Similar and equal relationships? Negotiating bisexuality in an enduring relationship

Abstract

In the public debate in Finland, same-sex couples’ right to legal recognition is routinely defended by stressing their sameness to heterosexual couples within the discourse of romantic love. This article explores how bisexual women and their partners use these discourses. The five couple interviews were analyzed by implementing discourse analysis. The results highlight how, when taking positions within the discourse of the enduring couple relationship, the interviewees drew on the discourse of romantic love. Woman’s bisexuality disappeared easily in this talk. Although it seemed effortless at first sight, negotiations and affective tensions arose when the interviewees tried to fit their relationship into the normative discourse: Is our relationship like traditional heterosexual relationship or is it more equal? Are we similar or are we different? What role does woman’s bisexuality have in our relationship? Close reading of these negotiations revealed the hierarchies and norms related to gender and (bi)sexuality that constitute the enduring relationship discourse.

Keywords

bisexuality discourse analysis heteronormativity monogamy same-sex marriage affective tension

The discourse of romantic love and marriage has dominated the Finnish public debate on same-sex relationships. In the long and heated media debate on registered partnership at the turn of the millennium, same-sex couples’ right to legal recognition was defended by emphasizing their equal worth and similarity to heterosexual relationships within the discourse of romantic love (Charpentier, 2001; Kaskisaari, 1997). The discourse of sameness is paradoxically a production of the hierarchical homo–hetero distinction (Clarke, 2002; Richardson, 2005; Young & Boyd, 2006). When nonheterosexual relationships are explained as similar to heterosexual relationships, the issue is one of normalization (Butler, 2004; Clarke, 2003; Warner, 2000).

With the adoption of the registered partnership law in 2003 in Finland, the normalizing discourses have strengthened. The “I do 2013” campaign, launched in support of a gender-neutral marriage law, succeeded in collecting 166,851 signatures. Finally, after the Legal Affairs Committee of the Finnish parliament had voted twice against the citizens’ initiative, the Finnish parliament, on 28 November, 2014, voted narrowly to allow gender-neutral marriage. Finland has thus made the first step to join the 18 countries and 32 states in the United States where same-sex marriage has been adopted in the course of the 21st century (International lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex association (ILGA), 2014). Allowing same-sex couples to legally marry puts them on equal terms with heterosexual couples and thus challenges the basic assumptions of heterosexual hegemony: that marriage and parenting are founded on gender difference. These are the main two reasons why same-sex marriage continues to meet with strong resistance and antipathy in Finland (cf. Jowett, 2014).

The “I do 2013” campaign’s black and white campaign poster portrayed two men wearing old-fashioned suits and hair styles. It was accompanied with the text “Honour tradition.” Although this contains an element of parody–the gay male couple can hardly be considered traditional in the conservative sense (Jowett, 2014)–the campaign nevertheless chose to adopt this concept for its own purposes. The desire in the politics of the lesbian and gay equal rights movement for sameness within the traditional heterosexual marriage model has also been criticized from feminist and queer perspectives (Barker, 2012; Butler, 1990; Clarke, 2003; Richardson, 2005; Rolfe & Peel, 2011; Warner, 2000). Marriage has been treated as an institutionalized form of heterosexuality that promotes hierarchical gender relations between the spouses: unequal division of finances, care, household chores, and emotion work (Barker, 2012; Duncombe & Marsden, 1993; Rolfe & Peel, 2011). These unequal patterns can also find their way into nonheterosexual marriages (Gotta et al., 2011).

Campaigning for same-sex marriage also narrows the imaginative horizons of living in close relationships (Barker, 2012; Butler, 2004; McLean, 2004). In the discourse of sameness to heterosexuality that draws on romantic love, it is difficult to articulate heterogeneity within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) community and engage with inequalities linked to, for example, gendered, classed, and racialized positions, and disability (Browne, 2011; Heaphy, Smart, & Einarsdottir, 2013; Young & Boyd, 2006). As a result, diverse queer lives that do not conform to this norm are marginalized even further and rendered invisible (Butler, 2004; McLean, 2004). The Finnish “I do 2013” campaign was often referred to in the media as promoting “gay marriage” with the emphasis on the right to marry of “same-sex couples.” In these discourses, there is very little room to address issues other than those of assumed cisgendered homosexual couples, for example, that of making diverse trans-identities and bisexualities visible (Eisner, 2013).

