-----Original Message-----
...everyone is figuring out that human desire is just damn
>complicated and that mainstream society is doing a rather efficient
job of
>policing it already thank you very much.
>
>Liza
hi Liza, for sure, which is maybe why the aim should be to unsettle heterosexuality. bill and Monica and Kenneth did a fine job, but needs some more focus.
part of the difficulty with establishing concepts like biphobia is that they take little account of the terrain, that is that we are all referencing ourselves first and foremost against heterosexuality (which I hope not even those who are het actually practice, how dull), and in this sense the naming of oneself as bi has a different echo than calling oneself a dyke or a faggot. so I think there's kind of two things to remember: that the practices aren't homogenous within each of these categories, that the categories themselves are politics first.
maybe I'm old enough to remember that the dyke/femme thing was more constraining, and that derision of women who wanted to sleep with men and women actually flowed from this, because they didn't fit into neat models of het identities, and of the fixity that was regarded as integral to butch/femme as a repetition that was taken so seriously it was more often than not regarded as grounded in genes. and maybe I'm old enough, or in a different place enough, to recall that the political lesbianism which accused bi women of being 'traitors' didn't ever really make it out of the academy, which maybe explains some of Kelley's comments about the differing responses. political lesbianism, after all, is a kind of rationalism.
and, maybe I'm young enough to remember that the immediate response to this rationalism was an anti-critical posture, which made sexualities seem ineffable, beyond critique; which was not an interesting response at the end of the day since it too thought of sexuality as a matter of will, of choice, and simply sought to celebrate those differences of choice.
just trundling along....
angela