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Reframing Sexuality and Identity Politics with Mark Wilkinson
2.5k Plays3 years ago
Follow Mark Wilkinson on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkJoseph_82
Follow Mark Wilkinson on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markjoseph82/
Mark's "Bisexual Oysters" paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750481318817624
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We're back with part 2 of our interview with Mark Wilkinson, a PhD candidate at Lancaster University studying media representation of the LGBT+ community, and we pick right up where we left off, analyzing the use of the word "bisexual" in the British press during the 80s, 90s, and through 2017. Mark discusses how the term became much more widely used during the AIDS/HIV crisis and the implications of that association, as well as how it shifted to becoming more of an identity in the 2000s as opposed to a word describing behavior or sexual activity.
We also chatted about changes happening just in the last few years, like the rise of the term "pansexual" and a push for more "queer" spaces. Then we talked about challenging basic assumptions about sexuality, like the fact that gender is the basis for most labels, as opposed to, for example, what sexual acts turn you on or your preferred relationship structure. Finally we touched on queer politics and the power of linguistics to both divide and unite.
Two Bi Guys is produced and edited by Rob Cohen
Created by Rob Cohen and Alex Boyd
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:01
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Hello everyone, this is Rob. You are about to listen to Two Bye Guys.
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But first, I am excited again to announce that not only is the first half of this season of Two Bye Guys sponsored by Zencaster, but the second half as well. Zencaster is what I use to record the podcasts in Season 3.
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I've talked a lot about that stuff in the past. I signed up for Zencaster before they were a sponsor of the show because of that, because they record each person locally and then upload it. I knew that that was quite important after doing it myself for the first couple seasons, and it has been so worth it. It really is crystal clear and it sounds like we're in the same room.
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but you can quickly and easily complete your post-production and have your transcript auto-generated for you. Zencaster is the modern web-based solution for the everyday and professional podcaster. I know a lot of you have used our discount code already, which is so awesome. I can't wait to see what people come out with, whether it's in this space of LGBT or bisexual interviews or something else.
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Interview with Mark Wilkinson
00:02:12
Speaker
you
00:02:18
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Two Bye Guys. We have part two of my interview with Mark Wilkinson today about the evolving use of the word bisexual from 1957 to 2017. If you missed the first half, go back and listen. It's fascinating. We talked about Mark's identity and how he got into this research. And we also talked about the use of the word bisexual from the 50s through the 70s.
00:02:45
Speaker
it was often used not the way we use it now. I mean, most often it was not used the way we use it now to describe a sexuality, but more often used to describe things like co-ed spaces or things like unisex items or like clothing or other things, or it was used to describe animals or organisms with characteristics of more than one gender.
00:03:07
Speaker
which we have different words for today, not bisexual.
Evolution of 'Bisexual' in the 80s
00:03:11
Speaker
In today's episode, Mark is going to tell us about the use of the word from the 80s up until 2017. I hesitate to say up until today because a lot has happened since 2017. We talk a little about that at the end.
00:03:25
Speaker
But in the 80s and 90s, it really started to get used more the way we use it today, but for interesting reasons and not always great reasons, so you'll hear that. Before we get into it, I do just want to reiterate since we kind of talked about this in the first episode, but I want to state it again. This is not an episode about the history of the bisexual movement.
00:03:48
Speaker
it is about the history of how the word was used in the British press. And Marx studied the British press as sort of a representative sample, but of course it doesn't represent everything. But it is useful to see how it changed over time in a society that is in some ways culturally similar to ours.
00:04:08
Speaker
So this is not necessarily about how bisexual people represented themselves. I want to make that clear. But it's about how the word bisexual is represented in mainstream culture. And often, the people writing these articles or running the newspaper, probably more often than not, were not bisexual themselves. And also, many of the people consuming this content, probably most people, were not bisexual at the time or were not out yet.
00:04:36
Speaker
So this isn't about the movement. It's about mainstream representation. But I do think there are really important implications based on how this word was used. It can help us understand biphobia and biracial and why there are so many misunderstandings and misconceptions from society when we come out as bisexual today because the history of the word influences how people hear that and receive it even today.
00:05:02
Speaker
but we are not talking about actual bi or queer movements. We're not talking about the way things should be. We're talking about how bisexuality was framed more broadly on a cultural level and how it changed over time, often not to the benefit of the bi community.
00:05:18
Speaker
So I just wanted to state that and I wanted to remind you that we always have to remember who holds power in our society under capitalism. Journalism can be an agent of change, of course, but the Times of London, which is what Mark studied, is not necessarily an institution that's tearing down societal norms or advocating radical change.
00:05:39
Speaker
In fact, it's a bit right of center, which is why Mark chose it. Go back to the first part to hear more about why he chose it. But it's an institution that's primarily upholding the status quo and reflecting dominant power structures. So I just wanted to frame this a little bit, frame part two, since what we talked about in part one may have faded from your mind a little.
00:06:01
Speaker
I think this research is really important to understanding how people view bisexuality, where biracial and biphobia comes from. So it's really fascinating and important for us to understand, but it's not about our movement from the inside out. It's about other people looking at us from the outside. So I just wanted to frame that and now enjoy part two of my interview with Mark Wilkinson.
00:06:32
Speaker
And then moving on to the 80s, when you finally do, you have 92% of all usages of bisexual reference, bisexual, bisexuality as a sexual identity.
00:06:44
Speaker
Okay, so we've gone from in the 60s, it's around 30%. In the 70s, it's around 66%, around two thirds. And then by the 80s, 92%, it's being used similarly to how it's used today. Yeah. So I knew that, you know, didn't always mean this, but that's interesting to see exactly how it rose, you know, through those decades.
00:07:09
Speaker
Okay, and then but then go on because I know there's some specific context to the 80s and yeah, it's used more in the way It's used today. There's a specific reason for that. So yeah, it co-occurs almost simultaneously with the the rise of the HIV and AIDS epidemic
00:07:29
Speaker
And so you find like, so the decade that I was looking at is 79 to 90, and I can see the dates, right? So like from about 82 or 83, when they first identify people with AIDS, HIV and AIDS in the UK, they start talking about, obviously it's a pandemic. I mean, you're living through one right now. They're looking for
00:07:50
Speaker
Sources right like where is this where's this disease coming from and of course as in the us and most of the world it was at the time especially it was associated with a quote-unquote homosexual promiscuity.
00:08:05
Speaker
But all of a sudden you have this, um, it almost becomes like, like they become partners in crime. Like they're just always together. They say homosexual and bisexual men, homosexual and bisexual, homosexual and bisexual men. And it becomes like this stock phrase, you know, and it's used, um, homosexuality is often, uh, used to explain the increase in infections and deaths within gay men.
00:08:32
Speaker
But bisexuality and bisexual people, when it is used outside of the sort of stop phrase, homosexual and bisexual men, bisexual people are described as like a vector of transmission, right?
Impact of AIDS on Bisexual Identity
00:08:48
Speaker
So it's like you have to be careful because there are these secret bisexuals everywhere who are having sex with men, contracting the HIV virus and then spreading it to their
00:08:57
Speaker
partners or wives, families, et cetera. So it's a really, really, well, I mean, it's incredibly disturbing, right? That this is kind of the way in which bisexual sort of became concretized as a sexual identity was through the HIV and AIDS epidemic, or at least within the times. That's not necessarily true everywhere, but at least within the time.
00:09:18
Speaker
Right. But your thesis of this research is that the times is reflective in some way of the overall culture. And you wrote in the paper that the word bisexual in this era, half the time it was used in reference to the HIV-AIDS crisis. So that's quite a lot. I mean, I assume it went from almost zero in the 60s and 70s to half the uses are in reference to this pandemic.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, over half. Yeah. Yeah. I also, I just found it so interesting now living through this other pandemic. I mean, obviously a very different scenario, because this one is transmitted in the air and not just sexually. But, you know, we're like, we're learning in this pandemic time, like, we're learning new things about
00:10:07
Speaker
the virus and we're learning a new language about the virus and like I've done so much research I never thought I would do of like how does this transmit and why and like where where does it transmit and it's interesting to look back at the word bisexual as like during the HIV AIDS crisis
00:10:25
Speaker
people were wondering, oh, gay men are getting this, but then how are straight people getting this? Or how are women getting this? And the word bisexual, it was sort of like a technical answer to this logic problem almost. Or that was how I saw it. It was like describing this behavior that leads to transmission. Very like technical thing.
