Mitigating Epistemic Injustice: The Online Construction of a Bisexual Culture
Article No.: 48, Pages 1 - 34
Abstract
People participating in online groups often co-construct knowledge of what they believe and, sometimes, co-construct their understanding of who they are. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 13 members of the online forum r/bisexual on Reddit, we found participants collaboratively constructing an understanding of bisexuality. We found that this knowledge-building fills an epistemic gap resulting from bisexuality often being poorly understood. When individuals do not possess knowledge key to understanding their own lives, this can be seen as hermeneutical injustice—a type of epistemic injustice. We use the lens of hermeneutical injustice to shed light on participants’ experiences on r/bisexual. Our work contributes to recent research on epistemic injustice in HCI by looking at how members of r/bisexual mitigate epistemic injustice by reclaiming residuality—the space outside the gay-straight binary. We also discuss considerations for hermeneutical injustice to inform the design of online communities and HCI research practice.
1 Introduction
People use online communities to make sense of the world and, sometimes, understand themselves. This is particularly true for LGBTQ+1 people. Since the Usenet groups of the early 1980s—almost a decade before the World Wide Web—queer people have used online communities to meet one another and make sense of shared experiences [97]. In the 2000s, Gray [57] found online forums like PlanetOut and personal websites were used by queer youth to support their identity work. Haimson et al. [61] detail the importance of Tumblr in transgender peoples’ lives in the early/mid 2010s before it “fell apart” in 2018 due to policy changes. More recent research has looked at the importance of transformative fandom communities [42] and TikTok [117] in LGBTQ+ people’s identity development. We contribute to this long history of research by studying a contemporary online community for bisexual people: the subreddit r/bisexual.
The disclosure [13, 14, 21, 23, 60, 93, 103], development [42, 49, 56, 117], and performance [12] of LGBTQ+ identities in online communities has long been a topic of study among Queer HCI researchers. Online identity is also a major area of research among social computing scholars [18, 123–125]. Another prominent strand of Queer HCI research demonstrates how queer people destabilize or fall outside of classification systems embedded in the design of technologies [71, 112, 118]. This work builds on earlier science studies research on residuality or that which falls outside of classification systems [15]. This Queer HCI research often looks at the harms stemming from residuality in the context of gender, such as the experiences of transgender [71, 112] and/or non-binary people [118]. In this work, we look at how members of an online community address the residual experience of falling outside the gay-straight binary.
While research on LGBTQ+ people in HCI often includes bisexual participants (e.g., [28, 29, 42, 117]), shared experiences between bisexual people in Queer HCI remains understudied. To the best of our knowledge, the Asynchronous Remote Community (ARC) study by Walker and DeVito [127] of harms experienced by bi+ people—which they define as those attracted to more than one gender—within LGBTQ+ online social spaces is one of the only HCI publications to focus specifically on bisexuality. Walker and DeVito describe tensions between bi+ people and others in the LGBTQ+ community and highlight the need to attend to intracommunity power dynamics. Their work calls into question the notion of an “LGBTQ+ user” as a unit of analysis for research and design.
In this work, we look at the system of meaning surrounding bisexuality as it is socially constructed within a particular place: the subreddit r/bisexual. To understand the activities within r/bisexual and the role of this online community in members’ lives, we performed semi-structured interviews with 13 members and engaged in participant observation. Outside r/bisexual, we find that members struggled to understand themselves and be understood by others owing to the lack of knowledge about and negative attitudes toward bisexuality in the public sphere. However, members were able to fill this knowledge gap by constructing systems of meaning for classifying bisexuality and performing bisexuality. This is accomplished through actions ranging from, for instance, inventing new language to baking cakes, like the one in Figure 1. We find that this online community is a joyful place where members be, do, and make bisexuality, thus constructing a particular bisexual culture in response to shared experiences of marginalization.
Fig. 1.
We use the theoretical lens of hermeneutical injustice to make sense of the form of marginalization experienced by our participants. The moral philosopher Miranda Fricker [51] coined the term epistemic injustice to describe when someone is wronged as a knower and identified two types: testimonial and hermeneutical. Fricker describes hermeneutical marginalization as when others have more power to interpret one’s social experiences than the experiencer. This marginalization rises to the level of an injustice when it causes a significant aspect of one’s life to be misunderstood by either oneself or others, such as the experiences described by our participants. Based on our findings, we discuss considerations for the experience, mitigation, and online reclamation of residuality. Furthermore, we explore (1) the design of online communities for and (2) HCI research practices related to hermeneutically marginalized people.
