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Vice Versa: Bisexuality and The Eroticism of Everyday Life, Marjorie Garber, Simon and Schuster, 1995, 606pp, $30.
Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries and Visions, Edited by Naomi Tucker with Liz Highleyman and Rebecca Kaplan. Haworth Publishers, 1995, 358pp, $14.95 paper (available from FE Books).
With the recent publication of Vice Versa, a voluminous "mainstream" book and a Newsweek cover story, bisexuality is flaunting its transgressive implications in public discourse. Genuine sex radicals realize both blessing and damnation are contained in this flurry of attention and pseudo-acceptance.
Every collective gaze diverted from theaters of death and death-dealing politicians, to momentarily focus on the meaning of pleasure, pleases me. But let's not be fooled by Jane Doe's voyeurism either: the same people momentarily enchanted by the exotic charge of "alternative lifestyles" when they consume our difference through the mediated barriers of books, magazines and talk-shows are doing nothing to ensure our liberation.
A few moments in the televisual spotlight usually augments assimilation and recuperation. Like all the "straight gays" invisibly infiltrating suburbia, some bisexuals may hop on the publicity train for all it's worth, but as even Garber's restrained analysis assures us, bisexuality is not so easily packaged.
Garber's book is ostensibly bold, but conveniently monocultural. Her sites of exploration reduce sexuality to a white European preoccupation best understood by pop culture, psychoanalysis and literature. These traditional academic fetishes fascinate and titillate but rarely illuminate. Her section on "politics" borders on the provocative, but ultimately lumps all activists together as she discusses bisexual "politicians," making little distinction between the insights of Eleanor Roosevelt and Emma Goldman.
The Eroticism of Texts
The "eroticism of everyday life" makes for...