00:10:47
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, they were like considered a vector of disease. And that that actually continues through until now. I think that there is still a sense in which like, you know, bisexual people, when they're portrayed in media, maybe not so much now, but definitely throughout for many years were portrayed as like promiscuous, right? Greedy. They need to have lots of partners like they can't just settle on one gender. They have to have more than one gender. Right.
00:11:14
Speaker
And a lot of this comes back to this idea that you have these people who are spreading a virus because they're so sexually voracious. I mean, this is the way it was really represented in the times, which is terrifying. Yeah. And most people alive today were alive at this time. And so this was the first time they encountered this word for many people, anyone who was born in the 70s or beyond.
00:11:44
Speaker
It puts a lot of things in context and helps you understand, especially why like anyone over 40 basically has to reframe what bisexual means or doesn't have to. But, you know, is in that mindset because that was their first, you know, the first time they heard it. I mean, on a personal note, you know, like I'm a little bit older than you, I think. And so when I came out in like the it was like the early to mid 90s, like my mother was would have been terrified.
00:12:12
Speaker
Because being gay was not still a death sentence, but there was this connection between disease and sexual identity that took a long time to wane.
00:12:30
Speaker
And I should mention as well, though, because I think that it's important that it wasn't just bisexual people that were considered a vector. It was also, of course, intravenous drug users, prostitutes. But there's also a lot of talk of Africans as well and Haitians. So there's a lot of like racist representation as well. Like, you know, not only do you have like these promiscuous bisexual people, but also Haitians and Africans are going to give you AIDS as well. So don't go to Africa. Wow.
00:12:58
Speaker
Right. Yeah. It's really, really disturbing really because it was like it wasn't instead of like now. And I think that we do have a little bit of it now in terms of like, you know, debates around who gets vaccinated and who doesn't, you know, like at the time, if you got AIDS, you were culpable for getting AIDS. Right. You were culpable for having HIV. That was your fault. Right. You know, and like that's something that was very dangerous and I think had a lot of like negative consequences for bisexual people.
00:13:26
Speaker
Yeah, because it's about this choice of this homosexual lifestyle, which you wrote about in there. And it's more about the act of gay sex than your identity or what I view queerness as is like an open-mindedness or rebellion against heteronormativity or pushing back against norms. Whereas at this time, it's like
00:13:53
Speaker
portray it as this selfish choice to have gay sex and spread a disease. Very kind of binary way of thinking. Which is why Reagan took longer to act, but Thatcher took years to act as well. They were like, well, we're not going to help these people because they brought it on themselves. It wasn't until the transmission had really taken off within the
00:14:18
Speaker
heterosexual population that then you started to have government responses to the pandemic.
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah. And it's also just interesting, this context, because like, you know, you did come out in the 90s. I didn't come out till way later in life. I grew, I was born in 85. And so I grew up at like, the tail end of this. And it kind of makes me think, no wonder I didn't come out, because probably most of the time I heard these words, especially by which might have applied to me,
00:14:49
Speaker
you know, is about this AIDS crisis and this pandemic and not portrayed as a positive thing to aspire to. And so, no wonder I just kind of pushed it out and never even really seriously considered it until I was 30. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the thing with representation. That's sort of the point of the whole project, not just
00:15:09
Speaker
the analysis of bisexuality but the analysis of all sexual identities is that the ways in which they are represented have a significant impact on the ways in which people are treated, the access that they have to things like healthcare, housing, employment, etc. So the times I think
00:15:31
Speaker
I don't want to get in trouble for libel, but you know that there are certain articles which would be culpable for people's prejudices. Let's move on to the next decade. Are we ready? Yes. So the 90s up until 2003.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah, so then it becomes a little bit like this is sort of contemporary, right? You know, in the sense that I think that there's a lot of similarities between the 90s and the early 2000s. But in England, they would call it the naughties, right? So basically, during this time, there is
00:16:21
Speaker
What i noticed most of all was that of course there's a significant increase in the amount of the amount of representation right so like you start to have i mean it was already at ninety two percent so we can assume that from.
