{"id":19886,"date":"2014-08-20T09:52:51","date_gmt":"2014-08-20T16:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/csws.uoregon.edu\/?page_id=19886"},"modified":"2021-01-13T09:45:54","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T17:45:54","slug":"jenee-wilde-phd-research-description","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/recent-grant-awardees\/2014-2\/jenee-wilde-phd-research-description\/","title":{"rendered":"Jen\u00e9e Wilde, 2014 CSWS Jane Grant Dissertation Fellow"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Publication outcomes from the grant<\/strong>:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"Jen\u00e9e<\/a>
Jen\u00e9e Wilde<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGay, Queer or Dimensional? Modes of Reading Bisexuality on Torchwood<\/em>,\u201d Journal of Bisexuality<\/em>, <\/a>vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 414-434 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDimensional Sexuality: Exploring New Frameworks for Bisexual Desires,\u201d Sexual and Relationship Therapy<\/em><\/a>, vol. 29, no. 3, August 2014, pp. 320-38 <\/p>\n\n\n

The article below is reprinted from the 2014 CSWS Annual Review (p. 13)<\/em><\/p>\n

The BiSciFi Project: Researching Speculative Fictions and Bisexual Lives<\/h3>\n

2014 CSWS Jane Grant Fellowship winner seeks \u201cto achieve a more complex recognition and understanding of multisexual lives.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Jen\u00e9e Wilde, PhD candidate, UO Department of English (Folklore)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

As a PhD candidate, my research has resulted in part from frustrations I have felt with the lack of serious treatment given to bisexuality as a position from which to theorize sexual knowledge within humanistic scholarship. While studies of gay, lesbian, and transgender communities and cultural production have dramatically increased over the past two decades, research on bisexuality remains highly undervalued in much of the humanities and social sciences.<\/p>\n

This situation led to a \u201cformative moment\u201d early in my English\/Folklore program. While I embraced queer theorizing and reading practices in graduate coursework, I kept bumping into a noticeable absence of bisexuality and bisexuals in the majority of the research I was introduced to. I felt both excited by queer perspectives and perplexed by their failures to address my own standpoint as a bisexual woman. Then one day in class, we discussed a study on \u201cstraight\u201d women in gay and lesbian spaces\u2014only the researchers, it appeared, had not bothered to ask any of the \u201cstraight\u201d interlopers if they identified as something else. When no one else seemed to notice this issue, I finally blurted out, \u201cWhere are all the fucking bisexuals?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"logo_300\"<\/a>I began conducting interdisciplinary research under an umbrella I call \u201cThe BiSciFi Project.\u201d Unlike more traditional humanities scholarship, half of this research involves ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Philadelphia and Minneapolis in communities where bisexual and science fiction fan identities overlap. My purpose is to challenge the dearth of research on bisexuality in humanities fields and to demonstrate the untapped potential of bisexuality studies across academic disciplines.<\/p>\n

The BiSciFi Project combines methodologies from literary studies, queer cultural studies, and folklore to explore multiple aspects of bisexuality and its representations in non-realistic or \u201cspeculative\u201d literature and television. Imagining alternatives to \u201cnormal\u201d human life is what speculative fiction does best, making it an ideal site for exploring marginalized sexual representation and identity.<\/p>\n

Approaches include critical analysis of dissident sexuality in 1960s-70s speculative literature, archival research of a 1980s bisexual fanzine, cultural analysis of contemporary genre television shows, and ethnographic research with bisexually identified speculative fiction fans in multiple settings. So far, the project has yielded several national conference presentations, two published articles, and my PhD dissertation-in-progress, \u201cSpeculative Fictions, Bisexual Lives: Changing Frameworks of Sexual Desire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dissertation is concerned with bisexuality on three cultural levels\u2014bisexual identity and community, bisexual representation and interpretation, and bisexuality as a category of knowledge. On the level of group identity, I am not so much interested in understanding how bisexuality is defined by individuals but rather why some people choose to self-identify as bisexual rather than (or in addition to) queer, pansexual, fluid, genderqueer, or other terms that resist binary categorization or refuse them outright. I\u2019m interested in how this self-definition helps some people to understand their social and cultural experiences and to find communities. Moreover, I\u2019m interested in how non-realistic or \u201cspeculative\u201d fiction genres may have contributed to some bisexual people\u2019s experiences of group identity and community.<\/p>\n

