Centre for Cultural Partnerships - Research Publications

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Historicising contemporary bisexuality

MACDOWALL, LACHLAN (Haworth Press, 2009)

Contemporary bisexuality has a distinctively modern history that begins in the middle of the nineteenth century and develops through a matrix of three interconnected definitions, as combinations of biological, psychical and sexual categories - male/female, masculine/feminine and heterosexual/homosexual. Due in part to bisexuality's marginality in theories of sexuality, recent theorisations of bisexuality have often been reluctant to historicise the category of bisexuality itself. However, bisexuality's origins in the nineteenth century, particularly its relation to Darwinism and theories of evolution, continue to shape how it is articulated in the early twenty-first century.