Bisexuality in Europe

Sexual Citizenship, Romantic Relationships, and Bi+ Identities

Emiel Maliepaard, Renate Baumgartner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000220841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Bisexuality in Europe offers an accessible and diverse overview of research on bisexuality and bi+ people in Europe, providing a foundation for theorising and empirical work on plurisexual orientations and identities, and the experiences and realities of people who desire more than one sex or gender

Counteracting the predominance of work on bisexuality based in Ango-American contexts, this collection of fifteen contributions from both early-career and more senior academics reflects the current state of research in Europe on bisexuality and people who desire more than one sex or gender. The book is structured around three interlinked themes that resonate well with the international research frontiers of bisexual theorising: bisexual citizenship, intimate relationships, and bisexual+ identities. This book is the first of its kind in bringing together research from various European countries including Austria, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries, as well as from Europe as a wider geographical region.. Topics include pansexual identity, non-monogomies, asylum seekers and youth cultures.

This is an essential collection for students, early career researchers, and more senior academics in Gender Studies, LGBTQI Studies and Sexuality Studies.

1 Bisexuality in Europe

Introduction to the field and this book

Emiel Maliepaard and Renate Baumgartner

Introduction

This anthology reflects the current state of research in Europe on bisexuality and people who desire more than one sex or gender. It makes work accessible that is grounded in expertise beyond the Anglo-American world, which still dominates academia in general and the field of bisexuality research and theorising in particular (Monro, 2015; see also Swan & Habibi, 2018). This book is not meant to provide a complete overview of bisexuality in Europe, as this body of research is still relatively small and rather diverse. Instead, researchers from both continental Europe and the United Kingdom have teamed up to discuss their current research, contribute to ongoing discussions, and provide inspiration and guidance for students, early career researchers, and more senior academics to delve more deeply into current bisexual theorising and the lives of people who desire more than one sex or gender.

The anthology is a product of a network of developments, including the increase in the number of academics and postgraduate students who are interested in studying bisexuality and the social realities of bisexual people, as well as international events and gatherings of bisexual researchers. It seems that bisexuality research in (continental) Europe is on the rise (Maliepaard, 2018a), and this book documents these developments as well as providing a solid foundation for the further elaboration of European perspectives and discussions of bisexuality, and the experiences and realities of bisexual people. This book is the first of its kind to bring together research from various European countries, including Austria, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries, as well as from Europe as a wider geographical region.

This first chapter provides a tentative introduction to bisexuality research in Europe, then discusses the European research that falls into the three themes of this book: sexual citizenship, romantic relationships, and bi+ identities. It also reflects on terminology in bisexuality research, and concludes by discussing the structure of the book.

Bisexuality research in Europe

Research that includes theorising about bisexuality in Europe began as early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when sexologists and evolutionists introduced bisexuality in various contexts related to sexual differentiation and evolution on the one hand, and to a person’s traits and dispositions on the other. In A History of Bisexuality, Angelides (2001) discusses these different uses and interpretations of bisexuality at length. For the purposes of this anthology, it suffices to highlight that bisexuality referred to three distinct but definitely interlinked phenomena (Hemmings, 2002). First, it referred to primordial hermaphroditism – embryological bisexuality – as the earliest form of human existence, before development and sexual differentiation. A second meaning of bisexuality was to describe people who possessed both masculine and feminine traits or dispositions – so-called psychical hermaphroditism. Third, bisexuality was conceptualised as a sexual desire, and ultimately as a sexual orientation and identity. This meaning was also an important aspect of the German-Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s work on sexual inversion and the concept of psychosexual hermaphroditism. Psychosexual hermaphroditism was the first phase of sexual inversion (homosexuality), and it referred to bisexual desire within people who were described as latently heterosexual. Bisexuality as a desire was further developed in work by the Austrian Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who understood bisexuality as the starting point of desire, before its differentiation into homosexual or heterosexual desire/attraction through positive or negative identification with the parent of the same or opposite sex. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did bisexuality become an authentic sexual identity: Austrian-born psychiatrist (and sexologist) Fritz Klein – who fled to the United States before World War II – further developed and complicated the Kinsey Scale (which had measured different degrees of sexual attraction to same-sex and opposite-sex people) into the Klein ‘Sexual Orientation Grid’ (KSOG). Klein contributed significantly to the understanding of bisexuality as an authentic sexual identity, not only with the KSOG – which added the time factor, and went beyond sexual attraction by also including features such as sexual behaviour, sexual fantasies, lifestyle, emotional preference, social preference, and self-identification – but also by publishing The bisexual option (Klein, 1993) and founding both the American Institute of Bisexuality and its flagship journal, the Journal of Bisexuality.

