My first introduction to June Jordan was through a livestream with Angela Davis. Davis reflected on Jordan’s beauty and skill as a teacher, a poet, a writer, and an advocate for prison abolition, Black culture, and (bi)sexual freedom. They were friends sharing similar activist spaces as Black women in the US through the mid-20^th century. Having heard her name, I searched June Jordan in Google and found an essay by Mel Reeves called ‘Bisexuality is Freedom’.

It’s hard to miss how Jordan’s anti-colonial, abolitionist, radical Black politics seeps through her poetry in evocative ways, mixing whit with violence and flowers with class oppression. Not only has her work contributed significantly to the struggles across Palestine and Lebanon throughout the decades (being more recently revived in our search for ways to process and channel the traumas as a result of the genocide inflicted by Israel and abetted by the West), but her work has also been taken up within bisexual politics. Her essay, “A New Politics of Sexuality” (1994)[1] is not only an important insight into the early formation of a politicised bisexual identity and an organised bisexual politics, but it is also a call to freedom. Recent uses of her essay, particularly Reeves’ article, have reformulated the arguments in the essay to deploy the slogan ‘bisexuality is freedom’.

In this essay, I want to offer an alternative reading to Reeves’ ‘Bisexuality is Freedom’ blog post. While Reeves is cautious to use words like ‘freedom’ in an understanding that would be different from the lived experiences of Jordan, I worry that in a reading that considers freedom to be achieved in identifying as bisexual, key concepts in Jordan’s essay become depoliticised. Instead, through a close reading of A New Politics of Sexuality, I argue that Jordan considers bisexuality useful only to the extent that it embodies a politics of complexities in bodies, desires, and through an intersectional analysis of differing experiences of power in society. In this, bisexuality (which itself must be intersectionally complex, honest to bodies and hearts, and strives towards freedom from control) merely becomes a means through which to achieve sexual liberation, rather than bisexuality being liberation itself.

Moving beyond an identity-based politics, I want to think with June Jordan’s New Politics of Sexuality alongside Deleuze & Guattari’s ontology and politics[2]. I argue that while there are distinctions, the theorists overlap to speak to an affirmative and affective potential that can orient contemporary bisexual politics away from identities and visibility strategies, and towards creating connections.

‘Bisexuality is freedom’?:

Mel Reeves, author of the blog BiHistory, has written a beautiful consideration of June Jordan’s (1994) essay “A New Politics of Sexuality”. In it, Reeves writes about the way in which Jordan’s vision provides a moment of clarity and comfort with her confus(ed/ing) sexuality[3]. A lot of Reeves’ essay speaks to my own experiences coming to terms with bisexuality, and with internal battles over the confusing and contradictory desires that spill over the edges of the bisexual label. Reeves initially writes on the uneasiness of the bisexual label to encapsulate her own desires, but finds a happy medium in it—thanks, according to Reeves, to June Jordan. Bisexuality therefore allows her to recognise the ways that the bisexual identity affords sitting comfortably with the changing aspects of our bodies, our preferences, and our experiences. In Reeves’ words,

Bisexuality frees me from the restrictions the world encourages me to place on myself, it allows me to create myself as I wish to be, outside the norms of our world. It encourages me to see community with other queer people, and to take seriously the responsibility I have to educate myself and fight for other marginalised people whenever I can. (2023: np).

With gentle consideration of the context in which Jordan wrote (particularly Jordan’s emphasis on ‘freedom’ as a Black queer woman and activist in 20^th Century United States), Reeves reformulates Jordan’s quote “bisexuality means I am free” (1994: 193) to ‘bisexuality is freedom’. I have no doubt that Reeves is trying to continue an affirmative politicisation of the bisexual label in order to demonstrate its utility for those questioning complex desires. I do worry, though, that this conclusion alters the message within Jordan’s New Politics of Sexuality in a way that depoliticises the radical potential of bisexual politics. In her post, Reeves does not expand on some of the key principles that thread through the analysis Jordan carefully underlines.

Because of this, I want to return to Jordan’s essay to touch on some of the tensions she navigates. Having approached her essay informed by Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy, I see an affective connection between Jordan and the bisexual political movements at the time which can be read as her anti-identitarian position being challenged by 1990s bisexual movements. However, plenty in the essay point to her steadfast anti-identitarian position. If we read Jordan’s essay in a way that is fundamentally anti-identitarian, radical concepts emerge that can inform a contemporary bisexual politics beyond identity. Therefore, exploring the points of departure and harmony, I want to see how Jordan’s New Politics of Sexuality can congeal with a Deleuzian-informed, queer politics based within the materiality of the molecular rather than identity.

A New Politics of Sexuality: Jordan’s principles:

The 1990s not only saw a rise in the inclusion of, and thereby commodification of, queer and Black lives and cultures, but it also saw active efforts to form radical political movements based in anti-assimilationism, against previous gay and lesbian attempts towards assimilation. The active politicisation of the derogatory term ‘queer’ and the (largely medical) category of bisexual formed the backdrop of a contemporary politics that emerged at the time of Jordan’s writing. These movements attempted to exist as open-ended, decentralised, and be concerned with intersectional and overlapping campaigns based in material conditions and a critique of power (Gamson, 1995). This context situates Jordan and her writing in a time where multiple intersectional, anti-identitarian and anti-assimilationist political movements was being formed.

Three concepts shape Jordan’s New Politics of Sexuality: that freedom is indivisible or it is not freedom; that the human must be honest with their heart and body; and that such an indivisible freedom, guided by an honesty with one’s body, is achieved in the freedom from control.

June Jordan begins the essay with an experience of a self-help book on motherhood. She explains that one book argued a good mother is one who does not demonstrate she is a sexual being to her child, especially if the child is male. In the process of reading mothering books written by men, she realised she was trying to conform to an expectation of the good, asexual motherly figure for her child. This lays the groundwork for her approach to liberation, her understanding of womanhood, and her New Politics of Sexuality. The politics of sexuality, which for Jordan includes politics around the gendered marginalisation of women and the marginalisation of non-normative sexualities, is “deeper and more pervasive than any other oppression, than any other bitterly contested human domain, is the oppression of sexuality” (1994: 188). She writes this from a number of positionalities in the piece without hesitation, since these (and many others) shape how she approaches a politics of sexuality:

I am speaking, finally, about myself. I am Black and I am female and I am a mother and I am bisexual and I am a nationalist and I am an antinationalist. (1994: 189).

These positionalities thread through a number of her other works, two of which are helpful for clarifying her political project: “Letter to the Local Police” and “Poem about My Rights”. Both poems highlight Jordan’s frustrations with institutional racism, sexual violence against women, the gendered hierarchies that afford men a ‘benefit of the doubt’, imperialism and colonialism, class oppression, domination over nature, police brutality, and colonial categories that dictate particular ways of being and dressing and doing womanhood. This context is critical for threading an intersectional politics through a politics of sexuality:

Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement of the few. Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine. (1994: 190).

This echoes a radical slogan still used today, “None of us are free until all of us are free”. She mentions this again in the context of two rallies, one against racism with a large attendance, and the other a gay and lesbian rights rally that drew a small crowd: “There should have been just one rally. One rally: freedom is indivisible” (1994: 191). Fundamentally, Jordan’s sexual politics is an intersectional, anti-colonial one with a united front.

The understanding of the human for Jordan is one that is both policed and restricted, and also bubbling with the potential to love. To acknowledge our capacities to love, to survive, we must be honest with our hearts and our bodies. She says:

if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: there is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you—who you really are—do survive. (1994: 191).

Many activists understand the sentiment that survival is first and foremost key to organising. We cannot help each other if we don’t help ourselves. A radical honesty with our hearts and bodies, Jordan argues, requires that we reflect on our capacities to love and acknowledge the restrictions that stop us from practicing this. From there, we can collectively coordinate to dismantle the hierarchies that limit us:

we must not conceal/assimilate/integrate into the would-be dominant culture and political system that despises us. Our survival requires that we alter our environment so that we can live and so that we can hold each other’s hands and so that we can kiss each other on the streets, and in the daylight of our existence, without terror and with-out violent and sometimes fatal reactions from the busybodies of America. (1994: 192).

In being visible and altering the environments through which we live, Jordan argues that we can begin resisting the sometimes fatal forces that inhibit this. Bodies and hearts are complex, and Jordan considers this an essential element in the new sexual politics emerging at her time of writing, and as something necessary to rally behind:

They seek to embrace our increasing global complexity on the basis of the heart and on the basis of an honest human body. Not according to ideology. Not according to group pressure. Not according to anybody’s concept of “correct.” This is a New Politics of Sexuality. (1994: 192-3).