00:16:36
Speaker
from 91 to 2003 and from 2004 to 2017, then it would have probably been 100% of the time or near 100% of the time it would have referred to sexual identity. There's two things that are really relevant in this period. And the first one is that, and I would kind of like collapse the two decades together, like I was saying, right? The 90s and the early 2000s.
00:17:07
Speaker
is that you tend the majority of discussion of bisexual people that exist, right? That aren't characters in film, television, and theater. The software that I have, you can look at the language patterns, as I was saying, right? So you can see that one of the most common words that goes with bisexual is the historical past, was or were.
00:17:34
Speaker
So most people are described as they were bisexual, I was bisexual. And so there's this sense in which bisexuality is temporally displaced, right? And I think that this is something that people still have a hard time wrapping their heads around. They're like, how can you be bisexual if you're married to a woman? Or if you're a cis man married to a cis woman? Or how can you be bisexual if you're a cis woman married to a cis man?
00:18:04
Speaker
right? Because there's this assumption that in order to be bisexual, you would have to be polyamorous, right? And having relationships with multiple genders at all times. And so you see that when they do talk about people who were considered, who they acknowledged were bisexual,
00:18:22
Speaker
For instance, I have here, they're talking about Leonardo da Vinci, the Gales, Lord Byron's sister, et cetera. For each one, they would say they were bisexual. Now, they're of course dead, right? But then they do talk about people that are alive as well. And they as well would say, you know, that like there's, I can't remember who it was, but it was
00:18:46
Speaker
a celebrity and she's like oh when my when i have grandkids i'll tell them about how i was bisexual interest rate so it's considered not only that it can't be taking place. At one time like but it also is a phase
00:19:04
Speaker
So it discredits the identity, right? You know, like you have like, this is an era when especially gay men and lesbians start to become really accepted, right? Or at least represented as being accepted. Obviously, healthcare, housing, all of these things are still a struggle for a lot of lesbian and gay men. But when it came to bisexuality, it was still represented as a phase or as something that
00:19:33
Speaker
I used to be bisexual but I'm not anymore because I can't be because I can't be with both genders at the time at the same time or I'm not with both genders at the same time. So that's one of the main findings.
00:19:45
Speaker
That's really, it's just so interesting that it's like seen as without even using the word phase necessarily how the language and the grammar makes you think that anyway by putting it in the past and by like, oh, it's got to be about like your current activities or your lifestyle as opposed to the identity, right? So it erases the
00:20:10
Speaker
the way we think of it now, I mean, I like to use Robin Oak's definition is it's about the possibility or the, you know, the potential inside of a person as an identity, you know, and that's a potential doesn't always go away. It can be there even if you're married and monogamous. But that sort of Robin Oak's definition is clearly a pushback to
00:20:37
Speaker
this kind of use of making it a lifestyle or a thing that has to be happening right now actively. So anyway, it's just very interesting. It's interesting. Yeah, I know. And I finally found a percentage here.
Challenges in Bisexual Representation
00:20:51
Speaker
67% of the examples discussing bisexuality or bisexual individuals occurred within discourses of the past.
00:21:01
Speaker
So they were preceded by was, were, were. Wow. So like two thirds, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they may, there may have been some occasions where they said they are bisexual, but not, not very many, not very much at all. So that's the, the sort of the main finding for the latter years. And then also that throughout all 60 years of the corpus, the majority of representation of bisexual people is, and I've mentioned this several times is in the review section.
00:21:31
Speaker
So bisexuality is represented as either being fictional or as not existing in the present. And this is not something that I have found myself. I mean, there's been lots of research done on this, like Duplessie, Angelides,
00:21:51
Speaker
a couple of other scholars who I cite at the end of the paper, that they have all argued this, that there is a displacement, a temporal displacement and a fictional displacement. You don't exist in the present, you don't exist in reality. In reality, right. You're fictional or in the past, but there's no real live bisexual people here right now.
