No Sex Please, We’re Bi: Young Adult Literature and the Wholesome, Monosexy Bisexual in Heartstopper and Imogen, Obviously
摘要
In “No Sex Please, We’re Bi: Young Adult Literature and the Wholesome, Monosexy Bisexual in Heartstopper and Imogen, Obviously”, Bonnie Kneen argues that the literature of bisexuality which has emerged for teenagers remains one that typically silences both the sex of this sexuality, and the fact that the objects of its desire are of more than one gender—producing a bisexuality that is both desexualised and monosexualised. Kneen’s chapter reads the “defanged” bisexuality of Alice Osman’s Heartstopper against Becky Albertalli’s somewhat less wholesome, somewhat more pluralistic depiction of bisexual desire in the Stonewall Honor book Imogen, Obviously, as well as against parallel online discourses adjacent to each text that speak cogently to popular understandings of bisexuality among Young Adult readers: such as the accusations of queerbaiting that arose after Kit Connor, the actor who plays the bisexual character, Nick, on the Netflix adaptation of Heartstopper, was photographed holding hands with a woman; and the similar accusations of heterosexual appropriation and inauthenticity in response to some of Albertalli’s other queer novels. Kneen asserts that the sexless, same-gender-focused vision of bisexuality in most Young Adult fiction is one in which erasure of the possibility that Connor or Albertalli might be bisexual, rather than heterosexual, is inscribed, even enjoined on readers; she argues that a literature of bisexuality must undoubtedly recognise bisexuals with limited sexual or romantic histories—particularly if it is to speak to or represent younger readers—but concludes that a literature that overwhelmingly neglects the plurality of bisexual desire supports a cultural discourse in which different-gender desire and relationships can be read only as heterosexual.