My doctoral thesis: a collection of six interlinked articles on bisexuality in geography, bisexual citizenship, and empirical work on bisexuality, coming out, disclosure, communities and space in the Netherlands.
9.3 Findings & conclusions
I believe that this study reveals four important findings (1) participants do contest the
coming out imperative, (2) they want to disclose their bisexuality when it is relevant to
them, (3) people find it difficult to express their bisexuality in doings and sayings, and
(4) research participants often passively pass as heterosexual or gay/lesbian because their
doings, sayings, actions, and possible material and visual clues are being read in binary
terms.
As Schatzki (2002, 2008) frequently stresses, practices are not just the manifold of doings
and sayings but organised activities that are governed by a practical understanding,
explicit rules, some general understandings, and a teleoaffective structure. To understand
the coming out practice, it is important to focus on both the practical understanding and
the teleoaffective structure of this practice. The coming out practice is, like every other
practice, a normative practice, however it seems to have, according to the participants, a
very clear-cut and heteronormative build-up. Coming out is mainly a linguistic practice in
which people position themselves, through specific speech-acts, on the sexuality spectrum
as non-heterosexual. In fact, this positioning is understood as the final stage of developing
and accepting one’s sexual identity. At the same time, it also means confessing one’s nonheterosexuality towards heterosexual people and, in the case of people who are bisexual, pansexual, or otherwise non-monosexual, also towards lesbians and gay men (also McLean,
2007, 2008). Confessing implies a hierarchy and the one who needs to confess is lower in
the hierarchy as compared to the ones people are confessing to. This means that bisexuality
is understood as a marginalised (and perhaps inferior) sexual identity as compared to
heterosexuality (and homosexuality). This confessing can be observed in phrases such as
“I need to tell you something”. Finally, the coming out practice means making a big deal
from one’s sexuality – a complete emphasis on one’s sexual identity – whereas there are
different ways to express one’s bisexuality without making it a big deal (see also Wandrey
et al., 2015).
As stated in the introduction of this manuscript, the most important question that framed this
study is “how do bisexuals negotiate their bisexuality in everyday (social) spaces, practices,
and activities?” This research shows that the majority of the research participants contest the
coming out practice or, at least, do not want to participate in this heteronormative practice.
They prefer to disclose their bisexuality instead of actually coming out towards others. In a
recently published article I define disclosing bisexuality as “more or less spontaneously or
reactively expressing one’s bisexuality without confessing it and/or making one’s sexuality
a big deal” (Maliepaard, 2018b, p. 19), and, “I do not conceptualize disclosing one’s sexual
identity as a practice (…) but as an action that takes place while participating in everyday
practices” (Maliepaard, 2018b, p. 19).
When focusing on when and where people actually disclose their bisexuality – in essence,
answering the question which factors and contexts are important in the sexual identity
negotiations of bisexual people – the research participants argue that it needs to be relevant
at that particular point in time. This relevance means that disclosing one’s bisexuality needs
to serve a purpose; it is a means to serve one or more ends. Theodore Schatzki’s notion of
teleoaffectivity and his conceptualisation of conditions of life are fruitful to understanding
bisexual people’s action intelligibility, including their ‘choice’ to disclose or not disclose
their bisexuality. Teleoaffectivity, or individuals’ orientations towards ends and how things
matter, puts participants’ sexual identity negotiations in a different perspective as compared
to most studies on sexual identity management strategies and stigma management. It is not
sufficient to focus on rational decision-making processes. Researchers need to focus on the
whole spectrum of conditions of life: people’s state of beings that include moods, emotions,
stances, principles, attitudes, and actions. As concluded elsewhere:
“Expressing bisexuality manifests a number of life conditions which need to be understood as
ends such as the desire to be valued as a human being, seen as an honest person, accepted as
a friend, family member, or lover, better connecting with others, and sharing one’s life with
other people. We should not read these manifestations as causing one’s expressions but as
actualisations of relating with others in practices. In fact, it is remarkable that most participants,
when reflecting on situations in which they disclosed their bisexual desire and/or identity name
that this disclosure was part of building a stronger connection with people” (Maliepaard, 2018b,
p. 16).
Similarly, as detailed in the same article, not disclosing one’s bisexuality manifests a
number of life conditions besides the notion of ‘not being relevant’: “not in the mood for
drama, not wanting to explain oneself, fearing negativity, uncertainty, others are not ready,
aware of heterosexism and binegativity, not appropriate et cetera” (Maliepaard, 2018b, p.
