How the Wisdom of Love Transforms Gaia: On Being the Resources We Share

Friends keep telling me that people don’t understand what I mean.  “She uses strange words,” they say, or at least, “she uses words in a strange way.  Why does she do that? What does she really mean?”
“That’s the point,” I think to myself, very shy, very humbled, very timid, “making up new words, new phrases, using words that are unfamiliar, making familiar words sound new.”
That’s the power of words, the power of literature, if you will.  What I was trained in.  (Arhhhhhg, what a mistake to presume one can relinquish some ignorance!)
“These people,” I think, “they really want it easy.  Not only I learned their language so I can speak to them.  But then if I use words of their language that for one reason or another sound queasy, they become suspicious of me.  There’s no way to do right by them!”
“What’s this fear?”  Fear of words.  One cannot be afraid of words.  Words are NOT things.  They only represent things.  Or do they?  Can words also MAKE things?  Can they CHANGE things?  Can they affect, transform, reinterpret, create REALITY?
Of course they can. All poets are keenly aware of this. Otherwise why would they spend time playing with words? 
So, a case in point is this video clip.  From The Wisdom of Love, a double book launch Deborah Taj Anapol and me held at Open Secret Bookstore on June 22, 2010.  It’s a bit late to post.  I know.  Took a long time to figure, with us being a team of wise, wise, wise people.  So ancient is our wisdom that we’re not all that familiar with latest tech stuff for social media. But we get it eventually.  And for this clip, we owe courtesy to Steve Hoffman of Oakaland, California, who shot, cut, and reduced for us.
So, what’s the fun with words here?  Well, “RESOURCES.”  People in ecology, in environmental science talk about ‘resources,’ right?  “Limited resources.”  “Sources of energy that are ‘renewable’,” as in wind, solar, hydro: ways to create power that generate themselves again every day, that are commonly owned/shared.  That don’t involve pollution or extinction of the source when it’s most needed.  See what’s happening with the oil spill.  Easy oil is almost gone now.  And we’re ever more dependent on it.  While it’s also turning our amiable hostess Gaia into an oven.  Ouch! I’m cooking! I’m being cooked!
So then, resources is the issue, right?  Why can’t we BE the resources we seek?  Sounds Oedipal?  It is!  What happens if we begin to think of ourselves as the resources we need?  What if we begin to practice BEING resources for each other?
A whole lot!  Big shift in thinking.  Now we don’t need a lot of resources.  We need to interpret each other AS resources.  And what can we trade that is, as Stan Dale would say, “free”?  We can trade LOVE, or ‘amor,’ or ‘amore,’ or ‘amour’ as those hopelessly Romantic, romance language people would say. 
Then we see that being POLYAMOROUS, being capable, by nurture, by nature (who knows?) of trading these AMOROUS RESOURCES with a whole bunch of people is NOT a dangerous perversion, is NOT a problem, is NOT a liability, is NOT a sign of being promiscuous or a misfit.  IT IS ACTUALLY A VIRTUE!!!
Yes, you heard me.  BEING POLY IS ACTUALLY A VIRTUE!  It should be rewarded as a free recycling system, as a national forest deep-ecology biodiversity sustaining nurturing ecosystem. It should be cause for being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace!
“But wait a minute,” you must be saying, “is this for real?”  “Sounds like a trick to justify some wicked perversion.”
Well, I leave the final judgment to you.  It’s on the video.  Somebody in the audience at Open Secret asked “what’s the connection between Gaia the living planet and open love, open relating?”
That’s how I explained it!
Go ahead and listen . . . .
Then, if you like what you hear, you can get more info from the source of my wisdom, Gaia and the New Politics of Love.  This book was inspired by one who IS the pleasure he seeks.  Watch out for the book’s new digital edition, coming soon.  Meanwhile, get your paper version and start practicing love’s wisdom.
There will be more posts and clips.  The momentous series of events we held in Norther California in June-early July will be unfolding digitally as we post clips and snippets, with comments.
We look forward to YOUR comments too!
Namaste,
Gaia

