Kelly Cresap

University of Virginia
kmc2f@virginia.edu

 

 

Marjorie Garber. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

 

Is it possible to conceive of bisexuality without resorting to binary logic? The very nomenclature of bisexual seems to declare faith in a certain form of dualism. Where, after all, might one locate bisexuality except between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as a predilection involving both sexes? Harvard literary scholar Marjorie Garber goes to considerable lengths in her new book to reveal the fallacies of such ways of thinking. She ushers bisexuality into a postmodern realm where it may be seen in fruitful interaction with anti-dualistic discourses and practices such as those of cyborg culture and chaos theory.

 

Garber strategically avoids providing a clear-cut, delimited view of her central topic in Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. A reader’s search for hard definitions is contraindicated by the book’s sheer proliferation of material, which includes excursions into cultural and literary history, scientific and pseudoscientific inquiry, mythology, etymology, fact, fiction, and anecdote. Through the course of 584 pages, bisexuality amasses a bewildering diversity of connotations.

 

Indeed, without Garber’s sustaining critical presence, the views of bisexuality registered in the book would threaten to devolve into a kind of pluralistic rampage. We ascertain from “common wisdom” that “everyone is bisexual” and that “there is no such thing as bisexuality” (16). Bisexuality is either the most “natural” or the most “perverse,” “the most conservative or the most radical of ideas about human sexuality” (250). Conceivable in terms of experience, essence, or desire (176), it presents a Janus-faced (365) or Sphinx-like (178-80) emblem of enigma. It is alternately chic and “creepy” (146), ubiquitous and invisible (267); a “whole, fluid identity” (56) and a “phantom proposition” (481); a practice predating antiquity (252) and a contemporary fad (219). Bisexual tendencies can be expressed concurrently or sequentially (30) as well as defensively, ritually, situationally, experimentally, and “technically” (30); they may also involve triangulated desire (423-35) or erotic substitution (435-42). Persons who behave bisexually do not necessarily identify as such, and (appropriately enough) vice versa. We learn from journalistic and cinematic accounts that bisexuals are creatures of “uncontrollable impulses” (93), the “ultimate pariahs of the AIDS crisis” (Newsweek, 1987); that the bisexual male is “the bogeyman of the later 1980s” (New York Times, 1987); and that the bisexual female’s known proclivities include vampirism (The Hunger) and serial murder (Basic Instinct). Such accounts mingle with discussion of long-standing stereotypes which cast bisexuals as fence-sitters (21), double agents (94), and swingers (20); as people who are habitually flighty, promiscuous (28), confused, irresponsible (56), opportunist (351), indecisive (360), going through a phase (345), devoted to group sex (476), attracted to anything that moves (55), guilty of wanting heterosexual privilege (20), and incapable of making commitments (56). Further, the situation of bisexuality is “either allegorically universal or untenably conflicted” (473); and coming out as bi would be easy for a dozen reasons, hard for a dozen reasons (67-8).

 

Garber intervenes in this topical maelstrom to assert that bisexuality acts as one of the great destabilizing forces of postmodern culture: “Bisexuality means that your sexual identity may not be fixed in the womb, or at age two, or five” (86); it “unsettles ideas about priority, singularity, truthfulness, and identity” (90). “Bisexuality marks the spot where all our questions about eroticism, repression, and social arrangements come to crisis” (368); it presents “the radically discontinuous possibility of a sexual ‘identity’ that confounds the very category of identity” (513).