2 Background On Bisexuality
To discuss bisexuality, we must first briefly describe how we look at sexuality in this work. In brief, scholars and everyday queer people themselves disagree over whether queer identities stem from particular internal essences (i.e., resulting from nature), are purely a social construction (i.e., solely a product of culture), or some hybrid of the two [33]. The debate about what queer identities are is beyond the scope of this study. However, we take as a starting point for our work that the language one uses to describe sexual orientations, such as “bisexuality,” do not have objective, inherent meaning [48]. The meaning associated with these words can change over time and can differ from person to person. Moreover, as noted by both the social theorist Erving Goffman [54] and queer theoreticians [22, 56, 90, 113], queer identities are something one does, expresses, or performs (in the dramaturgical sense). Some scholars, such as Judith Butler [22] and Eve Sedgwick [113], use “performativity” to simultaneously refer to identities in both theatrical (a la Goffman) and speech-act theory (a la performative utterances [7]) senses. As this latter use takes an anti-essentialist position on what queer identities are, this is beyond the scope of our work. In sum, we (1) take the position that both the language used to describe and ways one performs or expresses sexuality are socially constructed and (2) take no position on whether there are underlying experiences or essences to which this language refers.
In this article, we study bisexuality as it is socially constructed in r/bisexual. We therefore caution against conflating Bisexual People broadly with members of the particular bisexual online community we study. We also note that the language used to describe bisexuality can be contentious. Bisexuality is often understood as an umbrella term for non-monosexuals, or those who are neither exclusively straight nor gay [47]. However, some take issue with this characterization because the Latin prefix “bi” means two. It follows from this argument that the word “bisexual” implies there are only two genders which marginalizes other gender identities, such as non-binary, genderqueer, or indigenous third genders. In light of the growing awareness of genders outside a male-female binary, the word “pansexual”—with pan being the Latin prefix for “all”—has seen increased usage in recent years [9]. In this work, we do not seek to define “bisexuality” nor “pansexuality.” Instead, we take seriously the way these words are understood by members in a particular online community while acknowledging that the terms are closely related.
Bisexual identification is widespread. In a 2023 Ipsos poll of adults in 30 countries, 5% of respondents identified as bisexual or pansexual [65]. In addition, bisexual identification seems to be increasing, with 11% of those born after 1997 in the poll identifying as bi or pan [65]. In a 2021 survey, Gallup found that a majority of LGBT people in the United States say they are bisexual [67]. Despite this prevalence, bisexual people face a number of barriers. For instance, in an analysis of a 2017 survey from Stanford, Pew found that bisexuals are far less likely to be “ out” to important people in their lives than gay men and lesbians, suggesting that they may experience heightened social stigma [17]. As well, in addition to experiencing stigma from straight people, bisexuals encounter intracommunity stigmatization from gays and lesbians [131]. Walker and DeVito [127] explored this LGBTQ+ intracommunity marginalization in the context of online communities and found tensions between bisexual people and other LGBTQ+ people, which they dubbed validity conflicts, and tensions within the bisexual community, which they dubbed normative conflicts.
Bisexual people are often underrepresented in the general public sphere relative to monosexual people, which can be seen in legal discourses. In 1999, critical legal scholar Kenji Yoshino [135] coined the term bisexual erasure to describe this underrepresentation of bisexuality from American political and legal discourse. Yoshino [135] argues that this erasure is not incidental but rather the result of an “epistemic contract” between straight and gay people, who, despite having disagreements, both have “(1) an interest in stabilizing sexual orientation; (2) an interest in retaining sex as a dominant metric of differentiation; (3) an interest in defending norms of monogamy” which are threatened by bisexuality. Over a decade later, in 2015, Marcus [83] found that the word “bisexual” still rarely appears in U.S. federal LGBT rights cases. The legal erasure of bisexuality also extends beyond the United States [84]. Bisexuality is likewise rarely mentioned in European and Canadian LGBTQ+ rights cases [106]. Bisexuals are far less likely to win sexual minority asylum cases in the United States, Canada, and Australia than gays or lesbians [106].
