Alternative Families, Alternative Lives: Married Women<i>Doing</i>Bisexuality

Abstract

Married bisexual women shake up existing socially recognizable family, gender, and sexuality orders prescribed by Western society simply by being out, bisexual, and married. Empirical research on and theoretical arguments about bisexuality in the family have been rare. A recent study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family (2010) notes that “… a number of core questions [about bisexuality in the family] remain unanswered” (Biblarz & Savci, 2010, p. 490). It is my intention to argue in favor of a new paradigm that sees relationships through a bisexual lens (rather than a hetero-/homosexual lens), allowing for simultaneous partners of different genders (polyamory) as a legitimate and lawful practice and the creation of families through such practices to be viewed as no less necessary than the families of their monosexual peers. (In)visibility of this high-stakes way of doing bisexuality informs the ways my respondents do family.