-

granted mode of thinking about sexual desire for the next three quarters of a cen-

tury. As with all theories (scientific or folk) that succeed in becoming the dominant mode of discourse within a community (scientific or folk), this view of object choice as the central organizing feature of normal and abnormal desire organized the perceptions and research of a majority of scientists. In the usual way that science proceeds, observations were sought and techniques developed that satisfied the needs of the central scientific dogma.

This dogma was based on the existence of two opposed and completely sep- arate essentialisms: heterosexuality and homosexuality. It was generally believed in the scientific and professional communities that had the responsibility for managing sexuality, that these two forms of behavior had separate etiologies (though only the etiology of homosexuality was ever explored since heterosexu- ality was an outcome that was so natural that it needed no explanation) and were the automatic outcomes of the normal and abnormal pathways of development. While it is true in Western societies that nearly all forms of sexual expression were (and are) problematic, after overcoming these general difficulties, being hetero- sexual was not. In addition, heterosexuality and homosexuality as they were thought about (rather than as they were practiced) in Western Europe and the United States between 1890 and 1950 took on trans-historical and universal sig- nificance as essential features of sexual conduct in all times and in all places.

Having fixated on this dogma of the homosexual as person and personality (which was abstracted from the actual social practices of men who had sex with men and women who had sex with women) and the heterosexual as requiring no explanation (definable only by its lack of a homosexual taint), women and men who had sex with both women and men were a troubling anomaly, much as the advance of perihelion of the planet Mercury was to the classical physicists of the turn of the nineteenth century (Kuhn, 1970). Clinical and criminological studies had early identified the existence of persons who had sex with both men and women, and such persons quickly became labeled as bisexuals, ambisexuals, or intersexuals (“bisexual” contrasted with monosexual, “ambisexual” was rooted in the idea of ambidextrous, and “intersexual” carries the resonance of being between the sexual polarities of homosexual and heterosexual) (Kinsey et al., 1948).

Traditional psychoanalysis, which had acquired the primary responsibility for theoretically patrolling the terrain of what it labeled sexual object choice, proposed a number of solutions, the most popular of which in the United States has been to discriminate (in the language of psychoanalysis) between “true,” “obligatory,” or “exclusive” homosexuals and a number of other transitional perversities or situa- tional practices that had different origins than “real” homosexuality (Socarides, 1978). These forms of “bisexuality” were not intermediate types between the pure types of homosexuality and heterosexuality, but rather mixed practices with quite different etiologies and consequent character structures. The behavior of such per- sons was thought to be pathological in its origins and expression, but often transi- tory (e.g., the prostitution of delinquent boys or sexual contact among same-gender adolescents) or situational (as between men in the military or prisons). While such sexual practices were somewhat of an embarrassment theoretically, they could be explained away in a manner that preserved the essential differences between the homosexual and the heterosexual. In this historically and culturally situated dis- course, there existed a pure or true homosexual personality type that had a com- mon set of psychological or biological origins and a common adult character structure organized around a perverse sexual object choice.

The criminal-legal system during this period, and extending to the pres- ent moment in many jurisdictions, also patrolled the terrain between the homo- sexual and the heterosexual by focusing on the gender of the actors in the sex act (Gebhard et al., 1965). In such a practice those who had sex with both men and women were treated the same way as those men who had sex only with men or women who had sex only with women. While the existence of a “heterosex- ual” practice as evidenced by marriage or children might mitigate the offense or reduce the penalty, all persons who engaged in such acts were treated by the law as if they were “homosexual.” The act is the evidence for the perversity, and “homosexuals” and “bisexuals” were gathered together as a single group as they are in the HIV/AIDS risk group “homosexual and bisexual men,” which has been constructed by epidemiologists (CDC, 1992; Openheimer, 1988). In both AIDS-think and crime-think, it is easier to include men who have sex with both women and men with those men who have sex only with men than it is to cre- ate an alternative classification: “heterosexuals and bisexuals.”