In the benchmark study by Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan, (2001), British nonheterosexuals interviewed between 1995 and 1996 often stressed their wish to explore unconventional ways of arranging intimate relationships and to make “life experiments.” Yet a decade later (2009 and 2010), young British couples who had entered civil partnerships described their relationships in terms of ordinariness (Heaphy et al., 2013). A similar shift has been seen in Scandinavia (Rydström, 2011) and also in Finland (Kuosmanen, 2007).

Bisexuality in a relationship

But how does the common understanding of bisexuality as hypersexual and promiscuous (Gustavson, 2009; Hayfield, Clarke, & Halliwell, 2014; Kangasvuo, 2014; Klesse, 2005) fit with what constitutes an ordinary relationship in a discourse drawing strongly on “marriage and family?” Not without tension: bisexuals often wish to challenge the notion of bisexuality as nonmonogamous by necessity, but many also explore relational constellations other than normative exclusive relationships (Gustavson, 2009; Kangasvuo, 2011; McLean, 2004; Rust, 1996). Equating this with an assumption that bisexuals will always cheat on their partners, or that they are not capable of long-term commitment, is problematic (Kangasvuo, 2014; McLean, 2004). It renders invisible the variety of ways bisexuals arrange and negotiate their monogamous and nonmonogamous relationships (Gustavson, 2009; Klesse, 2005; McLean, 2004; Rust, 1996). Particularly within normatively monogamous couplings, bisexuality is largely invisible: individuals in dyadic relationships tend to be regarded as either heterosexual or homosexual (Callis, 2009; Gustavson, 2009).

In Butler’s (1990) theory of performativity, gender and sexuality are seen as mutually constitutive. The normalcy of heterosexuality is produced through constrained repetitions of two intelligible genders whose biological bodies, social roles, and (mutual) desires combine coherently according to a heterosexual matrix. In this frame, bisexuality can be treated alongside lesbian and gay as an identity that threatens the coherence of this matrix. Bisexuality as sexuality creates gender trouble because, not bound to only one object choice, it is not easily matched to a gender (Callis, 2009; Gustavson, 2009; Hemmings, 2002). However, bisexual performative acts are routinely interpreted as homosexual or heterosexual, which contributes to bisexuality being a relatively silenced form of sexuality (Barker & Langdridge, 2008; Callis, 2009; Haasjoki, 2012; Hemmings, 2002).

Regarding the cultural power and topicality of the trope of similarity between heterosexual and homosexual relationships in the discourse of romantic love and marriage, it is important to address its effects on the relational life of people whose relationships or desire transcend the homo/heterosexual binary–namely bisexual women and their partners. In this article, I study the uses and effects of the normalizing relationship discourses prompted by the debate on registered partnerships in Finland, and which have been strengthened by the “I do 2013” campaign. I show how bisexual women and their partners, whom I interviewed as couples in 2005, use these discourses when making their lives intelligible to themselves and others and, more precisely, how the more or less hidden hierarchies related to genders and sexualities emerge and produce tensions in this talk. Finally, I explore how and when bisexuality figures in the interviewed couples’ talk, and when the homosexual–heterosexual binary is drawn on as a discursive resource.

Procedure

The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with five couples–bisexual women and their partners–that I conducted in 2005. Two of the bisexual women had a female partner, two were together with a man, and one woman’s partner was a transman. The participants were recruited through a research request aimed at bisexual women and their partners, which was sent to various (student) mailing lists. The majority of the participants who responded had seen it on a Finnish mailing list targeted to lesbian women and women interested in women. One couple had been forwarded the request by a friend.

At the time of the interviews, the participants were aged 22–42. They were relatively well educated: seven of the participants had or were pursuing a higher education degree, three had vocational qualifications. This is a typical demographic in the studies on bisexuality: young, well-educated women tend to compose the largest part of the sample (Hartman, 2011; Kangasvuo, 2014). Participants’ relationships had lasted from three to seven years and all were cohabiting. The interviews were conducted in the participants’ homes, in four Finnish towns. They lasted from one and half hours to four hours. I interviewed the couples together, posing one question at a time and letting the couple discuss it freely. If only one partner answered, I tried to ensure that both of them got their voices heard by asking also the other partner’s perspective to the matter. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed using a simplified version of Jefferson’s (2004) system. Interviews were semi-structured and organized around the following themes: relationship ideals, current situation in life, history of the relationship, family and friends of the couple, gender and (bi)sexuality in the relationship, and couples’ future plans. As a method of eliciting the norm against which the couples compared their own relationship, I asked how similar or different to other relationships they thought their relationship was.