 

However, rather than simply declare bisexuality a dissolver of categories and proclaim herself a sexual agnostic, Garber devotes the bulk of Vice Versa to documenting the concrete cultural and social histories that inform contemporary notions of bisexuality. She chronicles varieties of Western bisexual experience in a great many guises and milieux: in bohemian circles from Bloomsbury to the Harlem Renaissance to Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico; in the confined space of barracks, prisons, and boarding schools; in the U.S. Congress, the Mormon Church, Hollywood, the world of early psychoanalysis; in the irreducibly plural affections of dozens of historical figures, from Plato and Shakespeare to Bessie Smith and Sandra Bernhard.¹ With what the Boston Globe has called “a doctoral candidate’s rigor and a channel-surfer’s restlessness,”² Garber assesses the multifold bisexualities emerging from a range of cultural artifacts, including memoirs, novels, plays, movies, nonfiction, newspapers, letters, academic journals, talk shows, advice columns, fanzines, “slash” lit, and song lyrics.

 

This material, taken together, clearly militates against the notion that any individual can claim a “sexual identity” that is either unwavering or fully comprehendible. Readers of all sexual orientations will find that the engaging wit and eloquence of Vice Versa belie its disconcertingly open-ended questions about the stubborn liminalities of human behavior and desire. Casting about for a way of conceptualizing bisexual politics, Garber enlists the metaphorical use of miscegenation and hybridity made (respectively) by Donna Haraway and Homi K. Bhabha (88-9). Concluding her chapter on bisexuality and celebrity, Garber writes, “the cognate relationship between postmodernism and bisexuality merely underscores the fact that all lives are discontinuous” (150).

 

What are the consequences of such destabilization and discontinuity? What cultural fallout attends Garber’s assessment of bisexuality as a resolutely non-homogeneous, category-unsettling phenomenon?

 

Her book, like the topic it addresses, arouses intensely ambivalent response.³ Even while gay author and activist Edmund White charges Garber with neglecting the more unnerving implications of her research, he confesses that her book left him profoundly unnerved. In White’s view, Garber focuses on the playfully “transgressive” side of her topic “at the expense of a deeper discussion of the threat that bisexuality poses to the orderly separation of gender roles, and of the corresponding rage that bisexual behavior can provoke.”⁴ Yet Vice Versa clearly prompts White to carry on such a deeper discussion himself, at least as regards his own past. The conclusion of his review finds him looking askance at his post-Stonewall “conversion” to a “full” gay identity, and at the way this conversion made him invalidate his previous sexual experience with women:

 

I must confess that Garber's very multiplication of examples browbeat me into wondering whether I myself might not have been bisexual had I lived in another era. . . . Following a tendency that Garber rightly criticizes, I denied the authenticity of my earlier heterosexual feelings in the light of my later homosexual identity. After reading "Vice Versa," I find myself willing to reinterpret the narrative of my own personal history.⁵

 

Certainly one of the virtues of Garber’s book is its ability to elicit this kind of self-reinterpretation. It’s not just that people will need to revise their position on the Kinsey scale (either retroactively or otherwise), but that they will be newly aware of how inadequate this and other scales are at accounting for the fluctuations and undercurrents of a sexual life. Vice Versa will also serve to help countermand the tendency in gay and lesbian circles to “reclaim” as homosexual any and all historical personages who displayed same-sex desire at any point in their lives. However, such factors only begin the task of reckoning with the Pandora’s-box contents of the book.

 

Without wanting to impose an artificial consensus on Garber’s scholarship, nor to downplay the specific and urgent rights-based agendas of the contemporary bisexual movement (of which both Garber and myself are members),⁶ I find it useful to describe Vice Versa in intellectual terms as a species of chaos theory, and to hazard Garber’s bisexual as a counterpart to the cyborg in Donna Haraway’s writings. (I use the word “hazard” here advisedly.)

 

In Chaos Bound, N. Katherine Hayles defines cultural postmodernism as “the realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying components of human experience are not natural facts of life but social constructions. We can think of this as a denaturing process.”⁷ Hayles speaks of interrelated waves in postmodern culture that have acted to denature language, context, and time. The next wave, she writes, “is the denaturing of the human. While this fourth wave has yet to crest, it is undeniably building in force and scope” (266).

