Too much? Excessive sexual experiences in bisexual women’s life stories

Abstract

This article explores bisexual women’s sexual experiences at the edges of or between relationships. It draws on the follow-up interviews of a longitudinal interview set conducted in 2005 and 2014–2015 with bisexual women and their partners, who do not identify as bisexuals. Bisexual women’s spontaneous, detailed and affective narrations of sexual experiences in the follow-up interviews caught the author’s attention. Although the experiences were often narrated as pleasurable, they could be overwhelming, and women also expressed concern that they were excessive, “too much”. The analysis of the women’s accounts utilizes and develops a psychosocial concept of excess. It reveals that the excessiveness of the women’s sexual experiences is constituted by bisexuality and monogamy-related norms that restrict women’s sexuality, and also by the non-rational psychic dimensions of these experiences. Within the normative limits of feminine sexuality, sexuality’s excess often plays a propulsive role as the women strive to become sexual subjects.