Sex and the City: Lakshmi, October 13

Hanover, NH

Hi queers,

Happy belated Bisexual Visibility Day! This hallowed annual holiday fell in September with little fanfare, but Twitter celebrated in its own special way last week, as voices across the spectrum of sexual identity joined together to complain about bisexuals. Before we return to this minor clusterfuck, which anxiously played out while the senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court, let's recall the last time the internet cared this much about bisexuality. It was March, Cynthia Nixon had just declared her gubernatorial run, and that meant, according to the headlines, that New York might get its first lesbian governor. The problem with this framing, some observers observed, was that it contradicted Nixon's own description of herself, at various points, as bisexual. If the prospect of "New York's first bisexual governor" sounded laughable rather than noteworthy, maybe the problem was with a public discourse still uncomfortable with B in LGBT.

Nixon's own public performance of sexual identity—an ongoing point of fascination on this blog, though we too have fallen into the habit of avoiding the b-word—doesn't really clear things up. Sometimes Nixon has described herself as bi; sometimes as a lesbian; and, maybe most tellingly, sometimes as a lesbian who would say she was bi if people didn't hate the bisexuals so much. "Everybody likes to dump on the bisexuals," she told the Daily Beast in 2012, explaining that she doesn't "like to pull out that word" because "we get no respect." Given this ambiguity, one wonders how many layers of meaning were packed into erstwhile New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn's description of Nixon earlier this year as an "unqualified lesbian": was Nixon a real lesbian unqualified for public office, or was she not qualified to be a lesbian at all? Bisexuals, as Lauren Berlant tells us, never made it into the "sexual star system" because bisexuality is just so hard to express.1 The only way to "qualify" as a bisexual is to claim to be one, and that's a meaningless qualification if no one believes you. Which, a lot of the time, they don't.

The disbelief that often confronts people—and by people I mostly mean women—who identify as bi was the ostensible topic of last week's Twitter referendum. In short, a woman tweeted that being married to a man didn't invalidate her bisexuality; it went viral; queers and straights alike made fun of her claim and her earnestness for the reasons I've heard all my life. Bisexuals are chaotic, privileged, infantile, sexually excessive, and worst of all, not to be trusted because we're self-serving in our sexual relations. We make straight men anxious because we might leave them for someone other than straight men, while other queers seem concerned—as the artist and writer Hannah Black put it in one tweet last week—that we're not "doing our shift" in the coop of sexual relations.

Maybe I've been reading all this queer theory wrong, but I always thought half the point of "queer community" was to resist the reproductive logic of the sexual and political economy. And yet of course I've heard this one before, too: the suggestion that bisexuals are failing to put in the work, i.e. the sexual labor, of performing homosexual acts and identities. In fact, I would argue, this gets at the heart of the issue: the problem and the promise of the figure of the bisexual is, precisely, her apparent unproductivity.

What I'm about to say might sound odd, because we think that we think of the bisexual as a butterfly off having threesomes 24/7. In fact, though, my hunch is that we really imagine the bisexual as that most solitary, self-serving, unproductive figure in the annals of sexual typology, the masturbator. Let us turn, then, to our very own Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Sex and the City.

In the season 2 episode "The Fuck Buddy," Samantha is in bed one night, smoking a joint and listening to her neighbors have sex, when she finds herself turned on by the sounds. Soon, she's masturbating herself, her moans woven in to the sounds of the couple next door. While Carrie's voiceover tells us that Samantha is getting off to the sounds of other couples having sex, the camera pans to the mirror hanging above Samantha's bed—so we might also say Samantha is getting off to herself. Later in the episode, Samantha establishes aural contact with the neighbors and sways down the hallway in her best weeknight sex doll outfit, only to be utterly disappointed by what she finds on the other side of the wall: a middle-aged straight couple so boring that she's physically shaken at the thought of having sex with them. Her hopes of a sexy bisexual threesome crushed, she returns to her own bed and her reflection on the wall. Samantha has learned the lesson all bisexuals are taught: threesomes sound great in theory, but in the end, since you'll never be straight enough or gay enough for anyone else, you're going to be left alone with your vibrator.

There is, of course, a longer history here. Eve Sedgwick, everyone's favorite bad bisexual (I know she didn't claim that term, don't @ me) reminds us that in the rush to tell a story of the homo/hetero binary as a valid and continuing divide, our public discourse on sex has often consigned other forms of sexual relation to the garbage bin of history. Bisexuals have not always stayed in our allotted dumpsters, but we do carry that awful stench everywhere we appear, fouling all the potential gay sex with our excessive desires, and muddling the clear boundaries of homo/hetero love that shape our sexual and political marketplace. Our worst offense is the lack of sexual discipline that we exhibit. Improperly trained subjects who skipped the lesson on how to choose our objects of desire, we allegedly suffer from a form of Sexual Attention Deficiency: we're unable to focus on anything except our own pleasure (that's pretty sad too). In other words, we're not disciplined enough to desire correctly, so we're left to please ourselves. That, again, is the rub: we're self-serving, a.k.a. masturbatory.