 

Hayles’s account of this fourth-wave project focuses on Donna Haraway’s ironic political myth, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Hayles finds the denaturing of the human sphere exemplified in how Haraway’s cyborg works to “undo” three distinct sets of opposites: human/animal, human/machine, and physical/nonphysical (284).⁸ The purported effectiveness of such “undoing” of opposites needs a caveat, which I will provide later in this review. At present I wish to explore the implications of this logic for Garber’s text.

 

Key passages in Haraway’s essay might lead us to assume a close likeness between her cyborg and Garber’s bisexual:

 

The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation (150). The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence (151). My cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work (154). Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia (181).

 

While sensing a potential affinity between Haraway’s cyborg and Garber’s bisexual, I am nonetheless aware of the risk involved in announcing a family resemblance. Haraway specifically states:

 

the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity (150).

 

Re-reading this passage in the context of Vice Versa, I was immediately struck with two questions: Why does Haraway assume that bisexuality necessarily constitutes a “seduction to organic wholeness”? Why does Haraway’s notion of bisexuality seem to have nothing to do with Garber’s?

 

The species of bisexuality Haraway refers to here is in fact one from which both she and Garber take pains to distance themselves. Garber singles out for ridicule the “holistic” notion of bisexuality popularized in this century by followers of Carl Jung. In her chapter “Androgyny and Its Discontents,” Garber lambastes Jung for his static universalist notions of masculinity and femininity, showing how the intrapsychic union of “anima” and “animus” espoused by Jung constitutes an etherealized form of the practice of compulsory heterosexuality. Vice Versa mercilessly exposes a host of skeletons in the closet of Jungian psychology: essentialism, egocentrism, romanticism, puritanism, sexism, heterosexism, and ethnocentrism (208-19). Garber shows how traces of such elements persist in a host of Jung-influenced practices: in the writings of Joseph Campbell (215-6), Mircea Eliade (218), June Singer (214 ff.), and Camille Paglia (221- 2); as well as in the men’s movement (224-5) and in certain cross-dressing and transgendered circles (225-9). Garber instances radical-feminist theologian Mary Daly as one of androgyny’s outspoken malcontents. (Although elsewhere in the book Garber criticizes the idea of Pauline conversions, she presents this one approvingly.) Daly initially favored the idea of “psychic wholeness, or androgyny,” then “recanted” from the position, finding the word androgyny “confusing,” “a semantic abomination,” and describing the androgynous ideal as the equivalent of “John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett-Majors Scotch-taped together” (216).

 

In Garber’s reconstructed sense of the term, as distinguished from Jung’s and Haraway’s usage, the bisexual may be said to collaborate in Hayles’s project of denaturing the human sphere. Like Haraway’s cyborg, Garber’s bisexual works to “undo” certain prevailing oppositions — though the principal oppositions involved in this case are not human/animal, human/machine, and physical/nonphysical, but rather 1) homosexual/heterosexual, 2) masculine/feminine, and 3)sexual/platonic.⁹

 

Garber problematizes the first of these three fundamental dyads in a number of ways: a) by looking at “borderline” cases which raise general doubts about the viability of a linear gay/straight continuum;¹⁰ b) by revealing the specific shortcomings of quantified indexes such as the 7-point Kinsey scale and the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (28-30); and c) by citing Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, whose scholarship has shown how normative claims are culturally produced within what Butler has called “a heterosexual matrix for desire” (161). Within this matrix, Butler argues, bisexuality is “redescribed as impossible” by the patriarchal law that “produces both sanctioned heterosexuality and transgressive homosexuality” (183-4). In a similar vein, Garber quotes feminist Mariana Valverde: “Although bisexuality, like homosexuality, is just another deviant identity, it also functions as a rejection of the norm/deviance model” (250).