a.k.a. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

http://polyplanet.blogspot.com

Exploring Intimacy by Suzann Panek Robins – Reviewed by Serena Anderlini

Exploring Intimacy: 
Cultivating Healthy Relationships through Insight and Intuition.
By Suzann Panek Robins  
New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.
Reviewed by Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio
In this inspiring and synergistic book, Suzann Robins presents a major paradigm shift about the relationship between our physiological and emotional health.  In her view our emotional and physical lives are intricately related, so much so that the health of the one is proportional to the health of the other.  So the paradigm shift she focuses upon can be summarized in her claim that “In order to have healthy relationships, we must be healthy” (106).
Let me contextualize this claim so that we can better understand what it actually means.  The imperative of “being healthy” could be interpreted to imply that only healthy people can aspire to good relationship, while those afflicted with some illness “deserve” the punishment of bad ones.  Or it could suggest the idea that those blessed with the good luck of physical health “deserve” the privilege to pair off with others like them, so that they can be blessed with minimal health-care bills.  In reality, none of these less-than-generous understandings of the book’s key principle does justice to the book’s complexity and achievement.  Indeed, the book provides a complex and innovative definition of health as integrated process of self-knowledge that relies on intuition rather than the effects of any consciousness altering substances, including the legal ones.  This self-knowledge could be described as a form of gnosis–a path to knowledge whose motivation is love–because it is intended to generate the kind of self-love that extends to those who form the ecosystems that surround the self.   
The book itself defines health in a way that integrates Eastern and Western philosophical principles, as it also demonstrates that the former are neither less wise, nor less grounded in empirical experience, nor less “scientific” than the latter might be.  Hence it presents us with a concept of health that is independent of the amount of health-care products or procedures we are able to consume, and is proportional to our ability to connect with ourselves and our inner being.  “Know thyself,” said Socrates, the philosopher of ancient Greece.  And indeed, knowing oneself is the most challenging experience, and, as 20th century ecofeminist philosopher Luce Irigaray would put it, it is the kind of knowledge that requires “the wisdom of love” even more than it requires the love of wisdom.  More to the point, this healthy self-knowledge requires the effort of intimacy, which Suzann Robins appropriately reconfigures as “into-me-see,” namely the art of seeing into oneself, of being in touch with one’s inner landscape and the emotions, forces, attractions, memories, desires, images that populate it.
“How can this highly modulated synergistic feat be achieved?” A reader might wonder.  The secret is Suzann Robins’s in depth understanding of multilayered systems of knowledge, including Western psychology, medicine, and philosophy all the way back to Antiquity, and Eastern religious, medical, and philosophical traditions.  Suzann Robins is a teacher and practitioner in various healing arts specialties, including hypnotherapy, personal growth, anger managements, and others.  Her awareness of interconnections among different sets of ideas comes from experience.  Healing-arts practitioners who have seen integration of healing modalities work over and over with clients, friends, and themselves, often come to the awareness that success is a result of expert, enchanted frequentation of different knowledge systems.  When theory successfully integrates healing modalities from different knowledge systems, as happens in this book, it yields the concrete knowledge that is based in the practice of history. 
Robins’s view of health is based on an integrative concept of medicine that accommodates holistic and allopathic practices in the same system.  While holistic practices promote healing from within and from surrounding oneself with thriving ecosystems, allpathic practices serve to overcome crises that threaten a system’s homeostasis.  Robin’s knowledge of various intersecting traditions helps to present a view in which these systems complement each other and address a core of experience we share as humans or individuals of the same species. 
For example, she aligns the Western concept of a “life force” (historically linked to the vitalist movement and the beginning of psychoanalysis) with the Indian concept of Prana, the Chinese concept of Chi, and the classical concept of Eros.  In the myth of Eros and Psyche, Eros is the deity who falls in love with the mortal Psyche.  He is the energy that espouses matter (151-156).  According to Fedro, in Plato’s Symposium, the dialog on love, Eros is “the most ancient of all gods.”  He is part of the first generation of Greek deities, who represent the forces of nature, as in Chronos (time), Gea (the Earth), Aeolus (the wind), and Poseidon (the ocean).  So in a way as the god of love, Eros is a form of Prana and Chi: He is the energy that animates matter.  Robins’s contextualization of classical mythology brings out the parallelism between knowledge systems.  She effectively shows that in their respective cultural contexts and traditions these concepts indicate the sense of life as the flow of energy that traverses and animates the material.    
Another area where Robins’s synergistic analysis is quite effective is her design of a parallelism between the human body’s main organs (and the life functions they preside over) and the symbolic system of the Chakras which holistic medicine has absorbed from Hindu traditions.  The alignment Robins shows here is quite convincing, as in the example of the Fifth Charka–also known as the Throat Charka–as the opening that presides over “our ability to express thoughts through the respiratory and bronchial apparatus that encompasses the vocal cords and the alimentary canal” (55).  Key to Robins’s notion of integrative health is the concept of balance, which she also relates to the charka systems.  These imaginary openings correspond to areas of the self where flows of energies are absorbed and recycled within the body’s ecosystem (10-12).  Balance involves an inner landscape where charkas are aligned with one another in a system that presents neither blockages nor excessive leaks, which can resulting “chronic illness and fatal disease” (52).  Robins’s analysis is complemented by a spat of exercises, surprisingly effective and simple, that help readers absorb her theories in a kinesthetic, in-the-body way.  A major source in this section is the work of Anodea Judith. 
A further step in integration of knowledge systems comes with Robins’s discussion of stages of growth in humans, which she also relates to interconnected foci in the charka system.  This section integrates Sigmund Freud’s and Eric Erickson’s views of human development with the holistic perspective.  For example, Robins provides an association of the Root Charka–located in the sacrum and usually representing the connection with the Earth–as symbolic of a baby’s growth during the first two years, when attachment is essential to the baby’s ability to develop survival skills such as receiving and absorbing touch and food (94-95). 
Finally, Robins proposes an integration that takes into account the color symbolism that characterizes the charka system in most representations.  This is also presented experientially, as an exercise.  The Sixth Charka is considered the site of intuition, or “third eye.”  In Hindu cultures it is often represented with a dot painted in the middle of one’s forehead, a little above the eyebrows.  Its color symbolism is “dark indigo or navy blue,” which appropriately represents the vast possibilities open to the imagination from what looks like “a clear night sky” (126).  In Robins’s book, intuition is also described as “the sixth sense,” a sense that synergizes the information the other five senses provide in a type of knowledge that respects the energetic (as well as material) nature of things and therefore enables the path to love.  This love manifests as the kind of intimate knowledge of the self that enables one’s body to function like a healthy ecosystem.  It is from the care for this ecosystem–and its surrounding bodies and energy flows–that the health of one’s relationships emanates in an ebb and flow of dynamic exchanges that result in a healthy homeostasis.  Relationships are not healthy to the extent that they follow structures marked by conventions, including marriage, monogamy, heterosexuality, exclusivity, or longevity.  They are rather healthy because they respect the ecosystemic balance of those involved in them.
So there is a productive way to read Robins’s central thesis: It is what J. L. Austin would call an “illocutionary speech act,” namely a pronouncement that actualizes itself by virtue of its own intention.  “We must be healthy” is not a descriptor of a putative state of health that preexists a given relationship, but rather a dynamic balance that evolves as we become intent in getting to know ourselves and each other intimately, and thus enhance our capabilities to know and respect others the way we do to ourselves.  It is a statement designed to generate the reality it alludes to rather than to simply describe it as what is.  In articulating her complex theoretical position, Robins also relies on the work of Karl Jung and Jean Piaget. 
From this book one does not get easy advice or recipes for “happiness,” as happens in many of today’s manuals and guidebooks about “better relationships.”  Rather, one gets a guided tour of the various ways in which happiness, and balance, and the health of relationships have been constructed in the cultural contexts humanity has inhabited in the modern era, and of how, with that knowledge, we can invent and choose the path and combination of knowledge systems that will work for us.  This is a much valued feat, since a manual’s promise to hold the “right” recipe for a happy personal life is always as short lived as that of the next such book. 
Indeed, the idea of offering recipes that yield the same result regardless of who uses them is too simplistic to honor Robins’s understanding of what knowledge is.  A prevalent myth of Western modernity is that Western knowledge is “scientific” while other traditions are enshrouded in legend and anecdotal thinking.  Of course this is self-deceptive and reflects Western ignorance of its own power over other knowledge systems, rather than any actual scientific superiority.  Further evidence of the deceptiveness of this myth is the failure of Western modernity to design styles of development that model sustainability.  Knowledge steeped in tradition is scientific because the evidence of its validity is in history.  Robins offers the grace of treating complementary traditions as such and represents them as equal.  Her refusal to rank these traditions is a way to enter the fray of the politically charged discussion about what qualifies as science.  For example, in talking about integrative medicine as a synergy of conventional and holistic medicine, Robins discursively establishes an equality that unfortunately is still far from being real. 
Because of ethnocentric prejudice that favors Western modalities of knowledge, conventional medicine is still associated with “science” in the mind of most people.  Robins’s expert interweaving of modalities and sources exposes this prejudice for what it is.  Her book is a refreshing read whose mixture of research, practice, and theory will generate awareness where there still is cultural resistance.    
Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD
Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, May 2010
http://polyplanet.blogspot.com

Gaia Silver Winner in Cosmology and New Science for Nautilus Book Awards

Dear Serena,
Congratulations !  I am delighted to inform you that our Second Team of judges has selected the 2010 Nautilus  Silver Award winners, and North Atlantic Books has a winning title.
Your Silver Winner is:
·        Gaia and the New Politics of Love by Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio
     007 Cosmology/New Science
All Silver Winning titles have now moved to the third and final phase of judging where the Gold Winner for each category will be selected.  Gold Winners will be announced and posted on our website, www.nautilusbookawards.com, on Wednesday morning, May 26th,  and also at the BookExpo America in New York
All Winners are eligible to receive 12 complimentary custom-designed metallic Silver Winner’s seals.
If you want to receive these seals, please email us the best address to send them to you.
All Silver Winners will be contacted by email in a few days
 and offered the opportunity to purchase additional seals.
We have attached a .jpg of the Nautilus Awards Silver Winner’s seal for you to use on your website, for subsequent printings of your book, or for PR  and marketing.
****************************************************************************
2010 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winners will receive Award Certificates, and these books will be:
  • Announced and exhibited in our 2010 Nautilus Book Awards Showcase at the publishing industry’s premier event, BookExpo America, held this year in the Jacob Javits Center in New York.
  • Announced in a Press Release which will be widely distributed at the BEA, and sent directly to our select list of media.
  • Exhibited for ONE YEAR in a special display on our website, www.nautilusbookawards.com,with a photograph and write-up of the book.
  • Announced in the June issue of EVOLVE! Magazine and distributed to 45,000 consumers through hundreds of bookstores. This will be a 5- page, full-color article with a photograph of each of the Gold-winning titles.                                       
Silver Winners will be offered the opportunity to exhibit their books at a greatly reduced rate in our booth at the BookExpo America in New York. More information about this will follow.
ALL SILVER & GOLD WINNERS WILL BE ADDED TO THE “NAUTILUS LIBRARY OF IMAGINATION & POSSIBILITY,” AND LISTED ON OUR WEBSITE, http://www.nautilusbookawards.com/The_Nautilus_Library.html
We will continue to update you on the progress of our judges.  If you have any questions or need any more information, please contact me at marilyn@marilynmcguire.com
Please know how much we appreciate your entering the 2010 Nautilus Book Awards.
We agree with Dr. Jean Houston, who says of the Nautilus Winning titles, “These books are creating a curriculum for those folks out there who are longing for a new story.” 
Cheers & Smiles,
Marilyn
MARILYN McGUIRE, Founder / Director
NAUTILUS BOOK & AUDIO BOOK AWARDS
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Polyamory and Sex Could Save the Planet, Author Argues

