Abstract
Part of the new Routledge Gender and Sexualities in Psychology series, Nikki Hayfield's book, Bisexual and Pansexual Identities: Exploring and Challenging Invisibility and Invalidation, foregrounds the historical and contemporary invisibility of asexual, bisexual and plurisexual identities within (psychology) academia, as well as larger public discourses. As Hayfield demonstrates in her book, this invisibilisation creates marginalisation within marginalisation.
Consisting of six chapters, Bisexual and Pansexual Identities begins by introducing readers to the complexity of the politics of representation of sexualities over time and the challenges posed by these politics of representation. Historically, sexuality began to be understood from a unipolar perspective, with heterosexuality represented as the only valid mode of sexual intimacy. This was followed by the bipolar conceptualisation of sexuality where homosexuality and heterosexuality were considered two distinct sexual identities. Having laid the foundations, Hayfield then goes on to provide a careful historical analysis of the emergence of the definition and understandings of asexual spectrum identities and plurisexual identities, including pansexual and bisexual identities, and the emergence of different initialisms like LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans), LGBTQQIP2SAA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two spirit, asexual and ally) and QUILTBAG (queer and/or questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, trans and two-spirit, bisexual, asexual/ally, gay and genderqueer).
The second chapter revisits the history of bisexual invisibility within sexology and psychology by thoroughly engaging with the pathologisation of same-sex desires. Discussion ranges wide, touching upon the work of philosophers, sexologists, psychologists and psychiatrists in complicating understandings of sexuality, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing's book Psychopathia Sexualis which played a significant role in pathologising homosexuality, and Michel Foucault's critique of such pathologisation. Hayfield brilliantly analyses first and second-wave sexology to illustrate the constant shifting and swaying of representations of bisexual identity, making sense of how mainstream academic psychology essentially rendered bisexuality invisible and invalid in its surveys, laboratory research, and lesbian and gay affirmative research.
The third chapter begins by critically analysing the emergence of terms like biphobia, binegativity and bisexual marginalisation, expanding the horizons of understanding beyond the previously limited confines of bisexual representation. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from studies in psychology, Hayfield shows that there have been very few experience-near understandings about bisexuality. The dominance of quantitative methodology in researching sexualities has contributed to this skewness. She offers a precise analysis of cultural understandings of bisexuality – a sexual orientation and identity that has remained obscured within the field of psychology – explaining key issues specific to bisexual people, including double discrimination from LGBTQIA + communities and heterosexual people. As the author shows, anti-bisexual experiences pose severe challenges for bisexual people in navigating everyday life, producing perpetual distress and substance use. Such coping mechanisms and everyday sufferings due to invalidation and discrimination are almost always pathologised as individual mental disorders by mainstream mental health systems, responsibilising the person for the “disorder” and its “treatment”, discrediting the structural violence that permeates their everyday life.
Hayfield's exposition and analysis of the relationship between appearance, sexuality, and visual identities in Chapter 4 is characteristically rigorous. The author poignantly foregrounds the absence of a bisexual look as compared to gay and lesbian looks, explaining that this absence is due to the lack of a visual public language and appearance norms through which bisexual people can communicate their identity and attraction: “[b]isexual look cannot be talked about because, unlike lesbian and gay looks, bisexual looks do not exist, and bisexual people cannot be seen” which makes “it difficult to convey their attraction to multiple genders through their appearance” (p. 67). This lack of a visual public language or appearance norms for bisexuality increases the imperceptibility of bisexual people, reducing their coming out options to direct verbal statements. Hayfield demonstrates that the lack of appearance norms for bisexuality impedes the creation and consolidation of bisexual communities. In contrast, the author explains how belongingness and solidarity are facilitated in gay and lesbian communities through well-established appearance norms. Drawing on extensive literature, the chapter lays bare the complexities of the deep-set ties between sexuality and appearance norms. In recent times, in the context of a changing culture that increasingly embraces gender fluidity, distinctive gay and lesbian appearance norms have been appropriated by the heterosexual mainstream, reducing the functionality that appearance norms served during the early years of gay and lesbian community formation.
The fifth chapter turns the lens to three public sites – education, employment, and mass media – to illustrate the invisibilisation of plurisexual and asexual identities in social spaces. Educational institutions are almost always heteronormative and heterocentric, denying voice and space to people with diverse sexual identities. As Hayfield demonstrates, heteronormative and heterocentric institutions often lead to a bruising learning environment for people whose sexual orientations are marginalised, an environment characterised by discrimination, bullying, and unsupportive peers and teachers. Such an environment negatively impacts mental health, and the academic attendance and achievement of students who are not heterosexual. Indeed, in An Education in Sexuality and Sociality: Heteronormativity on Campus, Frank G. Karioris (2018) throws light on the role of higher education institutions in establishing sexed and gendered hierarchies, and how students talk back strategically to heteronormative structures to “make their worlds” (p. 2).