Following Butler’s (1991) idea of identities as often produced to a request to speak from a certain position, the research request can be considered as an invitation to talk as a bisexual woman, as a bisexual woman’s partner and as a (bi)couple. Instead of producing uniform bisexual or bicouple identities, the invitation initiated negotiations of intelligible identity categories and discourses defining the subject (Butler, 1991). Although the woman’s bisexuality was discussed, it was not the most central theme in the interviews or the definer of the couples’ relationships in an identity installing manner. Instead of centering on bisexuality as such, gendered relationship talk dominated the couple interviews. In this talk, the interviewees often positioned their relationship within the homo–hetero distinction or as a trans couple on the basis of their partner’s gender.

As a scholar, I thus faced the question of how to refer to the couples. As the interviewees positioned themselves differently in the course of the interviews, sometimes, for example, on the basis of their (bi)sexuality and sometimes on the basis of the form of their relationship, they could not be described solely as bicouples, whereas to refer to them as heterosexual or homosexual (or nonheterosexual) couples on the basis of their partner’s gender was not appropriate either. I thus decided to refer to them as female couples (Heidi and Anna, Nina and Linda), other-sex couples (Helena and Erik, Paula and Thomas), and as a trans couple (Johanna and Max), which was a term used by the partners themselves (all names are pseudonyms).

I conducted the analysis¹ implementing Foucauldian discourse analysis (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008). Following Foucault’s (1981) thinking on subjectification and discursive power that both enables and delimits the possibilities of subjects to emerge, I paid attention to how the interviewees used cultural resources: the already existing relationship discourses and the subject positions enabled by them. Combining this approach with that more familiar to discursive psychology (Wiggins & Potter, 2008), I observed how language was used in the conversational context of the interviews. Inspired by the psychosocial approach (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000; Roseneil, 2006; Smith & Shin, 2014), I paid attention to investments in certain discourses and identity categories as well as to discrepancies and tensions in such investments.

When reading and rereading the data, it became evident that although the couples invested strongly in some relationship discourses, there were also notable tensions when positioning themselves and their relationships in these discourses. Following Butler (1990), I regard the relationship discourses produced in the interviews as regulatory ideals that couples can imitate, but never perfectly repeat. My aim was to not only to identify the discourses and what they consisted of but also to identify the affective tensions that arise when failing to fit in to these discourses. Reading the data in this way, the meaning of bisexuality also started to emerge. It would not be addressed as a strong identity, but as something emerging between the lines.

Analysis

The central discourses in the relationship talk of the bisexual women and their partners were the following: (1) the discourse of an enduring relationship. Although at the time of the interviews, the possibility of a gender-neutral marriage law was not in immediate prospect, the interviewees stretched the discourse of romantic relationship, comprising falling in love, being in a relationship and getting married, to include their own relationship. (2) However, unlike the Finnish “I do 2013” campaign, the interviewees distanced themselves from the traditional heterosexual relationship and its hierarchical gender arrangement. They did this as a means to invest in the discourse of an equal relationship. Gendered tension and unequal sharing of housework in an other-sex relationship were portrayed as the main obstacle in living up to this ideal discourse. (3) In order to manage the marginalization of nonheterosexual couples, the interviewees stressed the sameness of heterosexual and nonheterosexual couples. However, the female couples’ and the trans couple’s experiences did not fit easily into the discourse and produced tension in it. (4) When the women’s bisexuality was discussed, a so-called imaginary third appeared in the interview talk manifesting the desire to experiment outside the exclusive relationship, and so posed a threat to the continuity of the enduring relationship.

Enduring relationships

The interviewees were committed to the discourse of an enduring relationship. This discourse revolved strongly around and imitated the discourse of marriage and family (Lynch & Maree, 2013). For most of the couples, it was important to register their partnership or to get married, and they also considered having children as part of the relationship. However, not all couples were married or in a registered partnership at the time of the interviews. I thus refer to this discourse as one of an enduring relationship. Romantic love and marriage as its culmination point functioned as a normative frame for the couples’ understanding of their relationship. All attempts to renegotiate the meaning of the relationship were made in reference to this frame.

However, the discourse of romantic love resonates somewhat differently for same-sex couples and other-sex couples owing to their different status in Finnish law. The female couples sought to stretch the discourse to include their relationship, although marriage was only available for other-sex couples. For the trans couple, getting married would be allowed when Max had changed his name and gendered personal identity code and so become legally male.