Perhaps, then, the confluence between our images of bisexuality and masturbation shouldn't be so surprising after all. Historically, Sedgwick explains, masturbation signified an "excess of sexuality altogether," dangerous to others but chiefly to oneself. In the nineteenth century, young girls who masturbated too much (which is to say, even a little) received electroshock therapy applied to the clitoris.2 The masturbating girl and her adult counterpart, the unruly bisexual, are punished for engaging in desire that is unproductive and unreproductive because it is autotelic: we don't specifically desire the body of another; indeed, most any body will do, including ours. Femme bisexuality, then, starts to look much like narcissism: we want to have our cake and eat it too, or rather, be a fruit cake and get eaten out. As Alia Shawkat tells Ilana Glazer on Broad City, that's what makes it so hot.

In another SATC episode questionably called "The Caste System," Charlotte has sex with a movie star in the backseat of his limo, but leaves him the next day because he tells her to—well, since there's no way to say it politely, stick her finger in her vagina in a public restroom then let him sniff her fingers. The guy's been a sleaze all along, but this, for Charlotte, is a bridge too far. Something about femininity, it seems, precludes autotelic pleasure, and Charlotte has been well-trained. In season 1, as Andrea marveled in her first post, Miranda introduces Charlotte to the Rabbit™, a best-selling vibrator that causes her to become completely uninterested in social life, wrapped up in her sheets and her own desire. By the end of that episode, her friends are knocking down her door and physically drawing her apart from her beloved. How dare she ignore the calls of social life just to pleasure herself? What a horrid waste of time! She could be meeting the man of her dreams and reproducing the heteronormative family ideal, which Charlotte, more than her crew, has explicitly avowed as her desire. Indeed, she is willfully ignoring the quest for (hetero) sex and the city. It is no surprise then, that a season later, when she is asked to pleasure herself, even within a sexual encounter where doing so would also please another, Charlotte refuses; she will not be un(re)productive again.

The self-serving, masturbatory bisexual—good Charlotte's negative image—is not simply an inconvenient homewrecker but, more perniciously, a bad sexual laborer. She is unproductive, in the power she maintains to withdraw at will from the sexual marketplace. And she is non-reproductive, in a double-sense: first because, if she's doing her job right, she threatens the norms of heterosexual familial reproduction; secondly, she is unable to reproduce bisexuality itself as an identity category because she is always disappearing right at the moment when she act on her sexual desires: queer one second, and straight the next.

In her posts before the New York state primaries, Ari discussed the uncanny parallels between Cynthia Nixon's reluctance to tell coming-out stories about her respective identifications as a lesbian and, more recently, a socialist—in the latter case, creating a problem for her campaign in its attempt to win support from a growing socialist movement. Those parallels pointed us to a history in which communist and socialist politics in the United States have been subject to a similar structure of closeting as queer sexuality. But if we look at Nixon's political evolution while imagining her as a self-abnegating bisexual rather than a newish lesbian, a different parallel emerges: bisexuals are permanently stuck in the dilemma facing the recently politicized, in that they are suspected of not having put in the work to claim a new identity. As any bisexual worth their self-loathing will tell you, there's no way to really prove you're a democratic socialist besides saying that you are.

What could be queerer (more shame-filled, naïve, and hopeful), in the end, than running for public office as a bisexual socialist? In the aftermath of Nixon's campaign, her supporters have called attention to the #CynthiaEffect: a reading of her loss as not really a loss at all, since her campaign pushed Andrew Cuomo slightly to the left and helped sink the Independent Democratic Conference that for years had obstructed progressive legislation in New York state politics. (Ah, say the students in my queer theory class, the queer art of failure!) My point, though, is that her run was doomed to failure from the start, not just because of the money and power that glued the incumbent to his seat, but because of the political anxieties produced by the figure of the bisexual. That Nixon has dodged the pressure to adopt a clear-cut lesbian identity, even explicitly criticized the demand that her sexuality be made legible through the homo/hetero binary, and continued to consider herself a viable political actor, gestured toward a more radical socialist political tactic than any she actually endorsed on the campaign trail: the refusal to work.

Nixon's professed version of socialism—and presumably the one she actually believes in— focuses on a jobs guarantee and the rights of working people. But when bisexuality gets thrown into the mix, we are confronted with the trace of a socialist feminist politics that questions whether we should be working hard at all. Nixon may never have heard of Silvia Federici; "bisexual socialist" still conjures the specter of an unholy alliance between the ladies in the sheets and the workers in the streets, through her refusal to reproduce the sexual economy that, in turn, produces the political economy. In this sense, even if Nixon's proposals were tame, her presence was rendered obscene, in the fullest sense of the word: offensive to the point that it needed to be left off the political stage as much as possible. She could never have worked hard enough to eliminate the taint of the unproductive bisexual, the insinuation that she had not done the work of appropriately training herself, and served therefore as a threat to those who had. In the end, being an unproductive bisexual is about as much of a waste of time as being a socialist feminist. That's precisely the point.

Yrs in autoerotic politics,

Lakshmi

The Slow Burn, v. 4: An Introduction

Lakshmi, July 10

Ned, July 18

Andrea, July 24

Ari, August 16

Ned, August 22

Andrea, August 30

Ari, September 13

Ivan Ramos (Guest Post), October 1

Audrey Wollen (Guest Post), October 22

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The Slow Burn, volume 4, will run in this space all summer. Previous summers can still be found on Post45: 

2015: A Summer of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels - Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards

2016: Summer of Knausgaard - Diana Hamilton, Dan Sinykin, Cecily Swanson, and Omari Weekes

2017: Welcome (back) to Twin Peaks - Michaela Bronstein, Len Gutkin, and Benjamin Parker