It is difficult to provide a complete picture of bisexuality research in Europe or European research that includes bisexual theorising. Academics publish in their own languages as well as in the lingua franca of academia. A large proportion of publications are indeed in English; however, a lot of work is also published in different languages, including Dutch (e.g. Goetstouwers, 2007), German (Kemler, Löw, & Ritter, 2012), Finnish (Kangasvuo, 2014), and Swedish (Bertilsdotter, 2001). Publication in academics’ own languages may hamper the development of European discussions; however, such publications do form a basis for further developing bisexuality research in their respective countries, and they provide opportunities for academics, policy-makers, activists, students, and bisexual people themselves to become familiar with national and perhaps even international discussions of bisexuality and bisexual people.

Today a substantial number of researchers who are working in non-Anglophone countries publish their work in English-language journals to actively engage with bisexual theorising. Following are some examples of researchers who are not part of this anthology but who have contributed to bisexuality research in Europe. Köllen (2013) studied bisexuality in LGBT diversity management in Germany; Gusmano (2018) wrote about polyamory and bisexuality in relation to coming out in Italy; Gustavson (2009) explored bisexuality in relationships in the context of Sweden; Oosterhuis and Lipperts (2013) discussed the slow acceptance of bisexuality in Dutch survey research and popular media; and Turai (2017, 2019) published on representations and positions of bisexuality in post-socialist Hungary. It is fair to conclude, however, that most work on bisexuality in Europe has been conducted by academics working in the United Kingdom. This work comprises not only a large number of articles, but also books that have dominated bisexual theorising in Europe (e.g. Hayfield, 2020; Hemmings, 2002; Klesse, 2007; Monro, 2015; Shepherd, 2019; Storr, 1999). Interestingly, an important cluster of bisexuality researchers is based at the Open University and has published widely on bisexuality in Britain (e.g. Bowes-Catton, 2007; Bowes-Catton, Barker, & Richards, 2011; Jones, 2011, 2016). Researchers at this institution also took the lead in the well-known Bisexuality Report published in 2012 (Barker et al., 2012), which they published together with a number of bisexual activists. Of course, this does not mean that all these authors have their personal origins in the United Kingdom; however, it makes clear that bisexuality research is more institutionalised in the United Kingdom than in other European countries (see also Maliepaard, 2018a). It is no surprise that most of the researchers based in continental Europe are conducting and publishing doctoral research, or are early career researchers who finished their doctoral degrees fairly recently.

Due to its relative short history, it is no surprise that bisexuality is not (yet) a sub-discipline within contemporary sociology or psychology. As in other geographical regions, such as the United States and Australia, bisexuality research and theorising have been taken up by researchers working in different disciplines. Nevertheless, most European studies of bisexuality are conducted by researchers in the fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology. This seems to be quite similar to the situation in Australia and the United States, although a large share of the work in these contexts has been done by public health researchers (e.g. Ross et al., 2018 for a systematic review on mental health). There seem to be only a few studies in Europe that focus on bisexual health, and there is a lot of potential in such studies (this will be discussed in Chapter 13). It may be true, however, that similar studies have been conducted in European countries but have only been published in the authors’ native languages rather than in English-language peer-reviewed journals. Notable examples of studies that have partially embraced a public health approach include the aforementioned Bisexuality Report (Barker et al., 2012), the Complicated?’ report by Rankin, Morton, and Bell (2015), and a few individual articles – for example, on the relations between minority stress, social belonginess to LGBT communities, and the mental health of bisexual and lesbian women in Norway (Prell & Traeen, 2018). It is no surprise, then, that the majority of research on bisexuality in Europe is either based on qualitative research or is the result of more theoretical endeavours, while academic survey research on the realities of bisexual people seems to be rather absent. An interesting exception is Van Lisdonk and Keuzenkamp (2017), who used mixed-method research to understand the lived realities of same sex-attracted youth, and whose qualitative sample included several people who identified as bisexual. This emphasis on qualitative research and theoretical endeavours is also reflected in the contents of this book.

