‘I think I’m not a relationship person’: Bisexual women’s accounts of (internalised) binegativity in nonmonogamous relationship narratives

Abstract

This article explores how women (who either had relationships experiences with more than one gender or broadly defined themselves as bisexual) link their non-monogamous relationships with their bisexuality and analyses how these accounts could be argued to reflect these women’s (internalised) binegativity. While binegativity is widely researched, there is a lack of qualitative empirical work on the complexity of bisexual lives in general and of internalised binegativity in particular. This article contributes to these areas of research by drawing on interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to analyse nine qualitative interviews from an ongoing study of bisexual women in Austria. For some of these women, their experiences of non-monogamous relationship forms were linked to (internalised) binegativity, expectations of rejection and concealment of one’s identity; for others, they presented a form of agency. The women showed a range of reactions and strategies related to the positioning of bisexuality and (internalised) binegativity, particularly regarding unfaithfulness: Adoption of binegative self-attributions, excusing the antibisexual notions of others, and engaging in additional emotion work to ensure faithfulness to their partners.