Tinamarie Bernard on Modern Love Examiner
At first glance, sex and the environment don’t make obvious bedfellows. How can the answer to our environmental problems – global warming, access to fresh water, ecological sustainability, and the use of fossil fuels – possibly be found between the satin sheets of lovers? According to a growing number of greenies, free love may just save the world. In her newest book, Gaia: The New Politics of Love, author Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio attempts to lay the groundwork for this premise.

        

         Can pushing our comfort 
         zones about love be the 
         answer to world peace? 
       Image: Rene Magritte

Read more in  Modern Love Examiner
March 17, 2010

 
http://polyplanet.blogspot.com

A “Masterpiece?” OMG . . . I’m humbled. Really? – Review of Gaia and the New Politics of Love – The Journal of Bisexuality

Bi Book Review by Hudi Shorr
will appear in Bisexuality and Spirituality, a special-topics issues of 
The Journal of Bisexuality, edited by Loraine Hutchins
pre-published with permission

Gaia and The New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet
Serena Anderlini D’Onofrio,
North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA, 2009
Reviewed by Yuhudis (Hudi) Schorr

Our world is in crisis amidst wars.
Military wars are robbing mothers’ of their children, and people of their land.  Political wars are pitting the people of our nation against one another, forcing them to take positions that may make the boundaries between those who have and those who cannot afford to have, more clear and defined than ever before. 
Religious wars are abundant around the globe, attempting to justify the denial of basic rights of freedom as the word of God.  The Earth has been catapulted into a state of chaos; the wars that we are waging upon her have taken their toll. Never before have we witnessed such levels of increased poverty and environmental degradation. In our time, the human species has acquired the capability to destroy both human life and the biosphere that hosts it.
Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet is a masterpiece by Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio that offers us a chance to transform crises into opportunity.  Using science and nature as her backdrop, Anderlini-D’Onofrio constructs a new politics of Gaian symbiosis that affirms love as the force with which we must affect change in our universe, if we, as a species, are to survive our current state of environmental and political chaos.
In three sequential and interconnected parts Anderlini-D’Onofrio outlines a practical strategy to combat the toxic forces we have inflicted upon our planet.  Using feminist ecological epistemology she offers an entirely new way of thinking about love, based upon teachings learned from bisexual and polyamorous communities that can offer a fresh perspective with which we can begin to repair the damage done to the biota that currently sustains us.  If we are to survive the trauma to the Earth that we have caused, we must rethink our current conceptions of what that Earth is and the forces that we use to negotiate our way through it. We must expand beyond our currently limited definitions of love and family in order to include entire communities and the ecosphere that we inhabit. If we continue on our path of obsessive consumption of resources without regard to the harm we are causing, the biota will transform and survive, while our species will become one of the many extinct species that have at one point inhabited her live body.
Anderlini-D’Onofrio ominously warms us: if we continue to mistake Gaia for an assemblage of useable resources, we will kill ourselves, not her. It is now more than ever that we need her messages of warning, and instructions of repair.  


I.  Gaia in Feminist Science
Anderlini-D’Onofrio begins by placing her Gaian philosophy within a framework of feminist ecology.  Ecofeminism postulates that Gaia, the Earth, has a life of its own.  It has a consciousness like an animated, self-regulating organism. In ecofeminism, subject and object are largely the same, and control is replaced by more symbiotic dialogue and collaboration. This feminist epistemology effectively defeats the logic of either/or, and embraces a more inclusive logic of both/and.  In this way, feminist ecologies debunk the myth of distinction between that which is “human” and that which is “nature”.  A Gaian philosophy implies giving up our sense of entitlement as a species deluded to thinking that the biota is a resource to be exploited by us. 
“If we humans can come back to viewing ourselves as a resource among other resources with no special entitlement to occupying the position of subject in opposition to a “natural world” that becomes objectified as existing for the sole purpose of meeting our needs, then we can find again forms of coexistence with each other and the planet that hosts our lives.” (Intro, xxii)

Symbiotic reason indicates that while there are no mere resources, every cell in Gaia’s body can function as a resource for another cell. Symbiosis is the practice of sharing bodies in which both symbionts, the host and the guest, benefit.  We only have to look to nature to see examples all around us: the cow who hosts the bacteria in order to make her food, the womb that hosts the fetus to nurture its survival.  All parts of the equation are beneficiaries of the give and take relationship, without losing their individual identities in the process.  We: humans, animals, minerals, the very Earth herself are all part of the greater whole of Gaia, the process of life.  The pain we inflict on nature is in fact pain we experience as a species, the growth we experience as individuals affects the world at large.  A symbiotic logic requires us to view this bigger picture, and begins to develop lines of communication between the now disparate pieces that make up Gaia in order to find a more symbiotic harmony amongst them. 
Symbiotic reason is more apt than individual reason to understand life as an interrelated web in which each individual is a small node that exists thanks to others’ presence.  The author points to the behavior of growth among trees and roots.  Our ecosystem contains two kinds of intricate growth processes amongst vegetation.  There are the arborescent plants: treelike growths organized as individual trees that sprout from a seed and grow vertically by sinking their roots deeply in the soil, and the rhizomes, such as gingerroots and potatoes which operate as subterranean root networks that grow sideways, store resources within the soil, and intermittently sprout interrelated plants across the terrain where the rhizome is present.  A tree species may have strong individuals who grow to be taller and more powerful than any plant sprouting from a rhizome, but the rhizome in itself is more resilient to adversity and ecological changes due to their numerous points of entry.  For Anderlini-D’Onofrio, the rhizome can represent the Gaian principle of evolution by symbiogenesis, the symbiotic process by which a species acquires the genes of its symbionts into its own DNA.  This process is more horizontal. Anderlini-D’Onofrio argues that all life is symbiotic because biology shows that without exchanges between interrelated beings, there would be no life at all.  It is within this reasoning that she has developed her new politics of love.

