Now, in case it isn't amply apparent from the title, I just want to say that this post is going to offend pretty much everyone who reads it. You have been warned.
Alright, here we go: identity politics. Specifically, Diversity Fair politics. Fuck Diversity Fairs. The buzzwords of diversity are just as guilty of stereotyping, generalizing, and oversimplifying as the very power structures that they are supposedly responding to. You know this, CoffeeWhore. We talk about it all the time.
"Diversity," as it stands currently, does nothing more than take something that some folks see as a negative and try - usually lamely - to reframe it as a positive. It pretty much boils down to insulting sound bytes like "I'm not handicapped, I'm handi-capable!" This kind of tacky marketing ploy is utterly vile and condescending. To
everyone, really, but most especially to the people it is supposedly trying to "empower."
Real diversity is not something that anyone can see or label. To illustrate:
My undergraduate jurisprudence professor was a middle-aged, white, Oxford educated, heterosexual man. No diversity buzzwords in
that cover letter, I'm guessing, and one might venture to say that he wouldn't have added much diversity to the faculty. Three minutes of conversation with him, however, revealed that he was a socialist. He had a Soviet flag hanging from the bulletin board in his office. His perspective added a lot more diversity than that of the spunky young female professor down the hall ("Sandra Day O'Connor is a traitor to her vagina..." blah blah fucking blah).
On top of frequently being invisible, real diversity is often relative:
On Election Day, 2004, I overheard a conversation in a courtyard at San Liberal University. A black, homosexual classmate of mine was holding forth about how he was going to vote for George W. Bush because he was certain that once he had his degree, he was going to be in a high tax bracket. I'm thinking that despite having a cover letter liberally sprinkled with anecdotes about how his race and sexuality have left him "twice silenced," this young man would probably bring more
actual diversity to a gay pride parade than he would to a board room full of pre-visitation Ebeneezer Scrooges.
Which is all to say, don't let faux-diversity define you or influence the opinions you hold of other people. We are what we are, and that cannot be captured even in the slightest by checking a series of boxes.
Now, about bisexuality. Bisexuals are the black sheep of the sexual identity landscape. Bisexual women are treated as though it's some kind of experimentation phase - an increasingly necessary step towards the attainment of one's Mrs. degree, certainly - but, in the end, still merely a phase. Bisexual men, meanwhile, are treated as though they are firmly on the train to Gayville but trying nevertheless to cling to some fictitious vestige of masculinity and hetero respectability.
I am a fan of "queer," and though I'm not sure I understand your reticence about that word, I do agree that using it risks having people ask you for your, as you put it, "sexual C.V." in order to suss out just how queer you really are.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. We don't need to worry about word choice unless we decide that you need to "come out" at this Diversity Fair or on the job market.
To my mind, placing too much emphasis on one's diversity credentials comes across as an announcement that one is not actually capable of doing the relevant job. Pushing
too hard on "Look at me! I'm an Jewish albino dwarf lesbian Eskimo with a beard!" tends to carry with it the implication that one lacks other necessary or desirable credentials and is trying to pull the proverbial wool over a potential employer's eyes.
Even setting aside that concern, outing yourself as a bisexual woman is particularly dicey. For one thing, there will be people who dismiss you as a straight white woman of privilege who is grasping at any "axis" of diversity she can get her hands on. They will dismiss completely the possibility that your sexual identity is legitimate, and they will see you as a sneaky bitch, which is clearly no good.
Then there will be people who accept that you are bisexual but who see that word as nothing other than the politically correct term for "slut." They will be put out that you would overshare so blatantly with a potential employer, and/or they will see you as a corruptive little minx for luring so many otherwise sexually pure innocents down the morally bankrupt path of pansexual polyamory. Again, clearly no good.
There may also be a third class, made up of sluts who call themselves "bisexual," and one or more of them may hit on you. Potentially interesting, but probably not the way you want to go about getting a job.
So what should you do?
Well, one more thing before I quite get there. Recognize that you are really very lucky to be invisibly "diverse." I can speak from personal experience that when you can't pass for straight, people see that you're gay and promptly think they know everything about you. I have told you, haven't I, about the customer at work who perpetually tries to strike up conversations with me about queer current events, which have included everything from various marriage controversies to the foot-tappings of one Larry Craig. Very enjoyable, that is. Now, true, if you pass as straight, people think they know something about you too. But there's a lot more breathing room there. Heterosexuals aren't generally accused of having an "agenda," after all.
So I say, embrace the freedom that comes with being ambiguously academic and tweedy; let people speculate if they want to, and then decline to give them a clear answer. But most important of all (cue schmaltzy afterschool special music), don't let other people's narrow viewpoints have any impact on how you view yourself. You are what you are. You will call yourself whatever you want to, if in fact you choose to call yourself anything, and
you have the power to make decisions about which of your features are relevant to wooing potential employers.
The power is all yours. To paraphrase The Tick, Hug your power, CoffeeWhore. Hug it.
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