I’m Sophia Dwyer! I’m double majoring in Sociology and Environmental Studies.
My Capstone paper is titled “The Stigmatization of Bisexual Individuals.”
Abstract:
Of all the sexualities, quite often bisexuality is forgotten about, ignored, discredited, and stigmatized. Bisexuality is when a person is attracted to the same gender and the opposite gender. Bisexuality is underrepresented in scholarly literature on sexuality (Callis 2009). This lack of representation stems from America’s culture of monosexism where attraction to only one gender is the norm. The question that will guide my research is, how do bisexual individuals experience stigmatization and how do these experiences differ by gender? How do these individuals navigate the social roles expected of them in LGBTQ communities versus straight communities? For the research portion of my project, I did qualitative research. I interviewed 10 participants over the phone or on a video call for approximately an hour each. To recruit participants I used convenience sampling and snowball sampling. It was helpful that I identify as a bisexual person myself because I had developed a lot of connections with others who shared this identity. My findings were very unique and they had a direct correlation to the existing scholarly literature on bisexuality. One common theme was that most participants believed that their bisexuality had been invalidated at some point in their life. Some participants felt that their family members invalidated their sexuality. Many participants discussed that it was hard to navigate predominantly straight settings as well as predominantly homosexual settings, because they didn’t fit into either category and sometimes felt invalidated by others in both settings. I discovered that most female bisexuals had felt that their sexuality was feticized and fantasized about by straight men. Male bisexuals, however, struggled with “proving” their bisexuality and proving that they did have sexual feelings about both male and females. The males I interviewed mentioned that most people assumed they were either gay or straight, and didn’t acknowledge their bisexuality. My final theme was that some participants had a specific person or a group of people that they intentionally did not come out to as bisexual for fear that their bisexual identity would be stigmatized. This is consistent with Goffman’s concept of “techniques of information control,” in which people will hide certain aspects of themselves from certain people, yet they may be fully open with others (Goffman 1963).