II.  Politics of Love
            Anderlini-D’Onofrio’s politics of love is new way of looking at love that draws from ancient teachings of a sacred feminine to postmodern understandings of health.  Our current notions of health are monopolized by allopathic discourse that views health as the absence of disease and medicine a war against its attacks.  It ignores the fact that perhaps disease is not a foreign attack on the body, rather a part of the body itself, crying out for repair.  Holistic discourse on the other hand realizes a symbiotic alignment of an ecosystem’s dynamic parts.  Disease is viewed as a message from the body that demands a change in its ecology. Gaian awareness compels us to shift our current paradigms of health from an overwhelming allopathic discourse to more holistic notions of health, all the while invoking symbiotic reasoning to encourage dialogue between the allopathic and holistic health collectives. 
The AIDS crisis played a massive role in positioning love on the side of disease.  Through criminalizing loving communities, a rhetoric of fear was born, which produced a social energy that linked erotic expression with fear.  A new politics of love seeks to reverse this trend by transforming its negative social energy into a positive one that reconnects erotic expression with safety and well-being.  Hypothesizing Gaia helps the world shed needless fears from current dogmas of love as a crime or a disease. 
            In a holistic perspective, players are encouraged to enhance the health practices that strengthen their immunity and hence their health.  This follows the Gaian principle that the health of Gaia’s body is proportionate to the health of each of her cells.  Conventional allopathic medicine tends to attack the symptoms that express the body’s problem, and may neglect to seriously investigate its causes (63).  As Anderlini-D’Onofrio posits: if an individual is a cell in a super organism, his/her disease cannot be a foreign agent, for all agents are part of the larger entity of which that individual is an element.  Disease in the elements of a super organism is a force that manifests a crisis in its life.  Disease is thus read as a message that can help the living ecosystem deal with the crisis and reconfigure itself (71). 
The AIDS epidemic can be read as a crisis within Gaia, and as such, a signal for systemic change.  Excessive emphasis on allopathic hypotheses in sexual health has kept the world stuck in a mode of fear. Anderlini-D’Onofrio’s Gaia hypothesis postulates that the planet Earth is a web of interconnected organisms with a life of its own, a postmodern perspective that reverberates with indigenous, ecofeminist, pre-modern, and symbiotic cultural elements (102).  In Gaian post modernity, “sex” is an erotic expression, the joy of taking and giving, and the orgiastic revitalizing pleasures of bacteria.  It is the art of loving that lives in the wider space of the arts of healing, and as an art, is shy of any normativity (110). Western masculinity emphasizes control over intimacy.  It acts like a cultural imperative that dominates modern philosophical discourse reflected in Western modernity’s obsession with the mastery of nature.  The idea that humans can master nature is but a myth of modernity.  The reality is that humans cannot master nature, and there is no reason why they should (113).
Reconfigured as ecological erotic orientations, the love styles that correspond to former perversions are found to have a positive effect on Gaia’s health for various reasons: They multiply the possibilities of love; they help expand the boundaries of the loving arts; and they contribute to establishing regimes of love that help in the sharing of resources and the creation of sustainable emotional communities (123-4).  Love is free, and it can be multiplied at will.  Anderlini-D’Onofrio defines it as “a renewable resource that saves one from the trappings of useless consumerism” (125).  The healing arts emphasize practices of the body that redeem people from modernity’s secular materialism.  They are effective in empowering people and communities to heal themselves by creating a more symbiotic understanding of us as individuals, without losing the connectivity to each other and our Mother Gaia.  As Anderlini-D’Onofrio so eloquently writes, “this may not instantly resolve all global problems, but the perspective it puts things in vastly improves the prospects for healthy global ecologies” (127). 
III. The Arts of Loving
            In this part of her book, Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio articulates why she feels that bisexual and polyamorous communities provide the framework to actualize a Gaian awareness of living. Bi/Poly communities generate areas of stability of erotic awareness and emotional sustainability that free the imagination from needless fears and create the emotional and ecological abundance that Gaia needs (152). Because of their heavy reliance on touch, connectedness, non-violence, and a subtle knowledge and practice of intimacy, the styles of love invented by poly and bi people promote the activation of the hormonal cycle of Oxytocin (137).   Oxytocin is the hormone responsible for states of emotional calm and connectedness that often fills the aural and inner spaces of bi and poly societies.  Oxytocin becomes a social lubricant within these communities where playfulness is key.  It is the gentle playfulness produced by these arts of loving that enable emotional negotiations and agreements that would otherwise be impossible in an environment without it.
 The styles of love practiced in bi and poly communities help build the trust necessary to overcome fears and are often intentionally designed to break down people’s defensive identities, body armors and egos, so that all players can enjoy the free circulations of amorous energies.  It is this symbiotic reason that transforms scarcity into abundance. 
Consumer society can be visualized as an extensive orgy inasmuch as it is organized as a continuum orgiastic display of material temptations that induce desire for things we often don’t need or want (163). Anderlini-D’Onofrio writes that the combined practices of bi and poly love have the power to allow individual players to become part of the “flow of the orgy”, to consciously navigate its flow and become consensually immersed into the movement of the symbiotic energy generated by our aural, astral, and physical bodies at play (163).  This results in sustainability, balance, and renewability of resources for all involved, and it maximizes a player’s ability to give and receive love.  She writes:
“As players learn to navigate this emotional/erotic space, the dialogue between the emotional and erotic realms enables them to maximize the love energy they can share.  This sharing of emotional resources generates symbiotic energy fields between players, and enables the creation of emotional sustainability that result in symbiotic plateaus of enhanced awareness.  These plateaus involve crises that manifest at certain points in the network, and whose collective management can productively turn them into opportunities for deeper levels of symbiosis.  This growth and change can move the entire network on a higher level of awareness that enables more focused and productive experiments in the management of shared emotional resources and the symbioses therefore.  The network thus functions like a sustainable ecosystem for all of these interpersonal energies.  It generates the sustainability, balance, and renewability of resources for all involved” (165).   

Applied on a global scale, this turns scarcity into abundance, fear into hope, and hatred into love.  This transformation happens when we players lose our intense sense of entitlement to the resources that surround us in our ecosphere.  The tools of this transformation can be found in the schools of bisexual and polyamorous philosophy where intentional communities are formed by people who consciously choose to live by a shared utopian vision, motivated by Gaian principles. They share an expansive sense of love and sexual expression that involves consensual sharing of emotional and erotic resources and can be learned at their schools (154).
Anderlini-D’Onofrio proposes a journey to these schools to learn the tools of the loving arts, regardless of one’s orientation or identity. These philosophies of both/and/all include and cherish all points in every continuum.  They celebrate our diversities and encourage us to recognize each other and harmonize ourselves with Earth’s symbiotic ecosystem.  If we can take from them the ability to think of love as an art whose forms of expressions is infinite, then perhaps we can incorporate those healing and loving arts to stave off ecological catastrophes caused by our irresponsible behavior as a species. 
Imagine A Better World
We must begin to imagine a world that is better than the current one we inhabit, where wars are beings waged, and fear is abundant.  Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio has directed us upon a path that might open our imagination to new and thrilling ideas that, if we allow ourselves to be open enough to consider them, can restore our planet to a place of homeostatic symbiosis; a world where we both give and take from what and whom is around us instead of stripping all of their available resources and leaving desolation in our wake.  Gaia and the New Politics of Love offers us a glimpse as to what a world without animosity, soaked in selfish consumption might look like: a place where differences and individuals thrive together while dedicating themselves to the health of Gaia, that which came before us and will sustain herself after we pass. 
Perhaps with this new model emphasizing non-violent, loving sustainability we might do our part in ending the wars and restoring Gaia to her harmonic balance, thus ushering in the new era of planetary peace and health, based on mutual respect and love, that our world surely needs today.                                                                              
http://polyplanet.blogspot.com

Sex will save our planet! says author of new book – Tinamarie Bernard on Modern Love Examiner

Sex will save our planet! says  author of new book

by Tinamarie Bernard

At first glance, sex and the environment don’t make obvious bedfellows. How can the answer to our environmental problems – global warming, access to fresh water, ecological sustainability, and the use of fossil fuels, etc – possibly be found in the satin sheets of lovers? According to a growing number of greenies, free love may just save the planet. 
 

Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet
 
In her newest book, Gaia: The New Politics of Love (North Atlantic Books), author Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, attempts to lay the groundwork for this premise. And if you can get past any initial squeamishness, there is value in her message: Specifically, behaviors typical between lovers in open-relationships, also known as polyamory, may indeed be the secret to protecting Mother Earth from her errant, environmentally challenged children. That would be most of us.

 
Read more on
 

Tinamarie Bernard is a top-rated writer of sex, conscious love, intimacy and relationships based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 

http://polyplanet.blogspot.com

1 of 5: We Are Everywhere: A Fiveway Review of A History of Bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces, Look Both Ways, Open, and Becoming Visible

Jonathan Alexander and Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

Has appeared also in Bisexuality and Queer Theory, a special-topics issue of The Journal of Bisexuality, co-edited by Serena Anderlini and Jonathan Alexander. Pre-published with permission of Routledge, New York. 
Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality.  University of Chicago Press, 2001.  281 pages (with index)
Clare Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender.  Routledge, 2002.  244 pages (with index)
Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.  244 pages (with index)
Jenny Block,  Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage.  Seattle: Seal Press, 2009. 276  pages (with works consulted list)2
Beth Firestein, ed,  Becoming Visible: Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan.  Columbia University Press, 2007.  441 pages (with index)

For this special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality on the intersections among queer theory and bisexuality, we thought it would be useful to review books that have substantively engaged this intersection in critical, insightful, and provocative ways.  Two such books, Steven Angelides’ A History of Bisexuality (2001) and Clare Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (2002), are somewhat “older” texts that have not yet been reviewed in the pages of this journal.  To correct that omission, and in recognition of the importance that these two studies play in so many of the articles in this special issue, we offer our review and thoughts here.  To set the critical theory of these books in a more contemporary and applied context, we link them to three more recent text.  Two, Jennifer Baumgardner’s trade book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics (2007), and Jenny Block’s Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (2009) memorialize various levels of personal experience as avenues to theorizing bisexuality for the lay public, and observing the ways in which this trope deploys itself in one’s personal life and in the life and culture of our era.  Finally, Beth Firestein’s edited volume Becoming Visible (2007) offers a store of applied research as well as theoretical knowledge directed to professional counselors and therapists who intend to provide bisexual patients with the mental and psychological health care they need.  The volume’s subtitle, Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan, is emblematic of the volume’s intent to dispel the myth that “bisexuality is a phase” one can overcome with “proper” medical attention.  The idea here is that there are no reasons to “overcome” bisexuality, while there are many reasons why counselors and therapists, as well as society as a whole, should think of bisexuals as very healthy, wholesome, and valuable members of the human community.  An overview of these five books, we believe, will help readers of this collection get a fairly articulate sense of where bisexuality stands at this time in the realms of human knowledge and experience touched by these books.

To start, then, Steven Angelides’ A History of Bisexuality offers a much-needed historical and theoretical intervention in both our thinking about the history of what the modern era knows as sexuality, and our theorizing about the development of sexual identity categories.  Co-editor Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, who was raised in Italy, brings to our reading of this book the perspective of a Mediterranean education, where awareness of bisexual behavior registers across the cultural spectrum since antiquity.  This awareness  has been articulated in a study of bisexual behavior in ancient Greece and Rome by Eva Cantarella, a professor of classical history at the University of Milan.  The book’s title, Secondo natura, encodes the concept that there is nothing unnatural about erotic expression across genders: the title translates, quite literally, as according to nature, and even better, asgoing along with nature, or seconding nature, as one seconds a proposal in a meeting.  The English elides the poetic aspect of this and reads, objectively, as Bisexuality in the Ancient World (1992).  As might be expected of a scholar based in Australia, where the legacies of Western culture have arrived only recently, Angelides’ book focuses on the past 150 years.  Oddly enough, however, Angelides’ perspective on the recent history of bisexuality helps to explain why the title of Cantarella’s book did not make it into English.  Nature came to be studied scientifically in modernity, under the aegis of Christian monotheism.  At this time, bisexual behavior came to be it constructed as against nature,because nature itself was now seen as the creation of a single deity.    In the ancient world the divine was ubiquitous, it was in the body of nature and not separate from it.  Bisexual behavior was just as natural as could be.  Indeed, as Foucault would put it, the focus was on acts, not identities, and only after the onset of Christianity, with its separation between good and evil, certain acts came to be seen as sinful.  In pre-Christian Rome and Greece, Cantarella’s book exemplifies in great detail, amorous behavior was considered an art whose forms and styles of expression were infinite, and the scientific concept of sexuality did not exist.  In the arts of loving, the young were being initiated by those with more experience.  For obvious anatomical reasons, if the students were of one’s own gender, those practical lessons in erotic love would be much ere easier to deliver.  With English being a major language of modern scientific production (if not the most important one), no wonder the original title of Cantarella’s study either makes no sense or sounds outright pedophilic; the kind of thing that gets one in trouble in today’s academe, where mind-centered learning processes prevail.   

Angelides’ book helps one to see what has been lost in this scientific modernization, and what a postmodern perspective can recuperate for itself and humanity’s future, in the ways of bringing back a positive, sustainable notion of the primitive. Angelides uses deconstructive strategies and a Foucauldian approach to the history of sexuality to trace the development of the category of bisexuality, from psychoanalytical and sexological theories at the end of the 19th century, through post-war gay liberation, to queer politics at the end of the 20th century.  With critical sophistication and a general command of his subject, Angelides rightly points out how seemingly central bisexuality was, conceptually, to early psychoanalytic and sexological theory.  For instance, Freud’s theories of polymorphous perversity and naturally innate bisexuality serve as foundations for his theories of sexuality, even as they ultimately position bisexuality as the “immature” (e.g., “perverse”) state out of which sexual maturity (i.e., heterosexuality) must arise.  Angelides adeptly shows how bisexuality is cast in this role both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, namely in relation to the genesis of each individual and that of the species.  From this starting point, Angelides deftly demonstrates how a series of controlling binary oppositions—man and woman, but also, fairly quickly, heterosexual and homosexual—come to dominate theoretical, and cultural as well as political, constructions of sexuality and sexual identity.
In the process, bisexuality becomes, in Angelides’ accounting, a kind of “ghostly other” to sexuality itself—there in the shadowy background, but ultimately something that must be denied in the pursuit of more mature sexual expressions.  In other words, the persistence of bisexuality in this ghostly role embodies cultural fears that “sexuality,” per se, may not exist; that it may be nothing but a cultural construct.  Even with the rise of gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, when some gay liberationists advocated a “bisexual chic” or a sexual freedom that would return us to our original polymorphous-ness, bisexuality never seemed to gain traction, either as an identity or a community or even a politics.  

