A talk by Kristen Esterberg, an associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts – Lowell, drew a large audience to the latest installment of the Stonewall Center lecture series on Nov. 15.

Her lecture, entitled “The Bisexual Menace, or, Will the Real Bisexuals Please Stand Up?” explored the difficulty of analyzing sexual categories.

The lecture drew audience members from other Five College courses and from diverse fields of study. At least one student from Smith, speaking on condition of anonymity, was in attendance yesterday. She said that the lecture’s subject had drawn her to the UMass campus. According to the student, the lecture would be useful in writing a paper on bisexuality for a course at Smith on “Sex and Gender in American Society.”

She said she supported the goal of the lecture series to raise support for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender studies at colleges and universities. “GLBT studies, although dealt with [at colleges and universities] by other departments, don’t necessarily fall into those departments, and I think they’re important enough to warrant their own study outside of women’s studies or feminist studies, and things like that,” she said.

Another student from UMass said that she and a number of her fellow students from a sociology course had attended the lecture as a supplement to their class.

Junior BDIC and Spanish major Senofer Stead said that she regularly comes to the lectures to be better educated. She said she felt that yesterday’s lecture was particularly popular because Esterberg, “is a professor at UMass-Lowell so it’s probably been really well advertised in the UMass community.”

Regular attendee Joseph Derosier, a sophomore French and STPEC major, said that bisexuality was “a hot topic.”

“I think there’s a lot of discussion around the inclusion or exclusion of bisexual people within different communities,” Derosier said. “Things are divided into heterosexual and homosexual so much that it leaves bisexual people out of discussion. I think it’s good to be including as many people as possible.”

Esterberg prefaced her lecture by saying that the events of Sept. 11 had altered her perspective on her research.

“I don’t know if people are really talking about sexuality as much in popular discourse anymore,” Esterberg said. “The ‘bisexual menace’ has paled in comparison to other menaces.”

Before Sept. 11, bisexuality was “newly chic,” Esterberg said. A debate raged over whether bisexual people were to be reviled or commended.

“Some people thought of bisexuals as hopelessly confused fence sitters,” Esterberg explained. “Or they were lauded as postmodern, chic, and truly queer in an historical moment that seemed to celebrate uncertainty, flux and the flouting of tradition.”

The debate over bisexuality and the nature of research into its nature have highlighted the patterns of Western thought, Esterberg said.

“We tend to see things in binaries of male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, black and white, dominant and dominated,” she said. “Moreover, we interpret these things from the perspective of a dominant culture.”

Monosexism, Esterberg said, can come from the gay and lesbian community as well as the straight community. Esterberg added that this prejudice is rooted in fear.

“This ambiguity raises fears about the understanding of ourselves that are rooted in a sense of separation,” she said. “It also comes from the ethnic model of sexual identity, which relies on firm boundaries around different groups to strengthen the claims that these communities are in need of civil rights protection.”

A question raised by the study of bisexuality, according to Esterberg, was “are we at the brink of the collapse of the sexual divide?

“Bisexuality brings into question the value of identity at all,” she said. “It may be that the border wars will eventually destroy the borders themselves.”

Though the collapse of sexual categories is possible through bisexuality, Esterberg said that in her opinion, it was not plausible.

“I have extensive experience in observing the societal institutions and the stranglehold they have on people’s thinking,” she said. “I don’t think that the collapse of boundaries will happen, but maybe at best we can rethink our categories.”

She said that relatively uncomplicated studies of bisexuality, using mainly behavioral and empirical models of analysis, have highlighted only “the way we put people into boxes.”

“It’s like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. Identity and sexuality are more complicated and more fluid than that,” Esterberg said. “We need to focus on individuals and their ideas of themselves as bisexual in order to define this category in any meaningful way at all.”

On the Net: The Stonewall Center: http:///www.umass.edu/stonewall