“Performative Bisexuality”

Professor Breanne Fahs, author of Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women’s Erotic Lives, characterizes heterosexual-identified women who interact sexu­ally with other women for the purpose of pleasing and arousing men as engaging in "performative bisexuality." In performative bisexuality, women are not being sexual with other women from feelings of inherent desire and intrinsic pleasure. Women are motivated to perform as bisexual in order to appear sexy and desirable to men and to accommodate men’s fantasies of two women together. Performative bisexu­ality has become common enough that some men feel entitled to use considerable pressure to persuade their female partners to interact sexually with other women. Younger women, in particular, can feel that being sexual with other women is part of the contemporary expectation for "good femininity." Some examples of performative bisexuality include the middle-class college women in Girls Gone Wild DVDs who kiss, fondle, and perform oral sex with each other as requested by the director of the DVD. Performative bisexuality also occurs publicly at fraternity parties, bars, and clubs or privately in the context of a threesome with two women and one man or dur­ing group sex (Fahs, 2011, p. 102).