‘I didn’t know that I could feel this relaxed in my body’: Using visual methods to research bisexual people’s embodied experiences of subjectivity and space

Bowes-Catton, Helen; Barker, Meg-John and Richards, Christina (2020). ‘I didn’t know that I could feel this relaxed in my body’: Using visual methods to research bisexual people’s embodied experiences of subjectivity and space. In: Reavey, Paula ed. A Handbook of Visual Methods in Psychology : Using and Interpreting Images in Qualitative Research. Milton Park, UK: Taylor and Francis, pp. 409–427.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351032063-2723

Abstract

A great deal of the qualitative research on bisexuality published in the last two decades has used discourse analysis to explore bisexual people’s articulations of identity. These studies, which began to emerge around the turn of the 21st century, and focus particularly on bisexual women, demonstrate the difficulties of articulating a coherent bisexual subject position in a gay/straight world. To take up a bisexual subject position, these studies show, is to reject binaries at the same time as reifying them, and to reject boundaried notions of sexual identity while pragmatically embracing them. Bisexuality is commonly understood to refer to sexual attraction to more than one gender, but these studies consistently find that many bisexual people express deep ambivalence about the term ‘bisexuality’ itself, arguing that it reinforces the idea that sexuality is dichotomous.