The bisexuality of Tila Tequila November 4, 2008

During our segment on bisexuality, a student presented on Tila Tequila and bisexuality in the mass media. She did a lovely job of talking about the Tequila’s show, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. She discussed the interestingly hybrid genre of the reality t.v. show in general, spontaneous but not unscripted. And within that frame, she presented a compelling argument for the way in which the show scripts the parameters of acceptable t.v. bisexuality.

First, it is important that the show centers on a woman’s bisexuality. Given the power of the male gaze, a guy choosing between queer guys and straight women would prove much more uncomfortable for a viewing audience than the spectacle of a hot, sexy woman choosing between other hot, queer women and hot, straight men.

Second, while the show does provide some unsettling of our assumptions around sexuality through Tila Tequila, overall the show reifies gender and sexuality. While Tila is allowed to be transgressive (kissing and having desire for both men and women, at the same time), nobody else is. The men are all focused on her and, in the second season, when two of the women kissed each other, they were kicked out. In addition, the show has the women and men segregated in a color-coded house that reminds me of the gendering that toy stores do– pink doors and blue doors lead into the different areas, and when the women and men arrive at Tequila’s house, they arrive in pink and blue limousines.

Finally, the show reifies sexuality in its very format as a dating show that leads, eventually, to Tequila’s choice. At the end of the first season she chose a man. At the end of the second season, a woman. In some ways, regardless of her biography or her own romantic story, two seasons were necessary narratively in order to avoid claims that Tequila was not really bisexual. (See my previous post.)

On a side note: I sent in a PSA for human rights in Burma (starring Tila Tequila) to Sociological Images, a blog whose insistent media watch I appreciate. I’m still not sure how to read this PSA… but it is disturbing in its use of Tequila’s bisexuality in the service of (?) promoting students’ knowledge of and activism about human rights violations in Burma.

Thinking about bisexuality November 4, 2008

My class was thinking through the borderland nature of bisexuality recently. We read a number of personal essays/poems from Robyn Ochs‘s collection Getting Bi (a new edition of which will include even more global representation). We were lucky enough to have Robyn Ochs with us.

One thing that makes bisexuality comparable to mixed-race identity (which we explored through Nella Larsen‘s fabulous novel Quicksand) is its relative invisibility.

Let me explain. In the U.S., the binary racial system has historically meant that you are either black or white. Larsen’s novel gives us a protagonist (Helga Crane) in the 1920s who struggles to find a place where she can acknowledge both her heritages: Danish on one side; African American on the other. Unfortunately, she finds no place like that. Whereever she moves, one aspect of her identity is made salient, is provoked, is seen. So the novel ends as she sinks into motherhood, more mired by the biological body and the meanings that dominant society gives it (colored bodies are only “black”; female bodies are only wives and mothers). As my students have noticed, much literature around borderlands literature ends badly, depressingly, wrenchingly, reinforcing the difficulty of remaining healthily in in-between spaces and identities.

Bisexuality is similarly invisible. Robyn Ochs emphasized this for the students, explaining how once she married her (female) partner, some of the reactions she got were on the lines of “oh, you finally came out all the way” or “you became lesbian!” Likewise, if she had fallen in love with a guy, then her straightness would have been “confirmed.” To complicate this a bit more, while there is a wide spectrum of sexualities, most of us define ourselves by the most visible of our choices. In other words, a woman who has had physical relationships with men and has had numerous fantasies about women is encouraged to privilege the physical in describing herself. Fantasies are not seen as constitutive of sexual identity.

My students, of a different generation than I, than Robyn Ochs, saw the term “queer” as one that–as the Wiki describes it–”simultaneously builds up and tears down boundaries of identity.” It is a term that parallels Anzaldúa’s borderlands in that it counters normative gender and sexual identities. Robyn Ochs countered that it might obscure more interstitial identities like bisexuality. I admit, I’m undecided. Queer seems like a pretty powerful term, but until sexual politics do not always already expect a teleological end to our sexualities (i.e., you are en route to your straightness, or en route to your queerness when you are bisexual) it seems premature.