Bi Quotes

“It means understanding that different kinds of oppression are interlinked, and that one can't liberate only one group without the others. It means acknowledging kyriarchy and intersectionality - the fact that along different axes, we're all both oppressed and oppressors, privileged and disprivileged.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted—romantically and/or sexually—to people of more than one sex, and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Bisexuality has the potential to subvert the structure of the gender binary, since bisexuality is perceived as a type of desire that doesn't distinguish between people based on their genders.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Privileged people can feel the way these identities threaten their privileged status and the benefits that they receive as a result. For this reason also, trying to reassure hegemony that these identities are not a threat to it (for the purpose of being "accepted" into society) is moot. Hegemony is right to feel threatened, because there's no way one could change social order without deconstructing power.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“If the goal of feminism is to end patriarchy and gender-based oppression, then transgender politics supplies us one of the most important perspectives from which to view - and challenge - binary gender and gender-based oppression. As mentioned in previous chapters, if no clear distinction exists between "male" and "female," it becomes impossible to oppress people according to their gender. If we have no sole criterion for determining who is "man" and who is "woman," we can't know whose role it is to be oppressor, and whose to be oppressed.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Passing means that bisexuals are completely dependent upon their partners for successful bisexual passing....passing can never be done individually, as it necessitates being seen with other peoples (as "passing accessories").”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Many bisexuals might indeed feel comfortable and well represented by [creating images of 'stable, monogamous, appropriately sexual' bisexuals], but what of the many people who don't fit in this standard of the "normal" or "good" bisexual? Some bisexuals are sluts (read: sexually independent women), some bisexuals are just experimenting, some like people of certain genders only sexually and not romantically, some like to have threesomes and perform bisexuality for men, some are HVI and STI carriers, some don't practice safer sex, some are indeed indecisive and confused, some cheat on their partners, some do choose to be bi, as well as many other things that the "myth-busting" [or simplifying/sanitizing] tries to cast off. A very long list of people is being thrown overboard in the effort to "fight biphobia." In this way, the rebuttal in fact imposes biphobic normative standards on the bisexual community itself, drawing a line between "good" and "bad" bisexuals.
Either way, benign docility and unthreatening citizenship are not exactly what I would want my bisexuality to be associated with.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“bisexuality destabilizes the clear-cut border between gay and straight, symbolizing anxiety of the invasion of queerness into straight populations.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Minority world is a term denoting the geographical areas and countries usually imagined as the “West” (west of what?). It corresponds with the term majority world, which comes to replace the use of the problematic term “third world.” It allows us to keep in mind that, while minority-world thinkers have been busy pathologizing sex, gender, and desire, many majority-world societies have long had mainstream, socially acceptable patterns of practices and behaviors that minority-world people might understand as “queer.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“While radical queer activists around the world have been fighting against wars, military, and white neocolonialism, privileged white GGGGs in America have been fighting for their right to participate.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“bisexuality is a partial identity since it exists “everywhere and nowhere,” always imagined in relation to something else. Therefore bisexual identity is both a patchwork and a scavenger, taking what it can, where it can.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“When it comes to monosexual identities, gender-based discrimination not only is encouraged but also constitutes the basis on which monosexual identities are created and withheld. In this way bisexuality exposes inconsistencies within the system”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“not only did the American GGGG movement betray its queer roots of antiwar and radical struggles, but also that it has done so in a way that makes militarists and governments proud.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Instead of earning “rights” and aspiring for “equality,” bi movements should agitate for liberation and aspire for a revolution.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Instead of challenging straight life and helping straight people out of the unfortunate structures culture has built all around us, the GGGG movement tries to gain access into the same oppressive structures that are keeping everyone locked in.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Using bisexual identity in this way, as inspired by Vicky Shiran, makes bisexual identity into a defiant political statement. No longer just a form of sexuality and desire, but active resistance to systems of monosexism, sexism, cissexism, racism, and others. It means creating bisexuality not as a plea to be accepted by the same systems that reject us, but to destroy these systems and build something new.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Monogamy has been used historically and currently as a capitalist and patriarchal tool for controlling women, and for keeping all people in small, docile units where they are isolated and unable to connect and organize (especially in minority-world cultures). This keeps resistance to a bare minimum.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Bisexual passing also exposes the often-invisible structure of monosexism, since by crossing the monosexist line [by passing] we show that it exists. Our passing also threatens people's own "pure" identities, because despite the fact that we may look or act like them, we are not in fact like them. This means that we represent their anxiety of being "polluted,”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

“Reducing bisexual experience around oppression to the visual aspect only, necessarily means erasing all those other aspects of bisexual oppression that aren't perceived as visible or intuitive.”
― Shiri Eisner, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution