Drawing the sexuality card: Teaching, researching, and living bisexuality

This essay utilizes autoethnography to understand the stigma associated with identifying as bisexual in academic contexts. I weave classroom experiences as teacher and student with academic research, social systems, and critical analysis to highlight the importance of multiple approaches to issues of sexuality. While I recognize the logic of withholding one’s sexual identity in the classroom, I also show how denying this information to students and audiences that need it most closes any potential for dialogue that could improve our social and academic understanding of sexuality. Lived experience accommodates our shifting sense of ourselves as subjects and as objects, as acting upon and being acted upon by the world, of living with and without certainty, of belonging and being estranged (Jackson, 1989: 2).