 

In connection with the second dyad, Garber extends the discussion of her previous book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Her chapter on androgyny deconstructs not only Jungian psychology but related concepts such as hermaphroditism and the myth of unisexuality.¹¹

 

With respect to the third dyad, Garber argues that there is an unavoidably erotic component in amorous childhood and adolescent friendships (ch. 13), as well as in the teacher/student relationship (ch. 14). The realm of pedagogy is institutionally bisexual, Garber asserts, noting that classroom transferences occur regardless of the sexual predilections students and teachers display outside the class setting.

 

As this list suggests, few social or psychological institutions remain uninterrogated in the pages of Vice Versa. In addition to those already mentioned, marriage (chs. 16, 17), monogamy (chs. 18-21), “normalcy” (297-303), the “conversion” narrative (ch. 15), and even theories of ambidexterity (ch. 12) all come up for revisionist scrutiny.

 

I see Garber’s bisexual as a potential complement or corrective to Haraway’s cyborg. Haraway and Garber both create a “powerful infidel heteroglossia” which charts paths away from a unitary sense of self; but the paths they select diverge in important ways. Despite the masculine/feminine dyad discussed above, Garber’s bisexual would hardly be overjoyed at the prospect of living in Haraway’s “world without gender.”¹² Even if such a world were imaginable, would it be advisable? providential? fun? In Haraway’s talk of “ideologies of sexual reproduction” and the “informatics of domination,” one is left to wonder what place, if any, remains for Garber’s “eroticism of everyday life.” The very style of Garber’s book — its affable wordplay, countless anecdotes, vigorous readability — stands as an implicit rebuke to Haraway’s manifesto, with its ascetic ironies and pinched, semi-automaton syntax.

 

At the same time, a greater appreciation for what Haraway means by situated knowledges might have helped Garber to curb her occasional tendency toward grandiosity. Garber’s chapter on Freud ends with this pronouncement: “Bisexuality is that upon the repression of which society depends for its laws, codes, boundaries, social organization — everything that defines ‘civilization’ as we know it” (206). Despite the element of irony in the final words, Garber leaves open the possibility here, as elsewhere, that bisexuality carries the potential for shaking Western civilization to its very foundations. Such a cataclysm would be a tall order indeed for a movement which is bedeviled with problems of visibility and representation, and which is unlikely to yield a politically empowering event equivalent to the Stonewall Riots.

 

This matter of “pull-apart” opposites, and of cultural theory encroaching on realpolitik, calls for a caveat. John Guillory, rearticulating a concern that has become almost ritualized in the field, recently criticized the cultural studies tendency toward fostering claims about the supposed across-the-boards subversiveness of certain marginalized practices.¹³ This tendency, he suggests, arises as a kind of fantasy wish-fulfillment in the midst of a widening credibility gap: in the absence of persuasive totalizing narratives about politics or economics, cultural studies brings ingratiating relief in the form of crypto-totalizing discourse about neglected minorities. Guillory specifically takes Judith Butler to task for intimating that historically entrenched binaries about gender can be fully “subverted” through the auspices of drag performance.¹⁴ A similar argument could be made about some of Garber’s claims for bisexuality — her occasional habit of resorting to breathless superlatives (does bisexuality really mark the spot where all of our questions about eroticism, repression, and social arrangements come to crisis [368]?), and of relying on a plethora of literary close readings where broader historical analysis is called for. In Vice Versa, bisexuality at times seems to be elevated to the status of a full-fledged sociopolitical paradigm shift by surmise and enthusiasm alone, by the sheer prettiness of thinking it so.