The other-sex couples could afford to be more critical. Paula, who was married to Thomas, gave a tongue-in-cheek description of the progression of a heterosexual relationship:

Paula: It’s² surprising how easy it goes --- opposite sex relationships. Relatives immediately start: “When are you going to get engaged, are you getting married, are you planning to have children and do you have an apartment together?” You don’t have to do anything yourself. You just are there and there is so much fuss made over you from the outside that the relationship goes forward and soon you’ll notice that you are in an old people's home with that same person.

Her humorous tone changes when she refers to her previous relationship with a woman.

Paula: When you are together with a woman nobody asks: “When are you getting engaged or when you are going to register your partnership, isn’t it nice.” (laughs), or “When did you think of having children?”. Certainly not, it’s like “Is that person still around, please come to your senses.”

As in Paula’s description, woman’s bisexuality was often present in the interviewees’ accounts of their past relationships with both women and men. These experiences or even the bisexual identity/desire had made these women (and their partners) sensitive to the undermining of nonheterosexual relationships. For example, Helena, who was in a relationship with Erik, refused to get married because of the discriminatory legal situation of same-sex couples. For her, getting married also would have meant that her relationship “would be read as a heterosexual.” She was thus “annoyed that we could not register our partnership,” which would be one way to perform bisexuality when in a relationship with a man.

Equal relationships

The bisexual women and their partners used the concept of tradition in a way opposite to that in the Finnish “I do 2013” campaign, where it was both cherished and played with. They frequently brought up aspects of traditional heterosexual relationships that they wanted to distance their own relationship from. This is how they built up the ideal discourse of an equal relationship (cf. Magnusson, 2005).

Anna compares her own relationship to the traditional relationship.

Anna: Our relationship is different than what you see in the papers or on television. They create this other kind of- (4) traditional. How could one explain that. Our relationship is not like that.

When I ask her to clarify what she means, she continues:

Anna: How can I say it --- it comes out as this one and only heterosexuality. There’s like this certain way how you are expected to be in a relationship. There is the heterosexual couple ---. There is the man and the woman and the man is in the slightly better occupation and the woman gets paid a little less and they have two kids and a car and a cottage and in the weekends they go to the cottage.

Anna hesitates before she explains how gender and sexuality figure in a traditional normative couple constellation, the one she seeks to distance herself from. Her description reveals the norms and hierarchies in which the couple relationship is often embedded. The self-evident inhabitant of this discourse is a heterosexual couple, a man and a woman who are placed in a nuclear family setting with two children. The difference in the occupational status of the partners and in their wages is indicative of their respective places in the hierarchical gender order. The description of the couple owning a car and a summer cottage signifies their middle-class status.

In all the interviews, the strongest opposition expressed to the “traditional relationship” concerned the gendered sharing of housework and child care.

Paula: [My friend] Jenny takes care of the home and cleans up and cooks for Alex who can go hunting in his free time and then work (laughs). She lives like in this very traditional woman’s role in which I would like die in three days.

Paula’s use of the word traditional seems to be very appropriate here. The construction of a woman who takes care of the domestic sphere and cooks for her husband and thus enables him to go out into the public sphere and work brings directly to mind the 1950s (Marander-Eklund & Koskinen-Koivisto, 2014), and Parsons and Bales’ (1956) depiction of the naturalized male and female roles in the family. In Parsons and Bales’ theory, the gendered division of labor is essential in enabling the family to carry out its functions as a cornerstone of society.

Paula, however, laughs when she tells the story. The words with which she rejects the caricature-like gender arrangement are parodic: “I would like die in three days.” This parodic representation of the traditional heterosexual relationship communicates an ambivalent wish to make one’s life intelligible through the normative cultural understanding of a relationship (cf. Gill, 2007; Kolehmainen, 2012). By so doing, the bisexual woman is attempting to claim a place of her own and manage the hidden heteronormativity of this discourse. She tries to tell a story that is not exactly “the same.”

Paula’s caricature thus serves the purpose of highlighting her own relationship ideal, namely that of equality, which was shared by all the interviewed couples. While the equality ideal was mainly articulated through the discourse of a fair division of housework and taking care of children, the absence of domestic violence in the female relationship was also raised by one bisexual woman.

There was a difference in how the equality discourse was constructed as figuring in the relationships of the other-sex couples compared to the relationships of the female couples and the trans couple. The other-sex couples’ talk resembled the accounts of “most equal” Nordic heterosexual couples in Magnusson’s (2005) research: they did not rely on traditional gendered notions to justify their sharing of housework, but tried to share it equally. Despite their striving for the equality ideal, their talk revealed gendered tensions, as in the case of Erik and Helena.