On the surface it might seem that Jordan is attempting to depoliticise the body by assuming an essential and innate humanity that exists prior to ideology and norms that dictate behaviour. Instead, I read Jordan as actively politicising the human body as with the potential to enact a radical love. Whether or not she believes in an essential humanity prior to the social, she ontologically considers the human to exist as complex and entangled—something that dominant capitalist and patriarchal structures attempt to dismiss. Ultimately, Jordan considers honesty with one’s capacity to love in radical ways as the means through which new potentials are built. This honesty is critical to guiding a politics of sexuality:

if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force? (1994: 190).

Finally, to achieve the aims of a new politics of sexuality, Jordan understands that we must embrace the complexities of gender and sexuality. To do so is to begin actively working against efforts to control bodies. Bisexuality, as an identity and as a new political movement, becomes an important node through which to centre this radical complexity:

just as these men and women falter and anguish and choose and then falter again and then anguish and then choose yet again how they will honor the irreducible complexity of their God-given human being—even so, there are many men and women, especially young men and women, who seek to embrace the complexity of their total, always changing social and political circumstance. (1994: 192).

Here, Jordan beautifully explores the negotiations on an affective level with embracing complexity in everyday life and love. She demonstrates the need for a centring of potentiality, and of forming a movement that is based in difference—not a liberal understanding of difference as sameness or tolerance, but a difference that is productive, agonistic, intersectional[4]. In the outset of a new political movement, Jordan sees this potential in bisexuality:

I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well. (1994: 192).

Interestingly, the new politics forming around a sexual identity carries a tension with her own anti-identitarian politics that is visible elsewhere in her work (see “Letter to the Local Police”). She gives space to her understanding of an identitarian politics that is at odds with intersectionality:

even as I despair of identity politics—because identity is given and principles of justice/equality/freedom cut across given gender and given racial definitions of being, and because I will call you my brother, I will call you my sister, on the basis of what you do for justice, what you do for equality, what you do for freedom and not on the basis of who you are, even so I look with admiration and respect upon the new, bisexual politics of sexuality. (1994: 193).

Actively working for freedom, justice, and equality precede any notion of struggle over specific identities for Jordan, but this is specifically why she sees the early bisexual political movement as uniquely radical:

Bisexuality invalidates either/or formulation, either/or analysis. Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want and to love a woman as I am likely to want and to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies? If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable. To my mind, that is the keenly positive, politicizing significance of bisexual affirmation: To insist upon complexity, to insist upon the validity of all of the components of social/sexual complexity, to insist upon the equal validity of all of the components of social/sexual complexity. (1994: 193).

Freedom, in Jordan’s understanding, is therefore made through the embrace of the complexities of honest bodies and in the complexities of power dynamics between bodies. This embrace of complexity is the resistance to deterministic and dominating structures of imperialism and State-sanctioned knowledge taxonomies. She ends the essay with a look to the 21^st century:

This [bisexual politics] seems to me a unifying, 1990s mandate for revolutionary Americans planning to make it into the twenty-first century on the basis of the heart, on the basis of an honest human body, consecrated to every struggle for justice, every struggle for equality, every struggle for freedom. (1994: 193).

We can see, then, that Jordan’s New Politics of Sexuality is fundamentally based in centring intersectional politics, living in honesty with one’s body as a necessity of survival, and embracing the complexity of bodies and relations between racialised, gendered, and classed bodies. To briefly return to Reeves’ quote ‘Bisexuality is Freedom’, it is clear that Jordan does not necessarily consider the bisexual label, or a politics based around the bisexual identity, as the achievement of freedom. Rather, bisexuality is merely a means through which to achieve freedom. This important distinction means that we do not risk depoliticising Jordan’s work—while she does say “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want and to love a woman as I am likely to want and to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?”, her aim here is not to advocate necessarily for the bisexual identity, but first and foremost for complexity and potentiality, for honesty with human hearts and bodies. It is this complexity that attracts her to the bisexual movement, not the identity itself. By surmising Jordan’s position to one that argues ‘bisexuality is freedom’, then, depoliticises this important aspect of her New Politics of Sexuality.

A new bisexual politics: resonances in Jordan and Deleuze & Guattari:

There is a lot to be learnt from Jordan’s assessment of the current conditions within which a bisexual politics organises. Whilst not entirely compatible (as I will explore), Jordan’s essay carries significant and important resonances with a Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy that can similarly inform a bisexual politics. I want to now read with both thinkers to explore the productive threads that can be drawn from considering the two in conversation.