00:22:18
Speaker
And it's interesting because nobody's saying that directly, but that's what the language is sort of telling us subconsciously or, you know, of course, of course. And then the final thing that I was going to say is that in we start to see it in coverage of the HIV and AIDS epidemic or pandemic is that they the collocation and collocation means two words that go together. So the ways in which it was gay or homosexual and bisexual
00:22:46
Speaker
or it was connected by a comma or a slash, kind of collapsed bisexuals within like the umbrella of homosexuality, right? And then once you get into the 2000s, and we have this new abbreviation LGBT, right, which is supposed to be inclusive,
00:23:06
Speaker
I think to a certain extent, and you know, I think that Shiri Eisner put it really well in her book, Bisexual Revolution, when she talks about GGGG, right? Like, it's just gay, gay, gay, and gay, right? Like, we're supposed to believe that it's LGBT, but it's really, it's usually talking about white, middle class, cisgender men, and lesbians often, but even that, not very often, it's usually just talking about white guys.
00:23:34
Speaker
Right? And so the thing is, is that, again, you finally have this sort of
00:23:41
Speaker
inclusion that we're supposed to see it through as representing this opportunity to include four different identities, but only four for a while until they start adding extra letters. But it's erasure through conflation. It's conflating all of these identities and it's not actually allowing for representation.
00:24:06
Speaker
and bisexual people and bisexuality is still probably one of the least represented of the sexual identities that are most commonly covered in The Times.
00:24:17
Speaker
despite actually being one of the most common words that people within the community identify with. The recent studies show that about half of the LGBT community will use the B, which is interesting that it's then half the time in this era, we don't just talk about the B, half the time bisexual is used, it's in that acronym, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender.
00:24:47
Speaker
It was well over half of the occurrences. Oh, wow. Like well over half. I'm not sure if I can find the exact percentage, but the point being that, yeah. And it's the same argument that's been made about other identities within the LGBT acronym or LGBTQI or anything. It's like, is it really useful to have the acronym or the abbreviation? Good question. And I don't know.
00:25:11
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know if it is. I think that again, it goes back to what we were saying at the very beginning of the discussion, which is that, you know, strategic essentialism, it's like saying like, okay, like we need to say that we are a community with a shared history to a certain extent and shared political goals in order to achieve some sort of recognition, access.
00:25:32
Speaker
etc. But the thing is that ultimately, it doesn't really fulfill its promise, right? Right. It has that political upside, but then it also has this erasing of the individual identities within it, and so it's a double-edged sword in a way. Exactly.
00:25:57
Speaker
The final thing to say is that, of course, the sort of epilogue to all of this is that this ends in 2017. So it's interesting that I would imagine that it's probably increased. And I teach young people, so sort of between
00:26:14
Speaker
like 17, 18 into their mid-20s usually. And there has been a move away from the use of bisexual because there are young people who feel that it reifies the gender binary.
'Pansexual' vs 'Bisexual'
00:26:29
Speaker
The bi implies binary. So it doesn't imply more like plurisexual identity that you know you're interested in more than one gender.
00:26:37
Speaker
Right? As opposed to like, like plurisexual as opposed to monosexual, like heterosexual or homosexual. And so you start to see an increase in the use of the term pansexual. And that's where the paper ends, is that in the 2017, it's going up like from like 2014, it appears and then it starts to increase and increase and increase up until 2017. And I don't know what's happened since then because I haven't had time to go back and look, but. Right.
00:27:05
Speaker
I think that a lot of people have pushed back on this i think would be interesting to your perspective as well because i think that you know a lot of bisexual people are like that's what it's always like it's always meant more than one gender not only to write but i think that some young younger people without necessarily knowing the history which is no fault of their own well.
00:27:25
Speaker
Not necessarily any fault of their own. Just don't know the history of bisexuality and the organizing and the affordances that this term has provided to people who are interested in more than one gender.
