STUDENTS' RESPONSES TO MARJORIE GARBER
On 147, Garber says that "bisexual" is "the right term and the wrong term at once." She speaks of the "resistance to labels that leads people to says that they believe in equal rights for women but that they are not feminists, as if feminism meant something other, something scarier (something more lesbian?) than that." This is interesting evidence that (again) people and issues are multifaceted and connected. A woman might be scared of standing up for her rights not only because she's afraid of the label "bitch," but also because she's afraid of the label "lesbian." (Reed Haslach)
I almost get the feeling that Garber is saying that trying to talk about bisexuality is like trying to talk about enlightenment for a Buddhist, maybe like language trying to describe itself to Derrida, like trying to touch the tip of your tongue with the tip of your tongue. As soon as we open our mouths (or pen caps) about it, we are jumping in and pinning it down. So I think she is avoiding this as best she can by trying to "talk" about it less as its own unique multifaceted sexual construct, than as the shifty reality behind all sexual constructs . . . (Seth Warren)
What Garber fails to realize that is that if we are all indeed bisexual, bisexuality means nothing--a nod to Saussure as well as to Derrida--because it is not in a comparing/contrasting relation to anything else. It is omnipresent and all encompassing, and therefore void of effect or meaning. (Joe Tennis)
I liked Garber's analogy of the Möbius strip, and I think it is also an improvement on the Kinsey scale. By taking the two opposite ends, completely heterosexual and completely homosexual, we can see even heterosexual and homosexual as something other than centered identities. (Chris Schatz)
I am reminded of Foucault's "repressive hypothesis"--and the idea that by silencing sex, by attempting to subjugate it and master it, we have actually done the opposite, have actually brought sex to the fore and allowed for an explosion of discourses about it. Does it follow, then, that if bisexuality has indeed become chic, then this is precisely because it has been "repressed" by the binary of homo- and hetero-sexuality, because it is uncertain and enigmatic? And will bisexuality lose some of its "chicness" the more it makes its way into the mainstream and the more that people like Garber discourse on it? (Steve Rodgers)
The blurring of the line between male and female, gay and straight, has become the norm in pop culture. What Rolling Stone reader hasn't happened upon a Calvin Klein ad featuring waifish androgynes and yawned, "Next . . ."? Indeed, conferring the label of "bisexuality" upon the supposed counterculture may undermine its transgressive clout--as if to say, "Yes, we get it; you're neither male nor female, but at the same time both . . . Now move along . . . " (J. P. Mohan)
What next?