Bi radical

bialogue-group:

bidyke:

Sorry to be the party pooper, but: bi assimilationism. Why do we need to base our legitimacy on similarity to the gay mainstream?

Also: what’s with the token black man? Racism much?

These are for a brand new Canadian Campaign aimed at getting better health-care for bisexual people within the greater LGBTQ+ community. As mentioned in the accompanying literature, “The four posters provide visibility to groups identified in our pilot study, and in the literature on bisexual health, as strongly impacted by biphobia.”. The aim being to get health-care providers to re-think preconceived notions about who Queer people are and what they might possibly look like in order to make sure all LGBTQ+ people are provided with the best services possible.

There are only a total of four photos and Canada is a multi-ethnic/multi-racial country, so it would be counterproductive to use people of European background only. As it is one half of those pictured are not cisgendered (one Trans* person and one Genderqueer/Two-spirit person) and one half of those pictured are of non-European background (one First Nation person and one person of African decent).

This doesn’t seem to be assimilationist or tokenism, merely representational of the actual types of people an Ontario Health-care provider might reasonably be expected to come across in their daily practice.

Thanks for the link, that was really helpful and might help me make my point clearer.

Let me start by saying that the goal of this campaign is doubtlessly a noble one. Lack of appropriate health care is one of the biggest problems stemming from biphobia and monosexism, and the idea of a campaign addressing the health needs of bisexual people is both necessary and laudable.

On the other hand: wait, what? I don’t see any reference to bi people’s health anywhere on these posters. There’s no way of knowing what these posters are actually about unless you go on the website and read about it. So, here’s my first point: the posters fail pretty much completely at reflecting the original message.

Second point: What do these posters even have to do with the purpose of the campaign? If an organization wants to address the grave problem of bisexual health, why do it through posters? Is this really the most efficient method to counter misconceptions and lack of knowledge amongst care givers? Just off the top of my head, some more efficient methods would be: getting into contact with care givers, giving lectures about bisexual health needs, forming new care guidelines or a “standard of care” for bisexual people, launching a booklet containing information about the health needs of bisexual people, creating a network of bi friendly care givers, etc. etc… All of these methods would have contained a lot more information, carried more knowledge and therefore produced more results than a poster ever could. So why a poster?

Third point: Why a poster like this? To quote the campaign page: “The “This is Our Community” posters address the issue of bisexual inclusion in LGBTQ communities”. As I mentioned in my first point, this totally fails to address the goal of the campaign. But not only that, but this stance also presumes that in order to get better health care, bisexuals needs to become assimilated into the gay community. To me this implies a presumption that bisexuality by itself isn’t a good enough reason for demanding acceptance - it needs a legitimizing agent, and this agent is gay normativity. “Homophobia hurts me too”, as if biphobia isn’t reason enough, or, “I fight for all our rights”, as if bisexuals have to redeem ourselves - our bisexuality - by “community service” and political commitment. Acceptance is conditioned. The point in all the posters (except perhaps the pregnant one?) is similarity to other people and “redemption” of bisexuality through gayness (or being trans), meaning anything but bi. Just to be clear, this is what I call “bi assimilationism”.

Fourth point: The presumption that stereotypes and “invisibility” are the main sources of biphobia and monosexism, and that if we only change those stereotypes then both these structures would magically be resolved and go away. In fact, monosexism and biphobia are much deeper than mere stereotyping, and more significant work than simple “myth busting” needs to be done first in order to challenge them.

Fifth point: Regarding people of color - I wasn’t suggesting that only white people needed to be in this campaign. That would be overtly racist rather than the current covertly racist message which I saw in black tokenism. After reading the campaign link I now realize that the person whom “homophobia also hurts” is supposed to also represent racialized people. So here I’m guessing that the campaign designers expected people to have telepathic abilities, since the person in the picture passes for white (which is to be expected in a racist society where white is the default) and no mention of their racialized identity is made. So, huh?