By Grace Shaughnessy

I am a bisexual woman. I am also a white, cis-gender woman. I come from a working-class, Welsh family. I have a degree from Oxford but was educated at a special measures comprehensive school. On balance, I’m not winning any adversity lottery any time soon. But what self-respecting Gen Z doesn’t like to think that sometimes, just sometimes, they have it a little bit harder than everybody else? Here’s where my bisexuality comes in. 

Of all my identity tags, my bisexuality causes me the most problems. Contrary to what you might think from my introduction, it is also the one that I am least likely to disclose to acquaintances, friends, and family members. Frankly, I don’t have the emotional intelligence, candidness or stamina to elaborate on why this is the case. I think in one way or another, we all struggle with our sexuality; it is such a difficult, fluid, confusing thing. I recently read Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021. It held my attention for a while, which is no easy feat. The reason? How Naoise so excellently captures compulsory heterosexuality. 

I often experience my internalised homophobia as a kind of funhouse. As I walk through and try to find a way out (or rather, a way to come out), trick mirrors and shifting floors suspend me in a state of endless motion; I lose my path, unable to stare issues directly in the face, constantly ricocheting between and turning from them. Dolan’s novel froze me in my tracks and put me in the mirror of compulsory heterosexuality. To celebrate this newfound stasis (and selfishly, to extend its expiry date), I thought I’d write about what compulsory heterosexuality means for me as a bisexual woman.

Compulsory heterosexuality gives its name to social pressures configured by patriarchy and heteronormativity, which compel heterosexuality or sexual and romantic relationships exclusively between men and women. Arguably, compulsory heterosexuality manifests most explicitly in the socially prescribed life cycle. This describes the pressure on individuals in society to follow a linear narrative wherein they grow up, go to university, meet their partners (who are of the opposite sex), find jobs, get married, have kids, send kids to university, and then finally retire, shuffling along the remainder of this mortal coil by playing golf and indulging right-wing politics. 

Compulsory heterosexuality shows how sexuality in contemporary society designates not only a sexual preference but a particular culture or way of life. Since the AIDS epidemic, queer theorists have devoted considerable attention to how queer lifestyles differ from their heterosexual opposites. In No Future, for example, Lee Edelman explores how AIDS foreshortened queer lives, as the socially prescribed life cycle was resisted not only on the basis of sexuality but on the basis of time itself. Those diagnosed with AIDS simply ran out of time and were unable to fulfil the socially prescribed life cycle because, by proxy of their sexual relationships, they lacked the continuum over which those landmark events eventually unfold. As long as heteronormativity dictates the socially prescribed life cycle, queer people and queer culture will never be fully assimilated into it. But being queer doesn’t mean that you suddenly stop feeling the pressure to fulfil this narrative, especially not since it configures so many ideas (at least, in a capitalist society) about what success is and what constitutes it. Sex with a woman is miraculous, but it stops just shy of reversing years and years of social conditioning. 

In our society, success is often synonymous with heterosexuality. Dolan’s focus on social class and sexual relationships in Exciting Times is not incidental, nor is it mere coincidence that protagonist Ava – who hails from a working-class, Irish family and whose poverty Dolan keenly emphasises – pursues a relationship with Julian, an Etonian and Oxford graduate turned corporate banker, over Edith, a Cambridge graduate turned corporate lawyer (Dolan is nothing if not a master of Oxbridge stereotypes) whom Ava clearly loves. Although Julian and Edith, via their privileged education and high-earning jobs, both have considerable social capital, Ava recognises that a relationship with Julian would more likely resolve her anxieties about social class than a relationship with Edith. Ava narrates how “holding Julian’s hands was like holding a museum pass, and holding hers [Edith’s] was like holding a grenade ”. Dolan identifies how compulsory heterosexuality manifests in terms of the social visibility and the freedom of movement accounted to its participants.

And so it was when I was studying for my undergraduate degree. Oxford comes with a reputation so ridiculous that imposter syndrome is inevitable even for the most privileged percentage of the student population. But as a Welsh student from a working-class family, who, unlike most of my peers at Oxford, had a state education in a failing school, the symptoms of my imposter syndrome were particularly pronounced. My solution? Date only men. Why? Because it wasn’t just the ‘rah’ types in boat shoes who removed my class anxieties, it was any man. A relationship with any man was preferable to a relationship with any woman because while the latter would exacerbate my imposter syndrome, the former offered calming reassurances; sure, I might be abnormal from a social class perspective, but I was ‘normal’ from a heteronormative, socio-cultural perspective. Do I need to say that this line of thought left a lot to be desired? Or that the memory of suppressing my queerness in a city populated by so many beautiful women routinely keeps me up at night?

For the latter part of my teenage years and my early twenties, I experienced compulsory heterosexuality due to social class anxieties. My class anxieties, combined with my own internalised homophobia, caused me to subjugate my queerness and to create greater intrigue around men than around women. I know that I’m not the only bisexual woman to have felt this way – I am not screaming into a vacuum here. Biphobia within the queer community, the lack of sincere (by that I mean non-sexualised, male gaze-y) bi representation in mainstream media, and even the configuration of dating apps (which advocate for the pursuit for male validation) embrace the force of compulsory heterosexuality. So, how do we pledge our resistance against something so pervasive? 

I’m reminded again of those lines from Exciting Times: “I wanted to explain to Edith that holding Julian’s hands was like holding a museum pass, and holding hers was like holding a grenade”. Perhaps our resistance comes down to a change of perspective. Perhaps it comes down to embracing the grenade as if it threatens to explode a heteronormative system rather than us, its unwilling subjects.