Kinsey, in one of the major theoretical breaks in the history of sex research, treated the “problem” of those who had sex with both men and women as unprob- lematic (Kinsey et al., 1948). Kinsey’s treatment of bisexuality involved a radical critique of the relation between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Theoretically, he argued specifically against prior conceptions of the homosexual and homosex- uality, and by creating the 0 to 6 scale (or, as it was called at the Institute for Sex Research at that time, the H-H scale) he proposed that the heterosexual and homosexual acts of persons could be best understood as the proportion of other- gender and same-gender sexual acts (here including mental acts) in which they had engaged. The relation between heterosexuality and homosexuality was to be

treated as continuous rather than discrete, and individuals could move from one place to another on the continuum by adding new acts of the two different types. What Kinsey opposed was the well-established theoretical belief that per- sons with substantial amounts of same-gender erotic experience represented a unitary category of persons with similar psychological or biological biographies whose lives were entirely governed, or at least strongly influenced, by the gen- der of the persons they sexually desired. Kinsey’s theoretical counter to the bio- medical-psychiatric-criminological view that each homosexual was possessed of

a defect in biology or very early education—was to take an equally strong biolog-

ical line, but one that emphasized the evolutionary history of the species rather than the defective status of the individual. This is essentially the theoretical position he took about all sexual conduct, approved and disapproved. He argued that homosexuality, masturbation, and oral sex (to take the triad he most often discussed when dealing with these issues) were common activities in “the mam- malian heritage” as well as among human groups where cultural repression of the sexual was not the norm. Hence, such activities represented the diversity of nature rather than perversities and deviations from a biological or cultural stan- dard for the sexually correct individual (Kinsey et al., 1948). This is an argu- ment of extraordinary originality, one which allows Kinsey to bring what was thought to be unnatural under the umbrella of a larger and more copious nature. It shares with the Freudians a view that there is a severe tension between the offerings of nature and the strictures of culture; however, Kinsey’s vision of what nature offers is closer to Rousseau’s than it is to Hobbes’s.

The moral and political legitimacy of same-gender sexual acts (whether exclusive or in some mixture with opposite-gender sexual acts) could thus be created by treating them as part of a natural world that should not be limited by the artifices of culture. Kinsey’s opposition between nature and culture thus rests on a distinction between the bounty and variety of the natural world (read here the diversity of species in an unmanaged nature) as opposed to a civilized world of agriculture in which nature is pruned and limited. In much the same way as agriculture gives the fields over to monocrops, sexually repressive cultures culti- vate procreative heterosexuality as their sole flower, treating all else as weeds. Kinsey remained true to his prior evolutionary and ecological concerns: It is in the biology of abundance and adaptation that he finds the template for the nor- mal, not in the individual organismic views that characterize the defect-finding traditions in psychiatry, psychology, and biology.

The H-H or 0 to 6 continuum rested at least in part on this understand- ing of nature. As Kinsey wrote:

Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homo- sexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents

categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex. (Kinsey et al., 1948, p. 639) That continua are as much human inventions as dichotomies, and that there is, for certain purposes, a utility to distinguishing between sheep and goats, are reasonable intellectual responses to Kinsey’s positivist view that the con- tinua in the mind mirror the sexual facts in the world. However the important issue is Kinsey’s decision to make heterosexuality and homosexuality (and hence bisexuality) a question of acts rather than a question of common origins, com- mon personalities, or common behavioral performances (in the case of males: effeminacy, artistic temperament, a broader pelvis, occupational preference, scores on Terman-Miles MF scale) (Kinsey et al., 1948, p. 637). It is the mixture of heterosexual and homosexual performances that impresses Kinsey; the record of “experience and psychic reactions” (ibid., p. 639) that fluctuates across the life course, even within a single sexual occasion.

The scale is an empirical attempt to undermine all of the usual sharp distinc- tions that were made between individuals who had sexual contacts with the same and the other gender. By focusing on flexibility and change in conduct across the life course, it counters arguments that same-gender erotic preferences start early in life, are fixed across the life course, and are influential in all spheres of life. By focus- ing on acts rather than persons, Kinsey tries to protect those who are persecuted as “homosexual” because of a few homosexual acts as well as to counter the argument

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