Fighting bisexual erasure with a double-edged sword: Experiences of successful and unsuccessful bisexual visibilities

Bisexual erasure results from the oppressive belief that sexuality is binary, rendering bisexuality culturally unintelligible and unimaginable. Researchers and activists call for increased bisexual visibility; however the concept remains largely critically unassessed. While visibility can challenge erasure it also comes with risks, as heightened exposure often reproduces practices of domination, marginalization, and surveillance. These risks are especially pertinent when considering bisexual visibility through an intersectional lens where the most marginalized are rendered most vulnerable. Building on research on bisexual visibility strategies, this article challenges a binary framing of visibility as inherently positive and invisibility as inherently negative, where intersectional subjectivities are often ignored. This article draws from qualitative interviews with 35 bisexual people in the UK, and I find that while many participants desired increased visibility, they also sought invisibility in certain contexts. Participants described utilizing verbal and visual visibility strategies to varying effects, as well as intentionally passing to maintain invisibility when desired. While passing has primarily been discussed in relation to harm reduction, it can also be understood as an agential resistance strategy in the face of hegemonic identity politics. I propose the concept of (un)successful visibility to better capture the nuance of bisexual visibility across diverse subjectivities and argue that successful bisexual visibility should be understood as the ability to be seen (or not seen) in the desired way. Successful visibility may include both visibility and invisibility when desired, and unsuccessful visibility describes erasure, misrecognition, and unwanted exposure.