Erik: Well we try to share it equally and all that --- but it’s like --- it’s clearly Helena’s rhythm that how everything, like the criteria how we do it around here.

---

Helena: The thing that unnerves me quite a lot is that Erik does things when I ask but not on his own initiative. Yeah, that’s the thing I almost always nag about.

Erik: Yeah but it’s not like I didn’t do things but then I don’t do things like

Helena: but you do you do you do but

Erik and Helena have not quite settled the issue of sharing the housework. The responsibility for coordinating housework often falls to the women in an other-sex relationship (Jokinen, 2004; Van Hooff, 2013): “Erik does things when I ask.” This was the main source of gendered tension in this couple’s talk. For Paula and Thomas, it was the progression of the relationship, getting married, and having children that was depicted as gendered, something Paula had to persuade Thomas to do, which annoyed her: “That is probably the thing we could pick a quarrel about.”

The female couples and the trans couple described a more equal sharing of housework than tends to be the case in heterosexual relationships in general (Jokinen, 2004). This result is also supported by other research on the topic (Gotta et al., 2011). However, one should be careful not take the claimed equality in female or trans relationships for granted or treat them as “gender-free” (Oerton, 1997). Sometimes their description of the sharing of chores was strongly reminiscent of the dynamics of the other-sex couples described above: “the one who was bothered first —- got down to business and it took me like a very long time before anything bothered me” (Heidi).

Interestingly though, all the bisexual women depicted a life with a woman as a possible way out of hierarchical gender arrangements and in some cases out of the violent dynamics of an other-sex relationship, regardless of the couple constellation they currently inhabited.

Helena: That friend of ours [Katja] --- lived with us for one summer. --- My life was made so much easier. When I came home the food was already cooked.

Linda: The last longer relationship [I was in] Sure the dude was a bit crazy. There was mental and physical violence --- and now when I’m with Nina --- this is actually the first healthy relationship I’ve had.

Nonheterosexual interviewees in the study by Rolfe and Peel (2011) were against the “marriage model” signified by the registered partnership, as it was viewed as promoting unequal gender roles. Here, only one couple, Erik and Helena, were generally against marriage. Most of the interviewees were in favor of marriage, but unlike in the text in the “I do 2013” campaign, they did not put out a flag for the traditional relationship. They wanted to change the hierarchical gendered ways they associated with the traditional heterosexual relationship.

Similar relationships

The discourse of sameness to heterosexuality has been drawn on in the debate on registered partnership in Finland (Charpentier, 2001; Kaskisaari, 1997) and in the “I do 2013” campaign. In it, couple relationships are constructed as nearly genderless, in essence similar across all people and couples, regardless of their sexual orientation and gender. However, in the discourse of sameness, a long-term heterosexual relationship founded on gender difference remains the norm to which other relationships are compared (Butler, 1990). In deploying this discourse, the interviewees thus placed their relationship within the hierarchical homo/hetero distinction, or as a trans couple, on the basis of their partner’s gender.

The constraining effects of the discourse of sameness became evident in the negotiations it gave rise to in the interviews with the female couples and the trans couple. Their views and experiences in relation to intimacy, sex, sharing housework, and taking care of children did not always fit into the similarity ideal. To demonstrate the effects and logic behind the similarity talk, I present a long extract, in which the similarity talk is particularly pronounced.

Johanna and Max agreed to the interview because of Johanna’s bisexuality, which she redefined in the interview as a trans-orientation. During their relationship, Max had started transitioning from female to male. Here they negotiate about how their sex life is similar or different to that of other people.

Max and Johanna

Interviewer: Do you think that your sex life is similar or different to other [couples’]?

---

Johanna: I don’t really think that our sex life would particularly differ from other people’s.

Max: I feel like, how it differs from the others, well it’s maybe how outsiders picture it. Maybe other people, people close to us maybe think that our sex life differs in some very peculiar way from. But I think how we think ourselves maybe it’s quite the opposite. I can’t figure out how it would somehow differ.

---

Max: Well it occurred to me Johanna’s male friends’ comments and questions when we have drunk a couple of beers. It’s like then they start to come up with these questions. Like “How do you have sex?”

Johanna: Like their own imagination wouldn’t be enough to that. It feels like, I don’t know.

Max: Maybe it’s just that they think that, that it must be something much more exciting or then it’s just simply that they can’t imagine ---

---

Johanna: I think that when you have been in a relationship for a long time the sex in a relationship is as a rule good --- I don’t think that our sex would be especially better or worse than anybody else’s ---

---

Johanna: But then again because our sex is not concentrated on erections and it isn’t dependent on the man’s orgasm, it’s better than the sex that I’ve had before with a man.