Consider, for instance, Adrienne Rich’s famous “lesbian continuum,” which seemed to acknowledge, explicitly, like Kinsey’s famous scale, a continuum of sexual, erotic, and intimate interest, from the fully lesbian to the singularly straight.  In the hands of gay and lesbian activists and thinkers, however, the two poles become the focus of attention—gay and straight.  The minoritizing logics of identity politics figure “gayness” as another identity, like straightness, and the in-between status of bisexuality seems to question too much the non-threatening innateness upon which much of gay politicking came to depend.  We’re born this way, after all, so please don’t discriminate.  Bisexuality, by comparison, seemed too much the sexuality “of choice,” and particularly in the advent of AIDS, it came to be seen as the dangerous sexuality that vectored disease from promiscuous homosexuals to an otherwise pristine suburbia. So while bisexuality seemed to be the “centerpiece” of much gay liberationist thinking, it was a bisexuality in name only, a very theoretical bisexuality. 

Angelides moves deftly from history into theoretical discussion, focusing on the work of sexuality studies scholars such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—thinkers whose work dominated the study of sexuality in the 1990s.  In particular, he uses the work of Judith Butler, particularly Bodies That Matter, to unpack the prevalence of binarisms that made bisexuality a difficult subject to consider, even at the headily questioning height of queer theory.  Angelides pointedly asks, “Why is bisexuality the object of such consistent and intense skepticism?  […]  In short, why has bisexuality been rendered, for the most part incidental and even irrelevant to the history, theory, and politics of sexuality”? (190).

Following the lead of Foucault and Butler, particularly in their genealogical mode, Angelides ultimately situates his historical survey of bisexuality less as a discovery of the truth of bisexuality or the revelation of a hidden history (see Marjorie Garber’s Vice Versa for that story), but more as a theoretical questioning of why bisexuality is a conceptually troubling category.  He writes, “[t]racking the epistemic path of bisexuality has been for me one way of bringing into clearer view the failure of our epistemology of sexuality; that is, the impossibility of any attempt to posit this thing called ‘sexuality,’ and its component identity-parts of hetero-, homo-, and bisexual” (196).  For Angelides, undertaking such a theoretical venture has real-world consequences, in a number of ways.  In many ways, attending to the theoretical difficulties that bisexuality poses to our conceptualization of sexuality mandates a complete theoretical reconsideration of sexuality; and indeed, Angelides calls at the end of his study for a substantive rethinking of how we understand the history of sexuality:

This deconstructive history has demonstrated that no analysis of sexuality can afford to ignore the category of bisexuality, which mandates a critical rethinking of some of the central terms and strategies of Foucauldian and queer theories.  While these theories have provided, and continue to provide, cogent political and theoretical tools for antihomophobic and anti-heteronormative inquiry, it is important to attend to their own structuring exclusions in order to strengthen their political and theoretical promise (199).

Put another way, a queer theory that misses bisexuality’s querying of normative sexualities is a queer theory that is itself too mastered by the very normative and normalizing binaries it seeks to unsettle; as he succinctly puts it, “[a]s deconstructive readers and cultural critics we need continually to monitor the sites through which the reiteration of sexuality, and its accompanying hierarchy of hetero- and homosexuality, is taking place” (201).

More interestingly, and speculatively perhaps, Angelides stretches the implications of his critiques beyond the humanities into the social sciences and even the hard sciences.  He suggests that “…science ought [not] to abandon questions relevant to those things assigned to the category of ‘sexuality,’ but…scientists ought to pursue a different set of questions altogether” (206).  For example, the much vaunted search for the “gay gene,” which seems to dominate some scientific inquiry into homosexuality, seems misguided at best, if not seriously theoretically flawed as an investigative project.  Angelides urges that we not let our scientific thinking be dominated by the same binarisms that have hampered psychological thinking.  Rather, he argues, we should consider other, potentially more interesting questions about the multiple and plural natures of desire, attraction, and intimacy—questions that would not simply replicate the old, normalizing, and constraining hetero/homo divide, which doesn’t do justice to the complexity of sexuality anyway, either theoretically or experientially. 

A History of Bisexuality is, in many ways, a stunning book, one which scholars and lay readers alike can learn from, appreciate, and ultimately enjoy.  What partially hampers Angelides’ approach in positing such questions is his failure to account for some scientists and medical professionals, such as Dr. Fritz Klein, in doing exactly what he suggests they do.  Indeed, Angelides’ elisions of Klein’s famous study and treatise, The Bisexual Option (originally published in 1978), seems grievous in this case, particularly since Dr. Klein’s Sexual Orientation Grid attempts to move questions about sex, sexuality, intimacy, and eroticism away from identity and towards a complex plurality of modalities.  Nonetheless,A History of Bisexuality still dazzles with the scope of its historical sweep and its theoretical acumen.

Also published in SexGenderBody.
Reprinted here with thanks to Arvan Reese and Routledge, NY.

http://polyplanet.blogspot.com

2 of 5: We Are Everywhere: A Fiveway Review of A History of Bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces, Look Both Ways, Open, and Becoming Visible


Cont’d, Book Two: Clare Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces. (Routledge 2002.)

By Jonathan Alexander and Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

Has also appeared in Bisexuality and Queer Theory, a special-topics issue of The Journal of Bisexuality. Re-published with permission of Routledge, New York. 

Given such a sweep, Angelides’ text is well balanced by Clare Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender, a text which is as every bit as theoretically savvy as Angelides’, but one which also provides nicely drawn portraits of actual communities in order to ground the theoretical consideration of bisexuality.  Published just a year afterA History of Bisexuality, Hemmings’ text examines bisexuality not just from the perspectives of the history of sexuality and queer theory but also from the analytics of cultural geography, which attends more to the lived experiences of bisexuals in specific locales.  Such an approach offers her, ultimately, a somewhat more nuanced and sophisticated analysis of bisexuality.

Much like Angelides, Hemmings sees bisexuality as offering a theoretically rich way to interrogate and potentially destabilize the dominant hetero/homo binary:
…if we consider bisexual meaning in spatial terms, it becomes clear that bisexuality is not only a location between heterosexuality and homosexuality, binary genders or sexes, but also resides at the heart of lesbian community, between lesbian and gay communities, and in parallel with transsexuality within queer feminist terrain.  As a result, a bisexual subject is capable of producing knowledge that is at odds with dominant and community formations of sexuality and gender, and for that reason alone is worth attending to. (196)

But Hemming’s approach to bisexuality through cultural geography offers us an acute awareness of the particularity of bisexuality as it is situated in specific locales; she maintains, for instance, that “…where bisexual identity or community is the result of…struggles over bisexual meaning, it is frequently at the expense of the specific nature of bisexual political and cultural location” (196).  Hemmings details in her chapters, through interviews, media analyses, community profiles, and theoretical explorations, how the particularities of lived experience shape different understandings of bisexuality.  In some communities, such as in lesbian communities in Massachusetts, bisexuality becomes figured as a space between lesbianism and straight male desire, so as to demarcate it as separate from lesbianism.  In this way, bisexuality seems a “masculine threat to lesbian safety” (13).  In contrast, in San Francisco, bisexuality becomes part of a fantasy of radical inclusiveness, a way to recognize and value the multiplicities of queer desire.  Given such differences, Hemmings ultimately argues that bisexuality can be perceived both as “subversive of gender norms” and as a “reinscription of dominant (i.e. heterosexist) gender and/or sexual discourse” (117).  Put another way, engaging in bi-erotic behavior can prompt us to question what a real ‘man’ or ‘woman’ should do; at the same time, other versions of bisexuality practiced by some people might allow men and women to maintain dominant heterosexual relationships while ‘playing around’ with homo-eroticism in the privacy of a bedroom—without having really to confront what it means to be openly queer. 

