Look Both Ways
Bisexual Politics
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
For the acclaimed author and activist Jennifer Baumgardner, bisexuality has always been more than the "sexual non-preference of the '90s." In Look Both Ways, Baumgardner takes a close look at the growing visibility of gay and bisexual characters, performers, and issues on the national cultural stage. Despite the prevalence of bisexuality among Generation X and Y women, she finds that it continues to be marginalized by both gay and straight cultures, and dismissed either as a phase or a cop-out. With intimacy and humor, Baumgardner discusses her own experience as a bisexual, and the struggle she's undergone to reconcile the privilege she's garnered as a woman who is perceived as straight and the empowerment and satisfaction she's derived from her relationships with women.
Part memoir, part pop-culture study, Look Both Ways connects the prominent dots of a bisexual community (Alix Kates Shulman, Ani DiFranco, Rebecca Walker, and, of course, Anne Heche) that Baumgardner argues have bridged feminist aims with those of the gay rights movement. Look Both Ways is a compelling and current study in bisexual lives lived secretly and openly, and an exploration of the lessons learned by writers, artists, and activists who have refused the either/or paradigm defended by both gay and straight communities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sometimes confused but ultimately insightful, this cultural study pries open that ambiguous can of worms called "sexual choice" and looks at it with eyes wide open. Baumgardner, coauthor of the "third wave feminist" Manifesta, discovered her own bisexuality shortly after graduating from college, when she unexpectedly fell in love with a "girlie girl" co-worker at Ms. magazine, which was, significantly, the first place she "truly saw women without men as being successes, not failures." Her story of how she explored her "urge toward bisexuality as a means to figuring out how to have a satisfying, truly equal and truly intimate relationship" weaves a personal thread through the book. In between, she evokes the heady days of second-wave feminism, lauds Ani DiFranco as the quintessential bisexual of her generation and analyzes the TV heroine Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a powerful, vulnerable, tragic, feminist superhero. Baumgardner controversially argues that bisexuality, especially in younger women, is more widespread than we think, and that recognizing this "could harness the multiplicity of attraction that Kinsey described" and "lead to better relationships, both political and sexual, between men and women." Her insistence that bisexuality has the potential to further the goals of feminism and gay rights challenges the limitations of "gay" and "straight."