---

Johanna: Yeah, they think more like, they might think that our sex is somehow less when in reality it’s probably in many situations much more. It’s like more intense and more varied when there is no self-evident way to handle the situation.

---

Johanna: When it comes from a man it is somehow, like to a biological guy it must be a logical question, because his sexuality is in that one thing. And then there’s someone who says that he’s a man but he doesn’t have that. So it is the first question like “How do you have sex?”

Both Johanna and Max stress the similarity of their sex life to that of other couples. They draw on the discourse of sameness, but before long Max brings into the conversation the perspective of other people, who he believes might think that his and Johanna’s sex life is somehow different.

What makes the sex between a transman and a woman unimaginable to people outside the couple and allows Johanna’s male friends ask Max intrusive questions, is stated later in the conversation. In the heteronormative frame, the sex of a transman and a woman becomes defined as lacking something—“that one thing.” This frame even makes this line of questioning logical for Johanna: for a biological man whose sexuality, according to her, resides in his penis, it must be logical to ask someone who claims to be a man but does not have one, how he has sex. Yet, even when discussing this intrusive and hurtful prying and the discourse of a lack, Johanna attempts to adhere to the discourse of sameness.

When Johanna describes her experiences of sex with Max, it contradicts both the discourse of lacking opposite sex bodies and that of sameness in their sex. As if to strike back, she says: “they might think that our sex is somehow less when in reality it’s — in many situations much more.” Berlant (2008) has written of the cultural promise of an intimate and rewarding heterosexual relationship, which is always accompanied by “the female complaint.” In this way, women can express their dissatisfaction at the lack of fulfillment of this promise without seriously undermining it. It is this discourse that Johanna draws on to intensify her argument. She describes heterosexual sex as centered on the male erection and dependent on the male orgasm–and maybe thus not very satisfactory to the woman involved. In Johanna’s account, her sex with a transman is one way out of this female complaint. Without the preexisting script of heterosexual sex, sex with a transman can be more varied and rewarding for a woman than heterosexual sex.

Yet, trying to fit sexuality that is different from heterosexuality into the discourse of sameness is tricky, when difference continues to be constructed as other or as a lack. It leads both Johanna and Max to waver between sameness, lack, and superiority. In doing so, they are struggling with a very limited set of cultural meanings (cf. Nordqvist, 2012).

The logic of the conversation is strikingly similar to the logic of the current LGBTI struggle for recognition through claiming the legal right to marry. On the part of the lesbian and gay movement, a typical response to the stigma of homosexuality has been to try to empty homosexuality of the notion of shameful sex and turn instead to the discourse of respectability and the norms of matrimony, and so appear just like heterosexuals (Butler, 2004; Clarke, 2003; Rydström, 2011; Warner, 2000). This hides the long history of being rejected and shamed, and hence more radical politics have been suggested (e.g., Clarke, 2003; Warner, 2000).

When talking about one’s intimate relationship, it can be asked if the affective positions of pride (e.g., in one’s sex life) and shame, defined by powerful heteronormative discourses, can be freely chosen. Smith and Shin (2014) analyzed a discursive strategy they refer to as queer blindfolding, in which the differences between heterosexual and LGBTI subjects are minimized. In a psychological sense, this strategy can be understood as a defence mechanism, its function being “to repress the painful acknowledgment of queer oppression” (Smith & Shin, 2014, p. 952). It enables the subject to make a projection of the world as she would wish it to be. Max’s and Johanna’s persistent return to the discourse of sameness, which fails to do justice to their relationship, resembles queer blindfolding (Smith & Shin, 2014). Wavering between sameness and superiority can thus be interpreted as a defence against the painful construction of a lack. It reflects the ambivalent wish both to belong to and to question the normative relationship discourse and the sameness of “all couples.”

The imaginary third

The interviewees favored the conventional discourse of a marriage model relationship, in which the relationship was understood and/or lived out as an enduring and exclusive union. One interviewee, Helena, defined her relationship with Erik as “an open relationship that has never been tested.” Although touched upon in the interviews, the female partner’s bisexuality did not become a definer of the couples’ relationships.