00:27:41
Speaker
Yeah, no, actually, this was going to be my next question to you, because it's at the end of this paper. And it is something we talk about a ton on here, because it comes up a lot on Twitter and at my bi meetings in New York City, constantly we're doing this bi versus pan thing. And I have a lot of thoughts on it. And I do wonder if it's a useful debate or not. I'm curious what you think, because
00:28:09
Speaker
right? Like, to me, yeah, okay, bi means two, so bisexual could mean two, and that could uphold the gender binary in a semantic way, right? And if you don't know the history of it, you would think that. And so that totally makes sense to gravitate toward pansexual. And I do identify as pansexual and bisexual because they both
00:28:30
Speaker
essentially are overlapping to me. But then when I went to these meetings and met by people, and especially met by people who are older than me, who have been identifying that way for a while, or no other bisexual people in the 70s, 80s, 90s,
00:28:47
Speaker
almost all of them view bisexuality as non-binary to just men and women. Almost everyone I've met has attractions to more than one gender and not only two. I mean, the people I've met who say I'm only attracted to men and women and not
00:29:08
Speaker
trans or non-binary people is I can count them on my hand and multiple of them have later changed their mind on that. I even know one person who said that to me and now they identify as non-binary or trans themselves. So I don't know. I don't really know what the answer is. My personal answer is to just talk about it and talk about
00:29:33
Speaker
the fact that I identify as bi and pan and to me they're overlapping. But it is like this interesting semantic issue of
00:29:42
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. What do you think is, I guess it goes back to the same thing we're talking about of like, when it's useful to differentiate and when it's useful to come together, although in this case, I'm like, is the differentiation useful because it's based on a semantics thing that isn't actually the reality of the bi community? Yeah, I think I think that's really key is that that
00:30:11
Speaker
people realize that bisexual doesn't reference necessarily the binary. It doesn't reify the binary. You know what reifies the binary? Like patriarchy reifies the binary. It's like when this happens a lot in the UK, you'll get articles in the Times where people are having a connection fit because a trans model has been lip filler and they're like, oh, well, she's upholding
00:30:38
Speaker
you know, like these stereotypes and these gender norms. And it's like, no, like the trans community is not responsible for that. Like we know who's responsible for that. So it's like this weird kind of like, um, placing like a lot of responsibility and a lot of pressure on a word and an identity. I would say that, I mean, I'm kind of like, ideally like, like an abolitionist in the sense that like, I'm not sure that moving forward, I think for the time being, yes, having, having distinctions is, it's,
00:31:08
Speaker
perhaps useful, but I think that in the long term, I think you see it happening already instead of people saying LGBTQI, just saying queer, like kind of collapsing a lot of these things because, you know, so many, especially working with young people, like I know so many people that like they're
00:31:24
Speaker
their sexual identity is so, for lack of a better term, complex compared to mine, that like, like, there's not a single word. And if they do have a word, it's like a series of words, you know, like, I'm, I'm non binary, pansexual, yada, yada. And it's like, well, like, you know, is it useful to have those terms? And I don't know if it divides or if it brings people together. And I think that ultimately,
00:31:50
Speaker
It comes back to this question of, you know, neoliberal identity politics. It's like, are we trying to achieve representation so that we can have access to pre-existing institutions like recognition of our romantic relationships, et cetera? Or do we just want to dismantle the entire thing?
00:32:10
Speaker
Like, imagine a world where sexual identity is not based on which gender you're interested in, but like, what you're into. You know what I mean? Like, it could be anything, you know? Like, we accept it, and this is the point also, and this is very theoretical, so I won't go into it too much, but like, we accept so many things as being just common sense, but they're like, so the idea of like, a gender binary and being attracted to one gender or another, or both genders,
00:32:38
Speaker
But that is the product of the Enlightenment, probably going back to the Renaissance. We've had so many different ways of understanding gender and sexuality, not just in the West, but also throughout the world, that it could come to a point where we don't really need them anymore and we can move beyond it.
00:32:59
Speaker
What everybody needs is a different political and economic settlement so that we can address things like climate change, so that we can address things like health care and education and housing.
Future of Identity Labels
00:33:11
Speaker
And I'm not sure that the arguing about semantics will get us there.
