Blinded by the white.

How white supremacy corrupts our understanding of bisexuality.

Earlier this morning, as I was watching Twitter react to the latest announcement from my least favorite public bisexual, I stumbled across a tweet from Wagatwe Wanjuki, one of my favorite public thinkers (Check out her work! Support her Patreon!):

Sinema has me thinking how bi visibility is dominated by white women and how much that hindered my own understanding of bisexuality and queerness.

This is something that I think about a lot, especially since I know that people of color are actually more likely to identify as bisexual than their white counterparts. If Cardi B is more representative of bi women than Kyrsten Sinema, then why are we constantly talking about bi womanhood like Sinema is the exemplar? And what happened to our understanding of bisexuality when we’re only seeing it through the lens of white cis* womanhood?

Bi activists have long known that bi identity comes in a variety of configurations (notably, 1990s era publications like Bi Any Other Name and Anything That Moves frequently attempt to weave race into their discussions of the bi experience). But if you look at the stereotype of a bi woman, the image that comes to mind when most people hear the word “bisexual,” it’s easy to see how much of it is built on the assumption that the person in question is white — how white womanhood is woven into our understanding of what it is to be bi**. This idea of bi women as conditionally queer, willing (and able) to cut and run for the safety of heterosexuality at the first sign of trouble? It assumes that bi women have access to the safety and respectability of heterosexuality and hetero marriage — something that is far more likely to be afforded to white women. This idea that bi women suck all the oxygen out of queer spaces, that we’re constantly talking over everyone else? That, too, requires one to envision a bi woman as a white person — it’s not like women of color are routinely afforded the space to be heard at all, let alone heard over other people who want to talk.

Again and again, we’re told that bi women are constantly playing the victim when they’re more like the abuser, that bi women weaponize their aura of innocence and use it to cause harm to more marginalized folks. If you tell a bi woman she’s not queer enough, she’ll burst into tears until you finally relent, right? She’ll convince you she’s the one who’s been hurt, when all along she’s been able to retreat to the safety of heterosexuality at a moment’s notice. All of these dynamics, it should be noted, are the dynamics of white femininity: it’s white women who use their gender to position themselves as vulnerable victims, while relying on whiteness to absolve them of any wrongdoing. When we only see bisexuality as a white identity, we can only understand bi women as people who operate the way that white women historically have.

So it’s interesting, then, to see what has happened as more and more women of color have come out as bi. We have Cardi B and Meghan Thee Stallion and Stephanie Beatriz and Aubrey Plaza and Halsey and Natalie Morales and Niecy Nash and Tessa Thompson and… more often than not, these women kind of get forgotten when it comes to talking about bi womanhood. They are not the names that many folks immediately go to when they’re asked to think of a bi celeb — and when they are considered as bi figures, it’s often construed as less of an identity than an extension of their hypersexuality (this is especially the case with someone like Cardi B).

And it’s frustrating because if you believe, as I do, that bisexuality is less a concrete, fixed identity and more a liberation from expectation, then the overlay of whiteness on top of biness is simply getting us further and further from the goal. It’s increasingly restricting what it is to be bi, rather than opening the release valve and letting bi people be whomever the fuck we want. I hope that it changes. Someone like Janelle Monáe coming out as a pan and non-binary, pushing people to understand that there is space to just be, outside of these rigid preconceptions and labels… it gives me hope. And I hope it’s just the beginning of a larger process of shattering our white-led view of queerness, of breaking out of this belief that the people with the most ability to come out as bi without losing social status (that would be white cis women!) are the people most likely to be bi, or the people whose experiences should serve as the default for what it means to be bi in the first place.

[NB: Feels like I should acknowledge here that I myself am a white cis woman — specifically of Ashkenazi/Serbian/Croatian descent and a 3G Holocaust survivor, which complicates my relationship to whiteness, but a person who benefits from white privilege all the same. I’ve learned so much from POC bisexuals and queers and I encourage you to seek out POC voices to broaden your own understanding of the broad expanse of queer and bi experience. Wagatwe is fantastic and a fave; I’m also consistently blown away by Moses Moon, whose critical analysis of the intersection of race and gender has really really cracked my brain open (she also deserves your money).]

* Also worth noting that trans people are more likely than cis people to identify as bi, and yet bisexuality is almost exclusively understood as a cis identity, with trans people stripped of any sexuality beyond “trans” (which is of course a gender identity and not a sexual one!) most of the time.

** Not unlike the way a “gay man” is assumed to be white

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