Bisexuality, often associated with being hypersexual and promiscuous (Gustavson, 2009; Hayfield et al., 2014; Kangasvuo, 2014; Klesse, 2005) does not sit neatly with talk of an exclusive relationship (Lynch & Maree, 2013). In this study, the other-sex couples wished neither to reject this discourse of bisexuality nor actually live polyamorously. However, sometimes they introduced a third party, which was not necessarily an actual person or an affair into their relationship talk. To analyze this, I propose the concept of “an imaginary third.” By imaginary I refer, in Smart’s (2007) terms, to “the ways in which relationships exist (indeed have a life) in one’s imagination and thoughts” (Smart, 2007, p. 46). However, what is imagined can have actual effects on people’s relationships.

The imaginary third was present in Paula’s frequent infatuations with women and in Erik’s and Helena’s fantasies of either of them having an affair with someone else or sharing a bed with a woman together. The latter talk was related to Helena’s wish to share her life with a woman at some point during her life and in this way also accommodated to her bisexuality. The imaginary third rendered the woman’s bisexuality and her desire for women visible. This way it stretched the normative idea of exclusive desire in a long-term other-sex relationship.

Although experienced as personal, imaginings are affected by social and cultural realms (Smart, 2007). As it is hardly uncommon to fantasize about others outside one’s (exclusive) relationship, I would argue that the tendency of the heterosexual matrix to locate male and female at opposite poles and to ontologize these genders (Gustavson, 2009) contributed to the open emergence of an imaginary third in the couple interviews of a bisexual woman and her male partner. As Paula expressed it, “I do long for women sometimes and then [Thomas] is not a woman but a man.”

For Paula, the consequences of her feelings for women appeared as the product of the homo/hetero-distinction: “I’ve given it some thought whether I should nevertheless live with a woman.”This posited her relationship with Thomas as potentially under threat, which she shook off by saying “I haven’t sunk deeper into that like I’d started to brood over anything. Again it is good as it is.” By acting on the desires manifested as the imaginary third, the interviewees would be at risk of losing their partner. When discussing the couple’s future plans, Erik said “A kind of thing that could be, that could come between us — the only thought is that Helena will meet a wonderful woman and take off with her.” The psychic threat of a relationship breakup was moderated in the interviews by the assurances given by the bisexual women of their commitment to their current relationship.

The female couples and the trans couple did not introduce the imaginary third into their relationship talk in the same manner as the other-sex couples. Heidi and Anna told about an occasion in the early days of their dating, when a man interested in Heidi had called her up. This incident caused Anna to change her mind about something: “That’s the reason why I wanted to buy the rings. It’s like a visible thing that you are taken.”

The woman’s bisexuality did not give rise to pleasurable fantasies, but was more a straightforward threat to the relationship (Kangasvuo, 2014). This was reflected in the stereotypical depiction of a bisexual woman as one who is not capable of long-term commitment (McLean, 2004):

Johanna: If you say that you are bisexual then it is like okay you can take off with a man any time. It’s like when I sit with you here [in a lesbian party] and talk with you and fall in love with you, tomorrow you’ll have some guy.

In Butler’s (1990) theory of the formation of the melancholic sexual subject in a heterosexist culture, the same-sex object choice is made through repudiation of heterosexual subjectivity or vice versa. Hemmings (2002) claims that bisexuals have become cultural carriers–or holograms–of this idea: the bisexual woman has not given up desire for the opposite sex, so she must be heterosexual. The imaginary third thus appeared in the stereotypical depiction as “some guy” the bisexual woman would “take off with” (Kangasvuo, 2014).

Given this threat, it was possible for bisexuality to be talked about in the interviews with the female couples and trans couple as an identity or sexual orientation, but not as a desire, at least not toward a gender other than their partner’s or, especially, toward men. Anna said to Heidi, in the context of the ring conversation, “You were not interested in that guy, but he was interested in you.” Later on, Heidi commented “Bisexuality is quite a theoretical [concept] for us at the moment.”

Instead, the bisexual women drew on the discourse of romantic love and stressed that their sexual orientation was toward their partner. Johanna explained, “This bisexuality of mine has maybe been more like searching for a transman. If I had run right into Max the first time, I wouldn’t have needed to try straight or lesbian relationships.”

If a bisexual woman were to choose a (cisgendered) man as her partner, or even talk openly about her desire for men in the manner in which the present bisexual women with male partners fantasized about women, she would be acting in a way that would have been “expected” somewhere down the line, given the heterosexist cultural idea of the bisexual woman as “actually” heterosexual (Hemmings, 2002; see also Lynch & Maree, 2013). In the homo/hetero hierarchy, this would painfully question the worth of a bisexual woman’s female or trans partner. It is thus no wonder that the topic of a bisexual woman’s desire for men was avoided in the conversation.