00:33:19
Speaker
I couldn't agree more. It's funny. I was just talking to the guy who created this app called Hetero that is an app to connect based on a mutual interest in oral sex. And there's no sexuality labels. There are gender labels and then you can say what genders
00:33:40
Speaker
you're interested in, but there's no label for gay, bisexual, lesbian. It's just like you said, let's connect based on what we're into. And that could be the future. Why is everything in our entire, I'm a bi, white, Jewish man, why is the bi part because I'm
00:34:01
Speaker
of the gender I'm attracted to, such an important identifier. I mean, in the queer utopia future, that's a rhetorical question. It shouldn't be. In the present, I do identify as bi because I want to knock people out of the binary way of thinking because I was trapped in it for so long and I didn't see sexual fluidity as an option. And so to me, my bi identities
00:34:31
Speaker
my way to represent sexual fluidity and to put that out there. But then it's the buy pan thing. If you want to do that with the word buy, if you want to do that with the word pan because that makes more sense to you, fine. That seems very
00:34:53
Speaker
of the moment, all of these words and all of these debates. And it's based on what the status quo is or what pan people, what do we think by means? Oh, I don't want to mean that. But the goal, as you're saying, of all of that to me is to get to the united place of
00:35:12
Speaker
queer, of queerness and of then taking it to the next level. And yes, our individual identities are important, but our collective oppression and pushing back against it is much more important because there's so many people who can't fight back against this stuff and we need to really radically change things and not just about sexual identity, but
00:35:36
Speaker
climate change and systems of government and representation. So I do think it's like, I'm kind of ready to get past this bi versus pan thing, but at the same time, it is the entry point for many people into queerness. And to get to identifying as queer, we have to be kind of specific at first sometimes and help people feel comfortable kind of joining the cause.
00:36:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really nice way to kind of sum it up. Absolutely. I think that there's a really good book called The Transgender Issue, and it's written from the perspective of the UK. It's written by an author named Sean Fay. And she talks about, it's sort of a play on the idea of the transgender issue because there's this big debate in the UK about female-only spaces, et cetera, et cetera.
Societal Structures vs Identity Semantics
00:36:31
Speaker
And ultimately what she says is,
00:36:33
Speaker
It's not necessarily about trans rights, it's about like...
00:36:37
Speaker
demands for a socialism wherein if you have women's refuges, there's enough women's refuges that solving the problem of having enough spaces of safety would eliminate the problem of scarcity and people being like, well, there's not enough spaces and now we have people who identify as female that weren't born female. You know what I'm saying? So it's like you need to look at greater structures of oppression and then think about how perhaps
00:37:07
Speaker
paying attention to things like the semantics are not the most important thing. It's thinking about transformational politics and a radical new future.
00:37:21
Speaker
Lovely. I love it. Well, I could ask you a million more questions and maybe I'll have you come back as you continue working on your PhD. I would love to. Thank you so much, Mark. Your research is really interesting and helps put a lot of stuff that we've talked about here into some really good context. And I'm really glad you did that research and good luck with the rest of what you're doing and your PhD.
00:37:49
Speaker
Thank you, and thank you so much for having me. I love your podcast. Oh, thank you. I'm really honored to be on it. You feel really cool. Thank you so much. It was great to have you in chat. Thanks for being here, Mark. Thank you. Thank you. And I will see you again soon, I hope.
00:38:03
Speaker
Yes, keep us posted on any new developments, especially if you study what's going on even more recently, because you have to separate the eras into like a couple of years, because it's changing very fast. Exactly. Exactly. By next season of Two Bigas, the word bisexual could mean a totally new thing. Let's hope so, so I have something to write about. Yeah. Keep me out of trouble.
00:38:31
Speaker
All right, thanks again, Mark. It was great to have you. Thank you. Have a great day. Bye. Two Bye Guys is edited and produced by me, Rob Cohen, and it was created by me and Alex Boyd. Our music is by Ross Mincer, our logo art is by Caitlin Weinman, and we are supported by the Gotham, formerly IFP. Thanks for listening to Two Bye Guys.