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Literature, Popular Culture, and Bisexuality (call for chapters for edited collection)

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Submission Date: 2025-01-30

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Literature, Popular Culture, and Bisexuality (edited collection; print)

ed. Ian Kinane (University of Roehampton)

A paltry survey of a number of digital news and opinion outlets over the last decade or so suggests the degree to which, as a sexual orientation and/or marker of identity, bisexuality is often parsed in fraught and wildly hyperbolic terms. As recently as 2014, Owen Duffy proclaimed in the British mainstream left publication The Guardian that “popular culture is still afraid of bisexuality” (n.p.); while in 2018, Kristen Lepionka, writing for the liberal news and opinion site Salon, laments the poor treatment of bisexual people in popular culture at large. Apparently Lepionka missed a trick, however, because in the same year Lena Finkel declared on the feminist opinion site Femestella that “bisexuality is having a moment in pop culture” (n.p.). Within popular cultural discourse, then, bisexuality is often thought of – at one and the same time – as both unseemly and á la mode, both unfashionable and terribly de rigueur. Such contradictions abound. It is only a year after Lepionka’s denouncement, in 2019, that Hugh Montgomery proclaims on the BBC that popular culture has “embraced sexuality ‘without labels’” (n.p.); and that Emer McHugh, writing for the Irish national broadcaster RTE, argues that “pop culture enables bisexual people to tell their own stories” (2019, n.p.). Even more contemporarily, there has been a steady increase in the global coverage by digital news outlets and popular zines of those critical concerns surrounding the representation(s) of bisexuality in popular culture (Sarkar 2021) as well as the erasure of bisexuality and bisexuals from/by the media (Johnson 2022). This is but a very small sample of the discursive rhetorical loop in which bisexuality as a cultural category has been caught.

Bisexuality is often couched in contradictory terms: as a “notable absence” (Steinman 2000, 17), as “hardly unnoted” (Steinman 2011, 402), and as “absent and negative” (Alexander 2007, 9). Meg Barker and Darren D. Langridge’s note that “[b]isexuality has been acknowledged to be a silenced sexuality” (2008, 389) – which is really a double contradiction, since bisexuality cannot be both silenced and acknowledged, and certainly not if its silencing is acknowledged within/by mainstream media outlets. Similarly, Julie E. Hartman’s term “bisexual display” (2013, 42), or Alon Zivony and Thalma Lobel’s terms “public invisibility” (2014, 1166), or even Surya Monro et al.’s contention that “bisexuality is commonly overlooked” (2017, 667), seem to be contradictions in terms. (How does one display something that is apparently invisible? How is something invisible if it is in the public domain? Does the commonality and frequency by which bisexuality is overlooked not by that very commonality and frequency force us to look at it?) Given what Karen Yescavage and Jonathan Alexander previously noted as the “modest increase in media visibility for both individual bisexuals and the bi-sexual community” (2000, 177), the “growing bi-visibility in multiple media” (178), and the social and cultural interest in bisexuality that “seems on the verge of becoming more pronounced, more vocal, and more visible” (177), one wonders just how much more visible bisexuals have to be to be really visible.

This collection sets out to understand the “bisexual experience” (if, indeed, there is one) in the popular culture imaginary, how it is “read”, and what meanings we might make from it as readers. Given its propensity for bisexual storytelling, as well as its conveyance of bisexual aesthetics, popular culture, then, has become something of the bisexual medium, a form in which numerous bisexual representations converge and intersect. As Maria San Filippo notes, bisexuality has become of late a “crucial component in the strategies and processes involved in selling and experiencing screen media” (2013, 4). As such, there is a critical need to address the role of bisexuality in popular culture as well as popular culture’s impact on bisexual identity-making. The significance of this critical engagement is multiform: firstly, in terms of representative politics, analysing representations of bisexuals and bisexuality in popular culture is important because such representations not only shape societal perceptions of bisexuality, but also inform the self-image and behaviours of bisexuals themselves; secondly, through greater bisexual visibilisation within mass media, bisexuals and bisexual communities are afforded political agency and, in turn, greater political mass; and thirdly, popular culture is itself a political “movement”, a globalising force under the aegis of which bisexual and bisexuality are part of the cultural conversation.

Literature, Popular Culture, and Bisexuality seeks to expand upon the “texts” of bisexuality and to explore its imagistic representations across broader forms of popular culture, including literature, television, and wider digital media content. If, indeed, popular culture “enables bisexual people to tell their own stories” (McHugh, n.p.), it follows that a fuller understand of those stories may be sought by casting the interpretive net wider, so to speak, and accommodating for a broader range of popular forms and content. Much like Merl Storr’s defining work, Bisexuality: A Critical Reader (1999), this collection is “about bisexuality and not about bisexuals” (1); it is concerned not with the problematisation of “being bisexual” but with the cultural relevance and impact bisexuality has had (/is having) on and through popular forms of literature, culture, and media, today. Much like the work of contemporary bisexuality scholar, Jenée Wilde, Literature, Popular Culture, and Bisexuality is interested in what bisexuality looks like; in other words, “how we ‘read’ and interpret images of [bisexuality] in cultural production” (2015, 6). This collection, then, will focus on the imagistic representations and the ways in which it has been reproduced, discoursed, and (mis)understood within the cultural imagination vis-à-vis popular literary, social, and media forms.

Chapter submissions of 8,000-10,000 words (approx.) are sought for this edited collection from across a number of diverse geographical, socio-political, cultural, and racial and ethnic contexts.

Chapter topics might include but are not limited to the following:

bisexuality and/in popular culture

the “meaning(s)” of bisexuality and/in popular culture

the representation(s) of bisexuality and/in popular culture

popular culture as a bisexual medium

theories of bisexuality and/in popular culture

bisexual erasure and/in popular culture

redressing bisexual erasure and/in popular culture

bisexuality (in)visibility and/in popular culture

positive representations of bisexuality and/in popular culture

linguistic constructions of bisexuality and/in popular culture

bisexual texts, figures, celebrities, etc.

“coming out” as bisexual and/in popular culture

bisexuality and queer aesthetics and/or queer art forms

the politics of bisexuality and/in popular culture

the global contexts of bisexuality research and/in popular culture

Prospective contributors are invited to send an abstract of 500 words, a writing sample (e.g. previously published work or work in train), plus a bio note of no more than 250 words to Dr. Ian Kinane (ian.kinane@roehampton.ac.uk) by 30^th January 2025. All prospective contributors are welcome to contact the above to discuss informally and/or to seek further information. Submissions are invited from established academics, early career scholars, independent scholars, and postgraduate students/researchers alike. Abstracts will be reviewed and prospective contributors will be given a timeline to publication following selection of successful submissions.

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2025-08-11 ~ 2025-08-14

Literature, Popular Culture, and Bisexuality (call for chapters for edited collection)

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