Time and time again, bisexual women in Asia have consistently been providing their labour and care throughout various sectors of activism, movements, and communities. Yet, even queer organisations and communities rarely recognise nor resource their identities and concerns. Instead, they are sidelined as a single chapter within other issues seen as more legitimate, more deserving of spotlight. At the same time, the fluid nature of their identity is seen as too radical — either by cisheteronormative society waiting for them to “fix” themselves, or by queer communities that demand legitimate evidence of their queer identity. Instead of being acknowledged as their own category and community, they were seen as a bridge between “real” categories. Isn’t it ironic, considering rejection against categorisation is queer by itself?
Our report, “The Edge of Queer: Lessons in Liberation from Bisexual Asian Women”, was conceived from those anxieties and desire to not only investigate the impact of biphobia, but to also spotlight bisexual women’s voices and stories. This report diverged from the common bisexuality issue talking point, “erasure and invisibility”, that tends to decenter the violent structural problems causing it and simply encourage short-term “visibility”-themed solutions. Instead, we will delve deeper into personal experiences and thoughts of bisexual women about their lives, identities, and the oppressions they face by coming to the place they have been constantly relegated to: the edges of community life.
This report consists of the first in-depth survey on literature and research projects focused on bisexual women’s rights in Asia and a living journey we invite readers to experience with us, woven from interviews and conversations with 18 bisexual Asian women and nonbinary human rights defenders from 15 countries.
One of the major themes we repeatedly came across is the limitation in language within bisexual Asian women caused by lack of their own discussion and storytelling space. This limitation not only impacts their capacity in building their sense of self and community, but also their awareness in identifying unique forms of violence experienced by bisexual women. In our attempt to not only highlight concerns but also to answer them, we consciously rejected the impulse to pick and choose within the testimonies served in this report — which resulted in longer testimonies than you might expect to find in a human rights report. As opposed to curating incomplete quotes to serve a point, we hope that we managed to keep these testimonies alive within this report. Our intent was to serve a report that not only faithfully represents the vibrant and rich lives of bisexual Asian women that are constantly overlooked, but also serves as a space for these stories to intertwine and interact with each other. For ease of reading, we organised these testimonies under a selection of topics including care economy, gendered housing precarity, the emotional labour of bisexual women in LGBT movements, and how Indigeneity and caste are intimately bound up in bisexual women’s relationship to marriage and marriage equality.
We invite researchers, activists, policymakers, and community members to come with us towards the edges and experience their journeys in navigating their sexuality and gender identities along with each intersecting issues that comes with it. The full report is now available for download.