Bisexual people are also under- or misrepresented in media. For example, when a prominent Olympic diver came out as bisexual in 2013, much of the British print media mislabeled him as gay [80]. As another example, in a content analysis of LGBT representation in 2001, Riley and Lucas [104] found no bisexual or trans representation in U.S. television. Fortunately, this representation has improved over time. In their 2021 annual survey of survey of U.S. broadcasting and streaming television series, GLAAD found that bi+ characters represent 18% of all LGBTQ characters [1]. Of these characters, 13% are bi+ women and 5% are bi+ men. However, this remains well below the representation of bisexual people in the U.S. population, who, as mentioned earlier, account for a majority of LGBT people in the United States [67].
3 Related Work
In this work, we study a bisexual culture, or a particular system of meaning situated within a specific place: the online community r/bisexual. To do so, we review prior work on categorization, identity and culture. We then characterize hermeneutic injustice as a form of cultural marginalization that we use as a theoretical lens.
3.1 Categories
In this work, we are concerned with what it means to be “bisexual” in a particular place. Broadly speaking, categories, such as the word “bisexual,” are central to how people experience and think about the world [75, 108]. Cognitive research suggests that mental representations of categories are fuzzy rather than discrete and mutually exclusive [108]. For example, there is not a strict boundary between where the color “red” ends and another begins. Moreover, individual category members can be thought of as more or less prototypical, central, or representative of the category. That is to say, for most people, a robin may be a better example of a “bird” than an emu.
While mental representations of categories may be fuzzy, the classifications embedded in sociotechnical systems are often rigid. For example, a common throughline in contemporary AI fairness research explores the invisible data labor required to cajole subjective, fuzzy data into rigid, seemingly objective categories [6, 58, 111]. The use of categories in HCI has a long history. The introduction of computers into workplaces in the 1980s and 1990s led to a proliferation of research on formal classification systems [15, 120]. In Sorting Things Out, Bowker and Star [15] explore the design of classification systems for nursing labor, race in Apartheid South Africa, and causes of death. Bowker and Star develop a vocabulary for talking about classification systems. They define that which falls outside of classification schemes as the residual category and the tension that occurs when individual experiences misalign with formal classification systems as torque [15]. While torque can be harmful, the resulting illegibility from classification breakdowns can also be beneficial, such as giving nurses flexibility to engage in care work [119] and allowing members of marginalized groups to avoid algorithmic surveillance [63].
Queer HCI research has expanded this analysis of categories in HCI through the study of LGBTQ+ identities and the use of queer theory. For example, Keyes et al. [72] found that “Women’s Health” research in HCI often discusses gender in a biologically essentialist manner. However, failing to differentiate between gender, sex, and anatomy risks marginalizing those for whom gender, sex, and anatomy are not interchangeable, such as transgender and intersex people. This work demonstrates that the category of Women’s Health is fuzzier than how it is often discussed. Another body of work calls attention to the torque queer people experience when identities do not fit within the rigid categories embedded in sociotechnical systems. For instance, Facebook’s policy that one must use their “real name” harms those whose lives do not fit designers’ notion of “authenticity,” such as transgender people and drag queens [62]. Likewise, technological infrastructures—ranging from AI gender recognition systems [112] to online forms [118]—are often designed in ways that assume gender is binary, which excludes non-binary people. Similarly, Weathington and Brubaker [130] call attention to frictions in trying to translate queer identities to fit within structured database ontologies. As HCI research leveraging queer theory often notes, queerness destabilizes taken-for-grant categories in the design of technology [79].
3.2 Online Identity
In this work, we study a particular place or cultural context within which bisexual identity development takes place. While we are not studying identity per se, our work is situated in prior research in online identity. Two prominent threads of HCI research on online identity relate to (1) individual self-presentation or identity management and (2) individual or collective identity construction or development.
3.2.1 Identity Management.
HCI research on online individual self-presentation often [114] leverages the theories of self-presentation by Goffman [54]. Goffman uses a theatrical metaphor to characterize self-presentation as “performances” that change depending on the “audience” to whom one is performing. Those who hold stigmatized identities or have had stigmatized experiences (e.g., LGBTQ+ people [13, 14, 21, 23, 60, 93, 103], victims of sexual abuse [5], or those who have experienced pregnancy loss [4] or mental illness [32, 100]) are often studied in online identity management research. Goffman describes stigmas as attributes that, if disclosed, could potentially “spoil” a “normal” identity [55]. As LGBTQ+ identities are one such stigmatized attribute, a large body of Queer HCI research has studied LGBTQ+ online identity management in a variety of contexts, such as LGBTQ+ parents [14] and those undergoing gender transitions [60]. This research emphasizes the stress or potential harm associated with these disclosures [60, 103], while also calling attention to the benefits of disclosure, such as identifying allies [14], receiving social support from one’s social network [60] or finding others with shared identities [103]. A common design implication in this work calls for greater support for visibility management or audience control [23]. As we will discuss, other Queer HCI research speaks to LGBTQ+ online experiences beyond the context of self-disclosure.