Bisexuality in Europe: Themes

In his article, ‘Historicising Contemporary Bisexuality’, MacDowall (2009) concludes that from the mid-1990s onwards, British and American studies on bisexuality focused predominantly on making space for bisexuality within academia – so-called reparative studies. An important motivation for this focus was the feeling that bisexuality and bisexual people had been invisible or ignored in contemporary academic scholarship. For instance, British geographer Bell (1995) argued against the placelessness and homelessness of bisexuality and bisexual people in society: bisexuality had no place even on the margins of his discipline, the geography of sexualities (see also Maliepaard, 2015a). His conclusion was supported by Monro, Hines, and Osborne (2017), who analysed sexualities scholarship between 1970 and 2015, and concluded that bisexuality was indeed invisible and perhaps marginalised in sexualities scholarship. Their article proposes a number of reasons why bisexuality was invisible, including the heterosexist or heteronormative nature of the scholarship, the emphasis on gay and lesbian experiences (as a result of gay and lesbian identity politics), and the rise of queer approaches within sexualities scholarship. Finally, Barker (2007), who analysed 22 undergraduate psychology textbooks (introductory, biological, developmental, and social psychology) found that bisexuality was rarely mentioned and never theorised in depth. Besides addressing the invisibility of bisexual desires, experiences, and identities, reparative studies focus on the legitimisation of bisexuality as a solid research theme by emphasising that bisexual people have different realities, and therefore deserve academic study and theorising.

Most research on bisexuality – both reparative studies and those that engage with bisexual theorising and possibly wider social theories – is focused on the lived experiences of people who identify as bisexual, and more recently also on those who identify as pansexual, queer, and/or omnisexual. Far fewer studies discuss the realities of people who desire people of more than one sex or gender: studying bisexual orientations or desires seems to be a less usual, and possibly less safe, option for bisexuality scholars.

In this section, we discuss the three themes of this anthology: sexual citizenship, romantic relationships, and bi+ (or plurisexual) identities.

Sexual citizenship

One of the more minor themes in European research is bisexual citizenship. Sexual citizenship refers to relations between sexualised individuals and the state or society at large. Work has been published that focuses on the relationship between bisexuality and the state (e.g. Maliepaard, 2015b; Marcus, 2018; Monro, 2005) and bisexual communities (e.g. Applebee, 2015; Bowes-Catton et al., 2011; Monro, 2015; Voss, Browne, & Gupta, 2014). At the level of national and local governments, the limited research has shown that policy and legislation have been ignorant of the lived experiences and needs of bisexual people, which hampers bisexual people’s attempts to achieve cultural citizenship or exercise their rights to freely engage in romantic relationships, sexual activity, partner choice, identity development, and identity expression (e.g. Maliepaard, 2015b). As argued by Monro (2005), three issues need to be addressed to make space for bisexual citizenship: accepting bisexual identities; embracing sexual fluidity instead of limiting ourselves to static identities and orientations; and making space for relational diversity, looking beyond monogamy in both policy and legislation. Furthermore, we would add, it is of vital importance to address the sexual, mental, and physical health needs and challenges of bisexual people in order to draft useful and specific policies to enable bisexual people to participate fully – or at least to increase their participation – in everyday life (see also Marcus, 2018). While Marcus (2018) hints at the situation of bisexual asylum seekers, there is no scholarship yet on the lived experiences of bisexual asylum seekers, and only very limited work on LGBT asylum seekers that also focuses on the paths of bisexual asylum seekers.

Bisexual citizenship and bi-inclusivity in legislation and policy are not a minor challenge for policy-makers or politicians, since bisexual people’s realities may be even less valued than gay and lesbian realities (see Monro & Richardson, 2010). Bisexual communities, organisations, and events have the potential to speak with one voice and make political demands, urging politicians and policy-makers to actually pay attention to bisexual citizenship in policy and legislation (Maliepaard, 2015b; Voss, Browne, & Gupta, 2014).

Nevertheless, while research on communities suggests that bisexual communities, organisations, and events are helpful support networks for bisexual people, providing opportunities to meet like-m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Bisexuality in Europe: Introduction to the field and this book
• Part I Sexual citizenship
• Part II Romantic relationships
• Part III Bi+ identities
• Contributors
• Index