Hemmings is perhaps most convincing about such complexities, theoretically at least, when comparing bisexuality and transgenderism.  She notes, for instance, how “…there are a number of similarities in the ways that bisexuality and transsexuality are given and give meaning within queer and feminist studies currently…” (99).  On one hand, both bisexuality and transgenderism are increasingly seen among queer theorists and activists as the new frontier in sexual rights advocacy.  Trans studies in particular has a lot of current theoretical chic.  On the other hand, however, bisexuals and the transgendered strike many as embracing heterosexual privilege, particularly since transsexuals are viewed as reifying norms of gender as they seek to become “real men” or “real women.”  Ultimately, such attention to the complexity of lived bisexual experience prompts Hemmings to call for an approach to bisexuality that is aware of both its potential (theoretically) and its limitations (experientially):

A focus on bisexual knowledges found elsewhere, those not fully circumscribed by dominant formations of heterosexuality and homosexuality, …provides a strategy for resisting the narrativization of heterosexual and homosexual histories that rely on a denial of bisexual specificity.   Instead of celebrating dubious bisexual transgressions of sex, gender, and sexual positions, I advocate an approach that insists that bisexuality’s capacity to generate radical reconfigurations of those oppositions resides not outside but within social and cultural meaning.  (197)

As such, Hemmings’ approach, we feel, builds nicely on Angelides’ call for research that historicizes bisexuality in ways that both deconstruct older and limiting conceptualizations of sexuality while also paying attention to the historical particularity of how individuals and communities negotiate their relationships, both amongst themselves and in relation to controlling paradigms, including sexuality.

Also appeared in SexGenderBody

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3 of 5: We Are Everywhere: A Fiveway Review of A History of Bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces, Look Both Ways, Open, and Becoming Visible

Cont’d, Book Three: Jennifer Baumgardner’s Look Both Ways. (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2007.)
By Jonathan Alexander and Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

Has appeared in Bisexuality and Queer Theory, a special-topics issue of The Journal of Bisexuality. Re-published with permission of Routledge, New York. 

Both Baumgardner’s and Block’s books come in the feminist tradition of theorizing from the personal, namely of using personal experience to extrapolate theoretical propositions that are not exactly macro-political but nonetheless provide insights applicable well beyond mere identity politics.  While Baumgardner’s book uses the personal as a springboard to offer comments on the media and cultural politics, Block’s book is organized as a personal narrative, which, complemented by the author’s reflections about her own story, has the ambition to offer itself as an encouragement for any reader’s personal and political transformation.  In both their methods and intents, these books are a refreshing statement about what it means to have had several decades of women’s and gender studies as an official part of higher education.  One can see these disciplines in action as one reads how these authors take pride in their gender and acknowledge the importance of female genealogies in their lives, intellectual, political, and biological.  Block and Baumgardner come to bisexuality from different perspectives:  Block defines the space of her bisexual expression within the open marriage she and her spouse gradually create together, an amicable space where their daughter is raised with abundant parenting; more faithful to the feminist communities with whom she works, Baumgardner defines her profile as that of an independent professional whose choice to be a single parent is supported by her communities with abundant affection and help.  For both authors, embracing bisexuality is related to their sense of interconnectedness between women, and between generations of women.  Via different forms of self-affirmation and feminist practice, these interconnections ground Block and Baumgardner’s determination to own their sexuality, to proclaim their sovereignty over their own bodies and selves, and to honor their multiple desires.

If Angelides and Hemmings offer us robust histories and theories of bisexuality, then Jennifer Baumgardner’s delightfully accessible and narratively-driven call to Look Both Ways, in her exploration of, as her subtitle puts it, Bisexual Politics, serves to show us how much academic theorizing about bisexuality has, as it were, hit the streets.  The answer, surprisingly, is quite a bit.  We are not certain that Baumgardner has read either Angelides’ or Hemmings’ books (though she does cite Fritz Klein), but Look Both Ways is nonetheless an often astute and clever look at bisexuality that is aware, as is Hemmings, of both its seeming liberatory potential and its lived nuisances.
Baumgardner focuses primarily on women’s experience of bisexuality, which is not surprising given her previous publications and strong interest in feminism (Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future and Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism).  But she’s also savvy about the influence of popular culture in shaping our understanding of sexuality and in suggesting alternative trajectories for desire and affiliation.  She writes several times about the impact of Ellen Degeneres and Anne Heche’s former relationship on her own thinking about plural sexualities, and she recounts with glee a tension-filled movie theater in which young women expressed discomfort with hunky Matt Damon’s portrayal of the quite queer Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley; scenes of nearly missed kisses between Damon and co-star Jude Law elicited youthful squeals of discomfort.  For Baumgardner, such scenes show us how bisexuality and bi-eroticism permeate pop culture, offering many models for different trajectories of desire while still eliciting, among many others, unfortunate reactions of biphobia.  But that’s reality, as either an Angelides or a Hemmings might point out; as Baumgarnder puts it, “[t]hese subconscious and conscious images of bisexuality in ads, on TV, and in erotica reflect the lives of real women and girls” (9).  And she’s quite good at tracing such images and accounting for their personal impact on her life, all the while rooting them in their historical contexts—from considering bisexuality and second-wave feminism, to writing humorously about what she calls the “Ani [DiFranco] Phenomenon,” to musing about communal tensions among bisexual women and lesbians.

Admittedly, though, this is a “popular” text, and in comparison to A History of Bisexuality and Bisexual Spaces, Baumgardner’s analyses can seem at times too optimistic.  She seems at many points to grind the familiar axes of visibility: “Visibility is crucial to making bisexuality a political force, because it could take straight people from being the majority to being a minority” (222).  We’re not exactly sure what is meant by taking straight people out of the majority, per se, especially since, desirable as it might be, a wave of massive bisexual self-outing seems so unlikely at this time.  Also perplexingly, she writes that “…what is still usually invisible, within all of the rampant visibility that gay rights has achieved, is the insurgent role of bisexual people.  Because we are part of the mainstream, the alternative margin, and the gaystream (the mainstreaming of queer life), we have empathy for an insight into the straight and queer worlds.  Bisexual people are the primary conduits for the cultural conversation that America is having about gay rights” (35).  Yes, we agree in part: bisexuals are often invisible within both straight and gay communities; but we are still left wondering exactly how bisexuals are at the center of cultural conversations between straights and gays about gay rights. Indeed, the subtitle is misleading: there’s not much politics here, unless it’s the politics of the personal, which is an important politics, granted.  We’d hoped, though, for more macro politics, more consideration of how larger conversations, beyond pop culture, are taking shape around bisexuality in particular and around sexuality in general.  In accordance with prevalent styles in the trade book industry, the promise of such analysis is never quite fulfilled.

