Bisexual Activism: A Love Story

Like many activists, I am passionate about human rights. Activists are among the most passionate people I know; we are enamored of justice, and with yearning we are driven to achieve it. In this autoethnography, I reframe the stereotype of bisexual excess and consider it in terms of bi+ generosity. To my mind, it is love as affect that motivates generosity, which leads to love as care in action. I argue that my bi+ activism is enacted through acts of care, which bell hooks would categorize as an ethic of love. By discussing the place of love in bi+ activism, my goal is to contribute to the fields of autoethnography, love studies, and bisexual studies.

My interest in love has changed over time, shifting in focus from a religious erotic romantic ideal of the couple towards a materialist feminist love of many. For instance, my PhD thesis looked at the relationship between mutual love and reciprocal touch in the writing of the queer nineteenth-century Jesuit poet and priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the subsequent book, I argued that Hopkins's conversion was one of his most romantic acts and that we should read his poetry to Christ in this light.¹ My focus on love (eros or amor) was predicated on the individual- or, rather, couple-centric ideal that I absorbed from exegeses of the erotic biblical book, the Song of Songs.

My most recent research has been shifting away from literature and theology towards social research, especially in areas of social justice. And yet I am still invested in love, simply in a less romantic and more political love. In brief, what helped me make the leap was an early career researcher keynote lecture I presented and its resultant essay about the Song of Songs in womanist theology. The topic originated from my postdoctoral project about the literary and cultural reception of the Song of Songs, a text that I argue is the biblical book about love.² As with other liberation theologies, womanist theology emphasizes the Bible's application to contemporary social justice issues—in this case, the experiences of African American women. Inspired by Jennifer Nash, I argued that womanist theologians use the Song of Songs to nurture what might be called love-politics: social justice embedded in a resistant ethic of self-care and self-love, which are themselves acts of political defiance against white supremacy.³ I demonstrated how womanists adopted love-politics within a context of infrapolitics, what Patricia Hill Collins would call the often-hidden acts of everyday resistance in the lives of black women.⁴ Keeping with the tradition of black women's empowerment, Renita J. Weems asserts that a key aim of womanist exegesis "is to empower African American women as readers, as agents, and as shapers of discourse."⁵ From its earliest days, womanist theology aimed to create a bridge between theory and practice, politics and love.⁶

The womanist theologians I researched often wrote passionately from personal experience, calling for social change. I found myself drawn to writing about my activism from a similar genre, autoethnography, a style that Elizabeth Ettorre argues attends to "the cultural dynamics that an individual confronts rather than personal dynamics as in traditional autobiography."⁷ Autoethnography "exposes the individual in a matrix of always and already political activities as one passes through one's cultural experiences."⁸ I have previously coauthored an autoethnography on my bi+ activism.⁹ However, coauthorship meant that I was unable to frame my activism through my own unique perspective. This is because, to my knowledge, no other bi+ activist has spoken of activism as love. I knew that a special journal edition devoted to the topic of queer generosity would provide an appropriate setting to outline my activism through the lens of love. In particular, a quote from Rosalyn Diprose in the call for papers, that generosity "is an openness to others that not only precedes and establishes communal relations but constitutes the self as open to others,"¹⁰ is what I have also quoted in my work on mutual love and touch in Hopkins.¹¹ The...