Thirty-Six

THE BISEXUAL WOMAN AS AN INAUTHENTIC : FROM BEAUVOIR TO THE L WORD

James A. Martell

In her book, Identity without Selfhood: and Bisexuality, Miriam Fraser uses the biographies of Beauvoir and newspaper articles about her life to argue that the identity “bisexuality” is effectively precluded or erased. Fraser asserts that one of the methods used to erase bisexual identity is to define the bisexual woman as an inauthentic lesbian. She develops the con- cept of the inauthentic lesbian “based on three related academic papers, writ- ten by Ann Ferguson, and Marilyn Frye, taken from a special issue of Hipatia/Women’s Studies International Forum (1985) on the contem- porary relevance of to (lesbian) feminist politics.”1 Ann Ferguson’s paper addressed “the social implications of lesbianism”:

It is the social bonding of women into an oppositional subculture eco- nomically and socially independent of men in domestic life that makes possible the contemporary concept of a lesbian identity, of a community of women-identified women cutting across class and race/ethnic lines. And it is this collective and social lesbian identity . . . which constitutes the radical nature of contemporary lesbian-.2

Marilyn Frye argued that women “must organize politically to pull to- gether. . . . to think together, constructively and critically, to devise collective strategies of resistance and revolution and to try to convince and persuade each other about these things.” For Frye, “loyalty and identity are so closely connected as to be almost just two aspects of one phenomenon.”3 In her paper Claudia Card suggested that a potential “danger for the les- bian is her temptation to exploit other women’s conditioning to service and nurturance.” Card used two “kinds of cases” mentioned by Beauvoir as “good example[s] of inauthenticity in lesbian behavior.” The two examples are a woman “disappointed in man . . . . [who] may seek in woman a lover to re- place the male who has betrayed her. . . . [And women who] use women lov- ers for regeneration until they are able to deal with men again.” Card believes the woman in each example “would probably say she is a ‘bisexual’” because she is not deceiving herself into believing she is a lesbian or failing to take responsibility for herself. In fact, the woman in each example “seems to have her situation well in hand.”4 314 JAMES A. MARTELL

Fraser relies primarily on Card’s paper for the proposition that the bi- sexual identity is erased by defining bisexual women as inauthentic :

For Card, the very notion of “bisexuality” is a misnomer. Instead, the woman’s behaviour is “a good example of inauthenticity in lesbian be- havior.” As an example of something else, bisexuality cannot be consid- ered an autonomous sexual identity in its own right . . . . “Lesbian” is the subject here. . . . Bisexuality, by contrast, is merely an example of inau- thenticity in lesbian behaviour. . . . [S]ince inauthenticity itself constitutes the whole of bisexuality, bisexuality is nothing but inauthenticity. In other words, given that bisexuality is not defined in any other way throughout the course of Card’s article (that inauthenticity appears to be all there is to it) and that Card erases the notion of a “bisexual” woman on this basis, the definition of bisexuality as inauthen- ticity . . . . disqualifies it from being perceived as a sexual identity which expresses the self.5

Fraser asserts that while “Card’s and Frye’s arguments both suggest that loyalty to other women, and taking responsibility for others as well as for oneself, is an obligatory feature of a lesbian identity. . . . the common percep- tion of bisexuality [is] ‘a kind of failure of loyalty or lack of commitment’ [which] serves to erase it as an authentic identity.” And:

the “bisexual” woman’s sexuality is inauthentic because she takes ac- count only of her own pleasure. . . . The “bisexual” woman is engaged in a friendship of utility and pleasure. . . . It is the “bisexual” woman’s choice of pleasure—which is gained at the expense of the other wom- an—that renders her behaviour inauthentic.6

Based on the three papers, Fraser seems to have developed five charac- teristics of an authentic lesbian identity. First, an authentic lesbian identity includes “the social bonding of women into an oppositional subculture eco- nomically and socially independent of men.” Second, “in order to claim an authentic lesbian identity for oneself, one is obligated to confirm one’s loyalty to other women by taking responsibility for them.” Third, “where same sex relationships are concerned, only actively choosing the relationship for itself, or for what it offers in itself (and obtaining pleasure from it on this basis) qual- ifies it to be a constitutive feature of [an authentic] sexual identity.”7 Fourth, the lesbian identity includes a political pulling together “to devise collective strategies of resistance and revaluation.”8 Fifth, although it is not clear what it means to “take responsibility” for another woman, there would nonetheless seem to be an implicit requirement of monogamy based on the combined requirements of loyalty and taking responsibility for the other woman. Fraser’s conceptualization of the bisexual woman as an inauthentic les- bian raises several issues. First, Fraser’s concept is based primarily on Clau-