But there is meaty stuff here, nonetheless.  One nearly throwaway passage in the book’s final chapter gave us much pause for thought:

What Anne [Heche] symbolizes to me is the great what-if—what if it were okay for gay people to have straight expectations?  Not to “pass,” or become palatable, or go back in the closet, but simply to expect what Heche took for granted: to not have to be careful and quiet about her love life.  Heche’s cluelessness and her sense of entitlement were annoying, but they were also her weapons against fear—fear of being gay in a homophobic society and in a very homophobic (though very gay) industry. (217)

The insight here seems smart and dead on: perhaps what is necessary at times—not just to increase bi-visibility, but to help create a world of greater sexual freedom—is a bit of cluelessness, a willingness to claim a sexual empowerment even when such may not be willingly offered by those around you.  This is dangerous territory, but Baumgardner’s willingness to provoke discussion about a “bisexual politics” is dangerous, to gays, straights, and even some bisexuals too.  And while one may not be as theoretically provoked, as is the case with Angelides’ and Hemming’s books, a reader of Look Both Ways may find him-, her-, or ze-self personally provoked—and that might be the most effective kind of provocation of all.

Also appeared in SexGenderBody.  Reprinted here with thanks to Arvan Reese.

http://polyplanet.blogspot.com

4 of 5: We Are Everywhere: A Fiveway Review of A History of Bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces, Look Both Ways, Open, and Becoming Visible

Cont’d, Book Four: Jenny Block’s Open. (Seal Press, 2002.)

By Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Jonathan Alexander

Will appear in Bisexuality and Queer Theory, a special-topics issue of The Journal of Bisexuality. Re-published with permission of Routledge, New York. 

Similarly provocative, but in more subdued ways, is Jenny Block’s Open, a narrative about the author’s personal journey through the meanders of social prescriptions, expectations, and clichés, and her endeavor to define herself as a bisexual, polyamorous subject, a woman capable of loving both men and women and of sustaining more than one amorous relationship at once.  Block’s narrative is presented as that of a modern “every(wo)man,” who, in the United States, tries her best to meet social and familial expectations while at the same time continuing her search for what is fulfilling on a deeper level, as well as honest and authentic.  The literary quality of the book is quite impressive, which also speaks well of where bisexual and polyamorous communities are at in the ways of nurturing talent beyond what is merely effective.  The prologue, written in the third person, gives a summary of this every(wo)man’s story in paragraphs that then repeat at the opening of each chapter.  The story that particularizes the person to whom these things happened comes alive as the first-person narrative of each chapter unfolds.  So we learn about Jenny’s liberal parents, about her desire and determination to own and explore her sexuality as a young adult and in college, about her socially acquired goal to find Mr. Right and marry him, about her wisdom in choosing the person, about her first sexual experiences with women and her first affair, while married, with another married woman, Grace, whose husband was possessive and homophobic. 
What is most moving about this book is the way the narrator explains how these events impacted her personal life and the relationship with her husband Christopher, including the different styles of communication and affection that enabled the couple not only to survive, but to grow, and become more deeply related.  For example, we find out that when Grace’s husband threatened to tell Jenny’s husband about the women’s affair, Jenny not only accepted to talk to this man, but also, eventually, when all danger was averted, decided to tell her own husband the whole story as well.  Clearly, Jenny wants to be appreciated by her partner for her honesty, and takes the risk of honesty even when the facts could be easily and conveniently concealed.  In another situation, we learn that via communication and negotiation Jenny and Christopher have agreed to open their marriage, and that the chosen person is a female friend of Jenny’s whom Christopher knows as well, Lisbeth.  The description of the lovely threesome, the trepidations that anticipate it, the act itself, the feelings and afterthoughts are quite discreet and gracious, yet concrete and palpable enough for any reader to get a sense of how joyful and intense these experiences can be. 

As Block remembers:

I couldn’t keep from smiling as I watched my husband run his hand over Lisbeth’s breasts and down her hips. He looked awed, as if this were the first time he had ever touched a woman like that—not just her, but any woman.  It was amazing to watch them together.  It was hot, but it was also sweet.  She was lost in him, and he in her.  I was able to see Christopher as a human being for the fist time in years . . . . as a man, as a sexual being, a person who needed to be wanted (140)

Even though Jenny was the one who suggested opening the marriage, and even though Lisbeth was primarily her friend, when Lisbeth decides to continue the sexual relationship with Christopher and not her, Jenny is obliging in a dignified, self-sustaining way.  She respects them, as she explains:

After the three of us had been together for several months, my husband continued to sleep with Lisbeth, but I didn’t.  It was her choice, not mine.  But I respected her interest (or lack thereof).  . . . I missed having sex with her, but it was important to me that she was honest about how she was feeling (144).

The author comes across as a woman with integrity, love, intelligence, and determination, a person one would want in one’s life, and one who is ready to fight her battles to define herself and her circumstances in her own terms.  Toward the end of the memoir the author goes back to some of the dramatic moments in the story to offer her reflections on how she and Christopher made it though the most difficult times.  She clearly knows how to establish the terms of a negotiation with her partner, as a person who chooses marriage rather than feeling obligated to accept it as a woman’s biological destiny.

Christopher and I recovered from our first debacle almost instantly, simply because we decided we would.  So much of navigating a new lifestyle involves letting go of the ‘norms’ and ‘meanings’ to which people have grown accustomed.  We were figuring things together, and we had to learn to talk to each other and to listen . . . we continue to work at that . . . (228)

A capable negotiator, she is also compassionate and empathetic. As she explains:

even though we know that talking is paramount, it’s not always easy, especially for Christopher.  For example, when things ended with Christopher and Lisbeth as we all went back to being ‘just friends,’ it was though for all of us, as any change is.  But Christopher suffered a different kind of loss than either Lisbeth or I did—and, I believe, a more difficult one.  She and I fell back into our friendship easily, but he had no real relationship with her before our sexual one started and so we was left feeling like and outsider . . . he was back to being the husband of her best friend (228-229).

Eventually, the life narrative Block presents in this memoir ends with the formation of a three-way relationship that has Jenny involved with both Christopher and Jemma, the younger woman who accepts to be her exclusive girlfriend.  This configuration can be described as a bisexual/polyamorous triad. 

Through the empathy for her partner(s) and her affirmation of multipartnering as a practice of love that enhances amorous relationships, the author successfully presents open marriage as a viable alternative between conventional monogamy and more liberal ways to practice alternative lifestyles, as in solo players and group marriage (also known as polyfidelity).  As presented in this memoir, open marriage involves various degrees of bisexuality and responsible non-monogamy, with secondary relationships including something as fleeting as Jenny’s brief flings while out of town, and something as stable as Jenny’s exclusive relationship with Jemma.  Open marriage comes across as a viable option for open minded people in a society like the United States, where the nuclear concept of a family is prevalent enough in the culture at large to determine things as basic as retirement and health insurance.  When understood in these terms, open marriage is a cultural construct that challenges two of the most important paradigms upon which the accepted concept of marriage in the West is predicated: monogamy and monosexuality.  Open marriage, demurely concludes Jenny Block, is “just a variation on an institution that is desperate for a remodel” (221).  Today, when “gay marriage,” as a frequent centerpiece in debates about queer politics, is often understood as a variant that only remodels the gender of the other person, her statement is especially poignant.  And indeed, with her genuine story, Block has persuaded us that “most people involved in open marriages are honest, open-minded, and intellectual” (216). 

Also appeared in SexGenderBody.
Republished here with thanks to Arvan Reese.
Opne by Jenny Block @ Amazon.com 

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