The Refusal to Refuse: Bisexuality Trouble and the Hegemony of Monosexuality

Abstract

Abstract This paper both revisits and productively draws on Judith Butler’s theory of sexuality offered in Gender Trouble, to consider how this foundational queer theory text inadvertently works to contain and bracket plurisexualities such as bisexuality. I consider how Butler at once rejects the idea of originary bisexuality provoked by psychoanalytic discourse on polymorphous perversity yet subsumes bisexual oppression into that of homosexuality. I interrogate Butler’s monosexual presumptions to extend their notion of the heterosexual matrix to account for an operational hetero/homo binary that both excludes plurisexuality as its Other and obscures this exclusion. Following this theoretical line, I consider how the asymmetric hetero/homo binary has been coded along the lines of comedy/tragedy in culture, and in contrast how bisexuality and other plurisexualities are often rendered impossible. I suggest that plurisexualities, representing a refusal to refuse the originary prohibition, “haunt” both straight and queer contexts alike.