Terapeuttisen vallan viettelevyyttä ja hähmäisyyttä jäljittämässä

Terapeuttinen valta. Onnellisuuden ja hyvinvoinnin jännitteitä 2000-luvun Suomessa. Toim. Kristiina Brunila, Esko Harni, Antti Saari & Hanna Ylöstalo. Vastapaino 2021. 367 s.

The becoming of family relationships and friendship circles after a bisexual break-up

This chapter explores how bisexual women’s family relationships and friendship circles unravel after a relationship breakup. It intervenes at the conjunction of three under-researched areas: bisexual people’s relationships, LGBTIQA+ separations, and social networks after relationship breakups. The becoming of social or friendship circles after a bisexual relationship breakup is approached through the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblages, where multiple and complex elements come together, connecting in various ways and taking various forms. Further, the chapter offers a novel perspective on bisexuality as a process of “becoming” as part of these relational assemblages, rather than as “b…

The politics of pairlessnessSinglehood in the public debate in Finland

Sinkkujen määrä on lisääntynyt länsimaissa 1960-luvulta lähtien. Ilman vakituista kumppania elävien asemasta ei kuitenkaan juuri käydä yhteiskuntapoliittista keskustelua. Artikkelissa analysoidaan sinkkuutta koskevaa keskustelua suomalaisissa sanoma- ja päivälehdissä. Lähtökohtana on, että julkinen keskustelu osallistuu keskeisellä tavalla sinkkuuden määrittelyyn The number of people living without a partner is continuing to grow across the world. However, the tenacity of the couple-norm remains unaffected, and despite the demographic shift there is still a paucity of research on singlehood. Our contribution in this article is to analyse the Finnish public debate on singlehood, single peopl…

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

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 excess…

"Ihan samanlaisia ku muutki ihmiset" – bi-naisten ja kumppanien parisuhteen tuottamisen strategiat

Challenging Unequal Gendered Conventions in Heterosexual Relationship Contexts through Affective Dissonance

In Nordic countries, intimate relationships are routinely compared against ideals of gender equality, even though equality is not always achieved in everyday life. In this article, we analyse interviews with women that lived in unconventional relationships: mid- to later-life women in relationships with younger men, and bisexual women who have had relationships with people of different genders. The women’s expectations of equality and reciprocity in heterosexual relationships collided with the lived reality of inequalities, causing affective dissonance. We identify three strategies that women use to deal with this affective dissonance. In the first strategy, unequal relationship patterns ar…

Naisvalitus ja epätasa-arvo heteroparisuhteissa

Similar and equal relationships? Negotiating bisexuality in an enduring relationship

In the public debate in Finland, same-sex couples’ right to legal recognition is routinely defended by stressing their sameness to heterosexual couples within the discourse of romantic love. This article explores how bisexual women and their partners use these discourses. The five couple interviews were analyzed by implementing discourse analysis. The results highlight how, when taking positions within the discourse of the enduring couple relationship, the interviewees drew on the discourse of romantic love. Woman’s bisexuality disappeared easily in this talk. Although it seemed effortless at first sight, negotiations and affective tensions arose when the interviewees tried to fit their re…

Research perspectives on bisexuality

LGBTIQ+ break-up assemblages : At the end of the rainbow

This article explores Finnish LGBTIQ+ people’s break-ups. The long battle for equal rights has placed LGBTIQ+ people’s relationships under pressure to succeed. Previous studies argue that partners in LGBTIQ+ relationships try to appear as ordinary and happy as possible, and remain silent about the challenges they face in their relationships. Consequently, they may miss out on opportunities to receive institutional and familial support. This study aims to move beyond recurrent frameworks that take the similarity or difference between LGBTIQ+ relationships/break-ups and mixed-sex relationships as a predefined point of departure. The analysis draws on ethnographic observations of relationship …

Bisexual desires for more than one gender as a challenge to normative relationship ideals

Normative western understandings of intimate relationships continue to draw upon the discourses of romantic love and the ideal of finding ‘the one’ who meets all our romantic and sexual needs. As desire is not sexually or emotionally exclusive, even people in normative relationships have to make sense of desires beyond the monogamous ideal. Bisexual people engage in these negotiations from a challenging cultural position. As a desire for more than one gender, bisexuality is persistently culturally associated with wavering desire, promiscuity and multiple partners. In light of these cultural conditions, I explore how Finnish bisexual women – and their (ex-)partners of various genders who do …