G5 Doctoral dissertation (article)
Bisexuality in relationships : a queer psychosocial approach (2019)
Lahti, A. (2019). Bisexuality in relationships : a queer psychosocial approach [Doctoral dissertation]. Jyväskylän yliopisto. JYU Dissertations, 87. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-7773-3
JYU authors or editors
Publication details
All authors or editors: Lahti, Annukka
eISBN: 978-951-39-7773-3
Journal or series: JYU Dissertations
eISSN: 2489-9003
Publication year: 2019
Number in series: 87
Number of pages in the book: 1 verkkoaineisto (111 sivua, 87 sivua useina numerointijaksoina)
Publisher: Jyväskylän yliopisto
Place of Publication: Jyväskylä
Publication country: Finland
Publication language: English
Persistent website address: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-7773-3
Publication open access: Openly available
Publication channel open access: Open Access channel
Abstract
people of more than one gender. Bisexuality is persistently culturally associated with
being only a temporary identity, having multiple partners and being promiscuous. This
study explores how bisexuality emerges in contemporary relationships: how it fits,
contests or expands normative understandings of couple relationships, which continue
to draw upon the discourses of romantic love, marriage and the ideal of finding ‘the one’
who meets all our romantic and sexual needs. In particular, it examines how a sample of
Finnish bisexual women, and their (ex-)partners of various genders, negotiate
bisexuality in their relationships, and the affective consequences it has for those partners
and relationships.
The study draws on a longitudinal set of interviews, which consists of five
(originally seven) couple interviews with bisexual women and their partners conducted
in 2005, and 11 individual follow-up interviews conducted some 10 years later in 2014–
2015. It develops a theoretical-methodological hybrid: a queer psychosocial approach to
analysing participants’ relationships talk. This means attending to interviewees’
investments in certain heteronormative discourses and identity categories, as well as
taking account of affective, unconscious and excessive aspects of experience, which can
be noted by paying attention to affectively intensive moments, thickly narrated passages,
tensions and discrepancies in interviewees’ talk. The analysis highlights how the binary logic of the heterosexual matrix together with the strength of the monogamous norm produce conditions of possibility for
bisexualities to emerge in relationships. Through those conditions, bisexuality emerges as a ‘weak’ identity. Given the strength of the homo/hetero binary, bisexual women’s accounts of their desires wavered between this binary, which implied that bisexual women did not easily gain ‘a sense of being’ as a bisexual person in a relationship.
Bisexuality often disappeared in normative relationship talk. The majority of the interviewed bisexual women and their (ex-)partners lived in monogamous long-term relationships. Yet, the women’s bisexuality and the presence of
their desires for people whose gender(s) were other than their partners’, often brought the monogamous norm under explicit negotiation. Bisexuality highlighted the typical tension of contemporary relationships: the tension between ‘unstable’ and excessive sexual desire and the wish for a stable and secure (monogamous) relationship. Several
of the bisexual women also discussed affective experiences of sexual excess beyond cultural norms about relationships and gender. Excessive sexual experiences often played a propulsive role as women strived to become sexual subjects. Sexuality’s excess thus has the potential to complicate bisexual women’s relationship with norms that
dictate how they should be sexual.
Keywords: bisexuality; couple relationship
Free keywords: queer; psychosocial; monogamy; non-monogamy; affect
Contributing organizations
Ministry reporting: Yes
Reporting Year: 2019