16). While stereotyping is often mentioned as the primary reason for people to not disclose
one’s bisexuality (e.g. McLean, 2007), this dissertation concludes that only focusing on
binegativity, stereotypes, and harm reduction provides a rather partial picture of people’s
‘choice’ to not reveal their bisexuality. Stereotyping does play a role in people’s sexual
identity negotiations, however, there are more factors in play. For instance, people often
mention that they do not disclose their bisexuality because it is not appropriate to discuss
sexuality and relationships in particular (working) practices or because sexuality is never a
topic during conversations with people they do not have a strong bond with; it is undesirable
to, out of the blue, reveal one’s bisexual identity, desire, attraction, fantasies, et cetera.
Furthermore, research participants experience difficulties in expressing their bisexuality
in doings, sayings, and material and visual clues. They are not aware of specific bisexual
behaviour or doings outside the bedroom. It has been noted in a few studies that bisexual
people suffer from the binary organisation of sex, gender, and sexuality in our contemporary
Western society as bisexual people and their doings, sayings, actions and more are interpreted
in binary ways (e.g. Yoshino, 1999). I believe that heteronormativity, mononormativity, and
compulsory monogamy, as three core discourses (or general understandings), play important
roles in the misinterpretation of bisexual people and their doings, sayings, actions, and
more (chapter three). Because the research participants do not often explicitly disclose their
bisexuality towards others, they are interpreted in binary ways: heterosexual by default and
gay or lesbian the moment they express same-sex desire, behaviour, intimacies, and more.
As shown in chapter five, people, thus, often passively pass as heterosexual, gay, or lesbian
in important parts of their everyday lives. Contrary to most studies, I do not understand
bisexual passing as a predominantly conscious strategy to prevent harm. Of course, people
may be scared of encountering binegativity, monosexism, and stereotyping, but it would be
wrong, as discussed before, to argue that these types of negativity are the main reason why
people pass as heterosexual or as gay/lesbian.
While passing is not necessarily a problem for the research participants, it does impact
people’s participation in practices that together constitute the organised bisexual community
in the Netherlands which are built on the conviction that being visible as bisexual is an
important aspect of living your live as a bisexual person. The emphasis of the Dutch
organised bisexual community on being visible as bisexual individuals and as group
does not match the position of bisexuality in the lives of the research participants and the
everyday practices they are involved with. In chapter five, I show how Schatzki’s theory
of practice helps to understand how people relate with each other by participating in the
same practice and that not being involved in the same practice also has consequences for
relating with others. Bisexual participants find it difficult to relate with the Dutch organised
bisexual community and its members because they do not participate in the practices, e.g.
the bivisibility practice, that constitute this community.
As can be concluded from the different chapters and the above summary, the bisexual
research participants do not often disclose their bisexuality or come out towards others.
Explicit bisexual sayings, wordings, or phrases, but also doings, are mostly absent in most
everyday practices and spaces. There are, however, occasions on which people do disclose
their bisexuality – or their bisexual desire, fantasies, attraction, and/or behaviour – in
sayings. These situations can be best described as moments in which people talk about their
sexuality and/or relationships and give spaces a bisexual appearance. In these moments
it is relevant for people to talk about their bisexuality and these moments can last a few
seconds (brief disclosures) but may also have longer durations when people have more
extensive conversations about sexuality and/or relationships or other conversations in
which disclosing their bisexuality is relevant.
One of the main conclusions is, not surprisingly, that there are no spaces that are always
bisexual. Even participants’ houses or bedrooms may have no bisexual appearances because
of a variety of reasons. I initially proposed the term “pockets” to describe these bisexual
spaces to stress that these spaces are highly temporal, local, and often unplanned. Pockets,
however, may provide the impression that such spaces are isolated and not embedded in
everyday practices. To avoid confusion, and to better connect with existing literature in
the geographies of sexualities, the term “spaces with a bisexual appearance” is introduced
to identify bisexual spaces. This term also points to the idea that spaces have no natural
sexual coding but are constantly subject to both practices and individuals’ doings, sayings,
and actions. As such, it also contributes to further understandings of the sexualisation of
space as a research topic in the geographies of sexualities that goes beyond focusing on
people possessing certain sexual identities or the presence of a heteronormative discourse
that advocates that space is naturally heterosexual.
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