This article explores bisexual identity as an ambiguous social category within the dominant dualistic sex/gender structure. The article documents the stigmatization of the bisexual category in the discourse of both the Religious Right and lesbian feminist communities, then examines the impact of dual stigmatization on bisexual women, who often see bi identity as disrupting the dominant sexual binary. Drawing from interviews with bisexual women, the article argues that bisexual women's discourse on sexual subjectivity does not escape the influence of binary structures, although it does at times reconfigure the binary along the queer/nonqueer and bisexual/monosexual axes. While the bisexual identity category may work as a discursive stabilizing device during the sex/gender crisis provoked by the AIDS epidemic, its politicization by bi feminists also allows the category to be strategically deployed for feminist and queer political projects. At the present time, the regions where the grid is tightest, where the black squares are most numerous, are those of sexuality and politics; as if discourse, far from being that transparent or neutral element in which sexuality is disarmed and politics pacified, is in fact one of the places where sexuality and politics exercise in a privileged way some of their most formidable powers. ‐Michel Foucault No wonder people think we [bisexual women] are all sleazy. ‐Bisexual woman

This paper analyzes hostility toward bisexual women within lesbian feminist discourse. Based on interviews with feminist lesbians, this study uses a deconstructive approach to explicate the resonance of lesbian objections to women identifying themselves as bisexual with broader, dominant discourses on gender, sexuality, and racial purity—discourses that feminists often criticize as oppressive. The article identifies several specific discursive "techniques of neutralization" through which some lesbians construct bisexuals as "deviant others" against which the lesbian subject is defined as socially central, personally integrated, and morally pure. Broadly, the study analyzes marginalization within a marginalized community and the imbrication of dominant discourse in politically oppositional communities.Negative sentiment toward bisexuality and bisexually identified women finds expression in a wide variety of forms of discrimination, erasure, invalidation, and prejudice in lesbian-feminist communities and discourse. Ranging from gross personal bigotry to political exclusion, such practices silence bisexuals as individuals, disrupt the formation of a politicized bisexual identity, and prevent substantive debate over the implications of the emergence of a bisexual identity at RYERSON UNIV on June 5, 2016 crs.sagepub.com Downloaded from