The connection to speculative fiction brings me to the second cultural level\u2014bisexual representation. Here the issue I am interested in is how we \u201cread\u201d and interpret images of non-binary sexual desire in cultural production. In other words, what does bisexuality look like? The question isn\u2019t as straightforward as it may seem since in the United States our cultural codes for \u201cknowing\u201d the sexual orientation of another are directly linked to binary gender categories. We assume straight, gay, or lesbian sexual orientations by the gender of one\u2019s partner in relationship, but non-monosexual people don\u2019t neatly line up with this coding for a person\u2019s \u201creal\u201d sexual orientation. So again, speculative fiction plays a role by representing that which doesn\u2019t seem to \u201cexist\u201d within a particular socio-historical moment. It helps us to imagine what dissident, queer, non-binary sexualities might look like\u2014a critically important function for self-identified bisexuals seeking validation and community.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve already touched on the third level because it is impossible to extricate from the other two\u2014bisexuality as a category of knowledge in U.S. culture. This epistemic level governs what can or can\u2019t be \u201cknown\u201d about bisexuality and is utterly conflicted over what bisexuality is, what it looks like, who counts as bisexual or not, or whether it is even real. Since bisexual<\/em> first appeared in late nineteenth century medical and sexological debates, the term has accumulated a cargo hold of pathological baggage that was later retooled with Stonewall and gay liberation, rejected by lesbian separatists, demonized during the AIDS crisis, and ignored in the remaking of gay marriage as the poster child of homonormativity. Reverberations of these discourses have passed through cultural representations of bisexuality as an evolutionary or developmental phase, a utopian ideal, a lavender menace, a typhoid Mary, a ratings booster, and as a letter in an acronym that remains stubbornly invisible. As a lived identity and experience, bisexuality remains outside the dominant framework used to organize sexual knowledge in U.S. culture\u2014heterosexuality and homosexuality.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpeculative Fictions, Bisexual Lives\u201d asks how these gender-linked binary categories affect cultural understandings of bisexuality, and how some bisexuals use non-realistic or \u201cspeculative\u201d fiction to help negotiate oppressive cultural norms and assumptions in the lived world. At the heart of these lines of inquiry is \u201cChanging Frameworks of Sexual Desire,\u201d or the idea that the \u201cboth-and\u201d logic upon which bisexuality is structured may be a key to reframing the \u201ceither-or\u201d logic that now dominates categories of sexual knowledge. To achieve a more complex recognition and understanding of multisexual lives, I propose dimensional sexuality<\/em> as an alternative hermeneutic model and framework for analysis. My thesis argues that we must shift away from sexual \u201cknowing\u201d that is singular, static, exclusive, and oppositional to that which is multiple, temporal, relational, and indeterminate. Dimensional sexuality helps to facilitate this shift by providing a new method of interpretive analysis for humanities scholarship as well as a flexible analytical model for social science research. \u25a0<\/p>\n

\u2014Jen\u00e9e Wilde is the 2014-15 Jane Grant Dissertation Award recipient from the Center for the Study of Women in Society. More information on her research can be found at jeneewilde.com or at The BiSciFi Project on Facebook.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Publication outcomes from the grant: \u201cGay, Queer or Dimensional? Modes of Reading Bisexuality on Torchwood,\u201d Journal of Bisexuality, vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 414-434 \u201cDimensional Sexuality: Exploring New Frameworks for Bisexual Desires,\u201d Sexual and Relationship Therapy, vol. 29, no.…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"parent":18893,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-19886","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19886"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33211,"href":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19886\/revisions\/33211"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/csws-archive.uoregon.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}