One element Jordan emphasises in the politics of honesty and survival is being loudly visible in our activism. This has been an integral component to enacting policy changes and pursuing a queer politics of parodying the heterosexual matrix. However, Deleuze & Guattari are more interested in the molecular interactions between bodies. Affect flows between bodies but is not overt or visible or even recognisable until after it has affected someone—changed their state in one way or another. Because of this, while they recognise the importance of a politics of visibility, they are much more concerned with the invisible forces that allow us to radically reconceptualise the abilities and capacities of our bodies. These capacities necessarily pre-exist language. Jordan argues that we must “alter our environment so that we can live and so that we can hold each other’s hands and so that we can kiss each other on the streets” (1994: 192), but perhaps a Deleuzo-Guattarian politics would look for the affirming moments when this occurs, not thanks to a Statist legalisation of queer bodies, but because of the minoritarian positionalities and desires that rupture strategies of control. Such an approach reinstates a power within bodies to act and move and connect and desire. This affective, molecular politics expands the direction of political movements beyond visibility within wider Statist structures, but also towards a politics that fosters and sustains connections between living beings, ideas, and object outside legislative structures. These might well deploy visibility tactics to achieve this, but it will always exist through invisible affective flows.

Deleuze & Guattari’s ontology of becoming is also reflected in Jordan’s affirmative politics. Jordan is right to consider complexity and potentiality as necessary to a new sexual politics, and she is also right to treat identity-based movements with scepticism too. In my reading of Jordan’s essay, the bisexual identity is merely a strategy, a means to the ends of sexual/all forms of liberation, and it is certainly not the only means to these ends. What resonates between Jordan and Deleuze & Guattari is experimentation. Jordan writes, “bisexuality means I am free” (1994: 193). While this could be read as a keen advocation of the bisexual identity, I think her position resonates closely with a Deleuzo-Guattarian politics of becoming. Deleuze & Guattari understand bodies as always entangled within structures and categorising forces—bisexuality is merely one of these strategies of control[5]. It is therefore not possible to be ‘free’ under or through an identity category, since the expectations that an identity carries limits a body’s ability to be open to new interactions, connections, or to become. Identity categories would be understood by Deleuze & Guattari as a stratum, imposed and perpetuated across wider institutions (or molarities) that organise bodies, behaviours, and experiences. Instead, they centre a molecular politics of becoming—the always processual changing of bodies in their capacities to be affected by other bodies or objects or ideas. Becoming emerges through new connections, new experiences, and new interactions both positive and negative. In this case, then, freedom for Deleuze & Guattari is becoming—there are forces that attempt to close down becoming through categorising, anticipating, or defining, but a molecular, affective politics exists beyond an ability to easily fit language to it. Deleuze & Guattari would therefore understand Jordan’s statement “bisexuality means I am free” not through her ability to adopt an identity, but in the ability to test and engage with new connections that foster her becoming. This speaks closely to the aims of Jordan’s New Politics of Sexuality—one that lives honestly with a body and heart that has the potential to desire in many ways. Desire for Deleuze & Guattari is not something necessarily knowable, or something you can come to terms with within oneself, nor is it formed in the lack of something you don’t have. Rather, desire is productive in that it compels bodies into new interactions, new connections, new experiences (that can be positive or negative). With this then, adopting the bisexual label is, like my reading of Jordan’s political project, the means through which to experiment with the potentials for multiple forms of non-normative desires. It is the means through which to begin experimenting with a molecular politics, where new worlds are made actualisable—prefigured within the present. In practicing a molecular politics, Deleuze & Guattari advise:

Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO […] We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988 [2021]: 187).

Returning to her quote on the negotiations with complexity, Jordan writes

just as these men and women falter and anguish and choose and then falter again and then anguish and then choose yet again how they will honor the irreducible complexity of their God-given human being—even so, there are many men and women, especially young men and women, who seek to embrace the complexity of their total, always changing social and political circumstance. (1994: 192).