 

Yet it must also be argued that bisexuality is an unusually volatile and productive site of present contestation, and it is not Garber’s duty to undersell the potential of a movement whose parameters are still manifestly in flux. What Eve Sedgwick asserted of her book Epistemology of the Closet may be said as well of Vice Versa:

 

A point of the book is not to know how far its insights and projects are generalizable, not to be able to say in advance where the semantic specificity of these issues gives over to (or: itself structures?) the syntax of a 'broader' or more abstractable critical project.¹⁵

 

Nor, pace Edmund White, should Garber be burdened with the task of enumerating every one of bisexuality’s discontents. The enormous misconceptions and prejudices that still saturate most discussions about bisexuality, even among the highly educated, form their own inverted justification for the kind of playfully affirmative treatment Garber provides. Many readers, faced with the carnivalesque inversions and crosscurrents found in Vice Versa, will feel a sense of vertigo akin to the kind Fredric Jameson has described about the encounter with postmodern architecture:

 

We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace . . . The newer architecture . . . stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible dimensions.¹⁶

 

Notes

 

1. A sampling of individuals from the present century: Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay, married to a woman and actively gay (73-4); Patricia Ireland, whose bisexuality came under political censure when she became the president of N.O.W. (72-3); writer John Cheever, described by his daughter as a man who loved men but disliked homosexuals (403); First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (76-8); ex-congressman Robert Bauman, who pled “nolo contendre” to charges of homosexual solicitation, and whose marriage was subsequently annulled by the Catholic Church on grounds of “Mistake of person” (71); and painter Larry Rivers, for whom the term “trisexual” is coined (“He’d try anything”) (448).

 

2. Joseph P. Kahn, “The new book on bisexuality,” Boston Globe, 6 Sept. 1995, 80.

 

3. See also Rita Mae Brown, “Defining the New Sexuality,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 30 July 1995, 2,9; and Frank Kermode, “Beyond Category,” New York Times Book Review, 9 July 1995, 6-7.

 

4. Edmund White, “Gender Uncertainties,” The New Yorker, 17 July 1995, 81.

 

5. Ibid.

 

6. Garber traces the roots of nineties bisexual activism through the gay and lesbian movement to seventies feminism and the civil rights movement of the sixties (86-7). She acknowledges that the activist and theoretical sides of bisexuality are by no means interchangeable: “the two strands of bisexual thinking, the identity-politics, rights-based arguments for visibility on the one hand and the theoretical, deconstructive, category-questioning arguments for rethinking erotic boundaries on the other are not always easily combined” (87). For biographical material on Garber, see Kahn, 75, 80.

 

7. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 265.

 

8. See Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 149-81. The material Hayles refers to is found in pp. 151-4.

 

9. Garber writes, “If bisexuality is in fact, as I suspect it to be, not just another sexual orientation but rather a sexuality that undoes sexual orientation as a category, a sexuality that threatens and challenges the easy binarities of straight and gay, queer and ‘het,’ and even, through its biological and physiological meanings, the gender categories of male and female, then the search for the meaning of the word ‘bisexual’ offers a different kind of lesson . . . The erotic discovery of bisexuality is the fact that it reveals sexuality to be a process of growth, transformation, and surprise, not a stable and knowable state of being” (65- 6).

 

10. See note 1.

 

11. Regarding the potential for “destabilizing” the man/woman divide, Garber’s bisexual shows an affinity with the drag queen as figured in Judith Butler. See Butler’s “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) 128-41, and note 14 below.

 

12. Haraway, 181.

 

13. John Guillory, “System Without Structure: Cultural Studies as ‘Low Theory,'” Keynote Presentation, GWU “Intersections” Conference, Washington, 30 March 1996. An earlier formulation of this oft-reiterated concern is found in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986) 177-8.

 

14. Guillory singles out Butler’s scholarship as an unusually intelligent and influential (rather than unusually vulnerable) example of this practice. Butler herself, of course, is not unaware of the problem. She spends a considerable portion of Gender Trouble making similar objections to this tendency in the writings of Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and Monique Wittig (79-128). Further, she has made a number of clarifications about her own claims for drag performativity in “Critically Queer,” GLQ 1:1 (1993): 21, 24, 26-7; see also Butler’s Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993). In Gender Trouble Butler writes, “Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism” (13).

 

15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 12.

 

16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) 38.