Discussion

I selected the couples for the interviews on the basis of the female partners’ bisexuality. However, it did not become a definer of the couples’ relationships, and no such thing as a clear cut bicouple discourse was identified. Bisexuality did thus not appear as central as in other interview studies on bisexuality (Gustavson, 2009; Hayfield et al., 2014; Kangasvuo, 2011). Instead, the bisexual women and their partners made their relationships intelligible by taking up positions in the discourse of the enduring couple relationship. They positioned themselves in the homo/hetero distinction or as trans couple on the basis of their partner’s gender. By investing in this discourse, the interviewees sought to fit their relationship into the ideal of romantic love: to form a durable relationship with one person, possibly for the rest of their lives. Although at first sight the couples seemed to slide effortlessly into the normative relationship discourse, it seemed to require constant negotiation: is our relationship traditional or is it equal? Are we similar or are we different? Do gender and (bi)sexuality play a role in the relationship or not? Close reading of these negotiations brought to the light the hidden hierarchies related to gender and sexuality that constitute the enduring relationship discourse. The interviewees did not wish to be perceived as resembling a traditional heterosexual couple, since to them this echoed the traditional hierarchical gender arrangement. Instead, they invested in the discourse of an equal relationship, an ideal, which according to the couples, was more easily achievable in female and trans relationships.

The interviewees also stressed the ordinariness of nonheterosexual couples and their similarity to heterosexual couples (cf. Heaphy et al., 2013). Their persistent return to the discourse of sameness, even when it did not do justice to the experiences of the female couples and trans couple, resonates with the concept of queer blindfolding (Smith & Shin, 2014). In these instances, recourse to the discourse of sameness can be interpreted as a defence against the still widely circulated view of nonheterosexual relationships as shameful or pathological (Smith & Shin, 2014; Warner, 2000). Stressing sameness in the context of the enduring relationship discourse adds to the current queer studies consensus on a prevailing cultural climate where nonheterosexual desire and relational life are made intelligible within the frame of marriage and family (e.g., Butler, 2004; Warner, 2000). The wish to make life experiments (Weeks, Heaphy, & Donovan, 2001) seems to have been replaced by a strong desire for sameness (Clarke, 2002; Richardson, 2005), a wish to “fit in” (Nordqvist, 2012).

The interview data analyzed in this study were collected 10 years ago, in 2005. During this time, the category of bisexuality has become more visible in the Finnish media landscape and in sexual minority politics, and it has become more accessible as a sexual identity, especially for young women (Kangasvuo, 2014). Bisexuality, however, is an identity that disturbs the discourse of sameness. It does not fit neatly into the homo/hetero binary that the discourse is based on. In media accounts in the 2010s, a woman’s bisexuality was often associated with being shifting and trendy identity and was brought up to excite and entertain audiences (Kangasvuo, 2014). In normative relationship talk, bisexuality easily disappears (see also Lynch & Maree, 2013). However, in the present interviews it showed up as the imaginary third.

The imaginary third manifests in the desire to experiment outside the boundaries of the enduring, exclusive relationship. The interviewees’ responses to these desires were, however, ambivalent. The talk of the other-sex couples allowed room for the woman’s desire for women, which also made visible her bisexual identity. Within the power relations of the hierarchical heterosexual matrix, the bisexual woman’s desire for men would have been interpreted as undermining her partner. It was thus avoided as a conversation topic. Acting upon desires manifested as the imaginary third would also carry the risk of losing the object of attachment, one’s partner. The interviewee’s talk can be thus read as an attempt to deal with this ambivalence that is underlined by the woman partner’s bisexuality.

Knowing this, it can be asked whether the notions of respectability and sameness within the idealized discourse of “marriage and family” apply to bisexuality in the same way as they have gradually become applied to the sexual categories of lesbian and gay (Kangasvuo, 2014). Allowing same-sex couples to legally marry challenges the basic assumption of the heterosexual matrix and marriage: that it is founded on gender difference. However, the rapid progression of same-sex marriage can also be explained as a way to tame the unsettling notion of “genderless” desire, meaning desire that is not tied to only one (other-sex) gender, that is also present in bisexual women.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for the insightful comments on the original manuscript. She would also like to thank Tuija Saresma, Tuula Juvonen, and Kimmo Jokinen for supervising the article writing process.

Notes

Author Biography

Annukka Lahti is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Social Sciences in University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Subject of her doctoral thesis is tensions in bisexual women’s and their partners’ relationship talk. Her research interests include continuities and changes in contemporary intimate relationships, bisexuality, and affect.

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