Jordan considers it important to centre the complexities of bodies, their desires, and the differing power dynamics that are experienced by racialised, classed, disabled bodies. She holds the human being as essential to the materiality of her New Politics of Sexuality, likely channelling Sylvia Wynter’s reformulation of the human. To engage in an intersectional sexual politics towards freedom is to truly embody, beyond forms of (heteronormative) control, the many complexities of the human body. Deleuze & Guattari would agree with this in their consideration of the subject as already multiplicitous, complex, and forever in flux. However, they would resist an understanding that we might be able to embrace our complexities as a total—since bodies are always multiplicitous and becoming, nothing is singular or total or independent, and whilst holding on to complexity is necessary, they would caution against enveloping complexity into identity as a new form of policing and categorising bodies[6]. Since the subject is already multiplicitous, and since the subject is always already entwined with experiences and affects and memories and bodies and ideologies, the human body is no longer a stable entity through which to be honest to. Rather than reaching within to find any true sexual essence, then, Deleuze & Guattari are oriented to connections as true and necessary to a politics of desire. A resonance between the two, however, emerges in the start of Jordan’s quote, where she speaks to the affective possibilities of a bisexual politics that is radically open, non-exhaustive, and that doesn’t centre the sexuality at all but rather makes possible the thousands of possible desires at play in her human body through the process of faltering and choosing and anguishing and so on. This is becoming, and this molecular negotiation is necessary to a bisexual politics that actively offers experimentations beyond categories. This is a radically different perspective to ‘Bisexuality is Freedom’, where the adoption of the bisexual label is the liberation. Jordan bases this necessarily in a radical politics of movement and organisation.

Bringing these key learnings together then, both Jordan and Deleuze & Guattari see bisexuality not as an identity that should be comforting, but as a politicising and mobilising force that channels potentiality across all forms of life. While their strategies differ, with Jordan advocating for a visibility politics and Deleuze & Guattari centring a politics of affect, and their conceptualisation of the body seem in opposition, they can be read in an overlapping consideration of the importance of a molecular politics—that is, a politics based in the becoming of bodies. This provides an alternative to the efforts of a contemporary bisexual politics away from visibility, and towards the experimental potential of the bisexual label only as a means through which to instigate and sustain connections and relations that prefigure new possibilities.

Conclusion:

In thinking with June Jordan’s essay “A New Politics of Sexuality”, I have sought to challenge a particular reading of the essay as one that considers the bisexual identity as freedom. I worry that this approach depoliticises the important elements that constitute Jordan’s arguments. Instead, thinking through the three concepts that emerge in her essay—embodying an intersectional politics, operating with honesty in heart and body, and freedom being achieve beyond control—I have considered the resonances between Jordan and Deleuze & Guattari’s anti-identitarian ontology. Linking these theorists together offers an important reconceptualization of a bisexual politics not based in the identity as liberation, but in the identity as merely one of a variety of means through which to achieve an indivisible freedom. The contemporary task of (bi)sexual liberation cannot be found only in the self-identification of a sexual identity, since this does little to challenge power hierarchies unevenly enforced across society. Rather, liberation might instead be fought in the molecular, affective, honest, resistant, becoming of bodies and desires.

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[1] See Jordan’s (1994) Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union. New York: Vintage Books. Or read here: https://rachelyon1.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/a-new-politics-of-sexuality.pdf

[2] For this writing I draw particularly from Deleuze & Guattari’s (1988 [2021]) A Thousand Plateaus, which you can access here: https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf. Entering the text without previous reading is really difficult. I have found reading around first the most supportive and confidence-boosting in understanding their concepts, like: Nigianni & Storr’s (2009) Deleuze and Queer Theory (https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/2022-02-10_62054f90da252_chrysanthi-nigianni-deleuze-and-queer-theory-1.pdf) and Kathleen Stewart’s (2009) Ordinary Affect.

[3] In the ways that bisexuality is made confusing by a heteronormative framework, but also how confusion is felt on an affective level.

[4] For this, I find the quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon an excellent summary: “If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition” (cited in Butler’s (2024) Who’s Afraid of Gender: 245).

[5] Butler has a similar understanding in In An Account of Oneself (2005), where they argue that coming out of the closet as a lesbian is not ‘liberation’, but rather is imposing a new and different set of expectations and conditions onto oneself. These might be affirming to one’s identity, but they might also be limiting and might be used to police behaviour in new and unexpected ways. In any case, it is not liberation from control or the heterosexual matrix.

[6] This has since been explored by thinkers like Duggan (2004) dealing with homonormativity, Puar (2007) with homonationalism, and tangentially Keeling (2019) explores the ways that capitalist multi-national corporations like Shell, founded on histories of colonial resource extraction, embrace ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ to maintain their existence within a capitalist future.