The performance and production of bisexual identity work online
Date
2009-10-29T22:04:48Z
Authors
Arthur, Emily D.
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Abstract
Employing institutional ethnography as an analytic frame, this study explicates the
disjuncture felt by bisexual-identified individuals between their lived actualities and the textual realities stemming from the binary model of sexuality. This study also explores the role of online journal communities, including the capabilities and limits of this type of venue, as a rolling text that coordinates the narratives created there around bisexuality and bisexual-identification. Finally, this study critically examines the collaborative development of an experience-based discourse on bisexuality as produced by text-based
identity work. Through the coordination of bisexual identity work taking place online,
the venue facilitates the production of an alternative discourse that is differentiated from other sexuality discourses in its demonstration of fluidity, multiplicity, and resistance to order. In its differences from, rather than its similarities to, governing sexuality discourses, this bisexual discourse-in-production creates the possibility for a radical reconceptualization of sexuality and sexual-identification.
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Keywords
sexuality, sexual identity, social media, Internet, communication technologies, discourse, institutional ethnography, human-technology interaction, bisexuality, digital culture, cyberqueer, representation, media, social institutions, identity work, social organization of knowledge