Hayfield shows how similar patterns shape workplaces and the media. In workplaces, bisexuality and other marginalised sexualities get subsumed under the LGBTQIA + umbrella where “equal rights are frequently framed around same-sex/gender relationships as equal to different-sex/gender relationships – for example, in relation to company benefits such as health insurance, pensions and parental and compassionate leave” (p. 87). The media also espouses binary understandings of sexuality, perpetuating the invisibility of asexual, plurisexual, pansexual and bisexual identities. When they are represented, it is often in very reductionistic and stereotypical ways.
The final chapter highlights the various strategies people with marginalised sexual identities employ to visibilise their existence. At the same time, the author doesn’t suggest that visibility is a linear and straightforward path to validation because when marginalised sexual subjects become visible, they are dismissed, invalidated and denigrated by dominant groups, further bolstering marginalised groups’ invisibility. Instead, visibility offers public language potent enough for marginalised groups to feel acknowledged as existing. As argued by Hayfield, the lack of a public language is at the heart of the erasure of narratives. The erasure of narratives, in turn, erases identities.
Bisexual and Pansexual Identities could have been strengthened by weaving together the historical legacy of psychology's complicity with powerful agents of social control, including majoritarian social morality and the law, in invisibilising, invalidating and oppressing sexual identities that don’t fall within the normative cis-heterosexual paradigm (Bayer, 1987). Indeed, mainstream psychology's long-festering problem has been the (overstated) focus on “treating” and “curing” LGBTQIA + individuals through inhuman practices such as conversion “therapy”, instead of diagnosing the violent social structures and the unique life stressors that the LGBTQIA + community experience due to their disenfranchisement by the state and very often their own families, both of which become important sites of violence (McDermott et al., 2021; McGlynn et al., 2022), thereby contributing to further inaudibility (e.g., see Pillay et al., 2019). When a queer person has nothing left other than their life itself, an ethical and compassionate psychology should speak about the “enforced unlivability” of queer lives due to invisibilisation and invalidation.
Judith Butler's poignant analysis of the relationship between livable life and an inhabitable world is valid here: Part of what it means to live, then, and to live in a way that is livable is to have a place to live, a part of the earth that can be inhabited without destroying that earth, to have shelter, and to be able to dwell as a body in a world that is sustained and safeguarded by the structures (and infrastructures) in which one lives – to be part of what is common, to share in a world in common. To inhabit a world is part of what makes a life livable. So, we cannot finally separate the question of an inhabitable world from a livable life. (Butler, 2022, p. 19, emphasis added)
The absence of statutes and structures that ensure livability leads to what Lauren Berlant calls “slow death”. The phrase slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence. (Berlant, 2007, p. 754)
Mainstream psychologists have been reluctant to speak about the state's responsibility (including their own) to ensure conditions of “livability”. The social amnesia of psychological theory building, research and praxis and a fear of the social context (Boyle, 2011) demonstrate psychology's intimate relationship with systems of oppression, such as colonialism and capitalism, where experiences of distress are divorced from their often-painful lived and systemic realities. The private troubles that are told and retold in the clinic are cut off from the larger milieu of the person, a milieu consisting of communities, economy, politics, personal identities and state policies. Creating a human, humane, and more meaningful psychology means drawing from and understanding the historical, political, economic and local contexts that shape diverse ways of being in the world. Bisexual and Pansexual Identities does fulfil this goal evocatively in taking up psychology's humongous, and delayed, ethical responsibility to throw light on the most marginalised within marginalised sexual subjects – asexual, bisexual, and plurisexual people.
However, the book could have immensely benefited from an intersectional approach in its analysis of asexual and plurisexual invisibility. Indeed, the book's representation of asexual and plurisexual experiences and identities is, for example, white-centric, ableist (in centring non-disability), and without reference to the Global South. In this sense, Bisexual and Pansexual Identities fails to acknowledge the multiple marginalisations and multiple invisibility that persists within asexual and plurisexual spaces and communities, e.g., a white bisexual man and a black bisexual woman's experiences of these spaces represent the complex intersections that exist among multiple marginalised social locations.
All in all, Hayfield's book is an amalgam of information bridging the gap between academia, research and practice that is still lacking in mainstream psychology. As such, Bisexual and Pansexual Identities has taken extraordinary care to act as a resource centre for its readers by providing complete information on self-help groups, media campaigns, NGOs, comics, graphic novels, and online communities related to marginalised sexualities. Beyond this, the book exhorts researchers in psychology to adopt practices that advocate human rights and practices that include the (self-)affirmation and celebration of differences. Indeed, in an era of neoliberal governance where suffering is marketed by mainstream mental health systems characterised by biomedical hegemony, colonial hangover (Bhatia, 2017) and decontextualised practice, Bisexual and Pansexual Identities pushes for transformative change by infusing much-needed critical understandings about sexuality, sexual subjects, structural violence and social suffering that shape their everyday lives. For these reasons, this book is a must-read for activists, academicians, mental health practitioners and researchers working on mental health and its intersection with sexualities and human rights across disciplines and international boundaries.