3.2.2 Identity Work.
Another major thread in online identity research relates to the construction of individual and collective identities. Prior work suggests that online communities can be useful spaces for identity work, or the mutually constitutive processes whereby one understands themselves and others [129]. For instance, Bruckman [18] argues MUDs, text-based virtual reality environments popular in the 1990s, can operate as “identity workshops.” Likewise, Turkle [123–125] and Donath [36] describe how online communities can support identity exploration and play. As another example of online identity work, Das and Semaan [31] found members of Bengali Quora collectively negotiating how to define Bengali identity (with Bengali-speaking people spanning multiple nations) in relation to national identities introduced by colonial borders established by the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. In particular, Das and Semaan [31] found that “[p]eople were questioning colonial influence on their identities, and thus, highlighting how those inter/intracategorical identity framings came to be.” Similarly, Ammari et al. [3] found fathers negotiating the challenges of living up to masculinity social expectations by constructing “DIY” dad identities online to articulate “a masculine father identity through labor that has been historically characterized as women’s labor or care work.” These dads did so both materially (by creating DIY projects) and discursively (by writing and sharing DIY and parenting blogs).
Prior work suggests that online communities are also important spaces for LGBTQ+ identity work or understanding oneself and others [42, 49, 56, 117]. For instance, Dym et al. [42] found that online fandom communities help LGBTQ+ people explore their identities by allowing people to engage in identity play, or “trying out” queer identities, through writing stories. They also note that online fandom communities serve as counter-publics [50] within which queer people discuss and circulate counter-narratives and create counter-visualities in opposition to dominant representations of queer people in the general public sphere. Additionally, Simpson and Semaan [117] discuss the role of TikTok’s algorithmically mediated For You Page in LGBTQ+ identity work. Much like Dym et al. found within fandom, Simpson and Semaan found that TikTok provides an outlet for performing one’s identity through video creation to an audience mediated by TikTok’s For You Page algorithm. However, their participants worried that this algorithm reinforces “stereotypical presentations of LGBTQ+ identity, as well as playing into harmful societal norms around body size, ability, and sexuality,” such as the association between femme gender presentations and submissive sexual roles [117]. In an ethnographic work, Gray [56] notes that rural queer youth negotiate both “local, material conditions and modern, commercial renderings of LGBTQ [social] identities” to construct queer self-identities.
In this work, we explore one place where bisexual identity is constructed; however, we do not study Bisexual Identity or Bisexual Culture writ large. Critical theorists [27], postcolonial scholars [110] and feminist anthropologists [2] have long advised against speaking about social groups in such a homogenizing manner. As Kimberlé Crenshaw notes [27]: “The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.” While this study speaks to some issues experienced by Bisexual People broadly, in this work, we look at bisexuality as it is socially constructed within a particular place: the subreddit r/bisexual. Through this smallness, we contribute to the burgeoning body of Queer HCI research around identity by placing [39] identity development within the culture of a particular social world. In the next section, we will further elaborate on this relationship between identity and culture.
3.3 Culture
Identity differs from culture. While identity relates to one’s self-understanding, culture can be thought of as the context within which this understanding takes place. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz [53] explains: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” Similarly, the cultural sociologist Ann Swidler [121] suggeststhat “culture consists of such symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life.” The goal of cultural analysis is to understand systems of meaning within which peoples’ lives are situated. Topics of particular interest to culture researchers are, for instance, the study of symbols [53], language [77], religion [41], rituals [52], kinship systems [126], magic [45], systems of exchange [85], gender [98], and taboos [38].
A major question raised by this research is the relationship between individuals and culture. Geertz [53] cautions that “culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed,” rather “it is a context” within which these things can be described. Swidler [121] instead “offers an image of culture as a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems.” In doing so, she locates the casual significance of culture “not in defining ends of action” but rather “in providing cultural components that are used to construct strategies of action.” HCI researchers have similarly raised questions about the relationship between individuals and social groups to which individuals belong, often using the lens of intersectionality [43, 78, 95, 105]. Similar concerns about HCI researchers flattening particular experiences can be seen in recent work criticizing centering harms in research related to marginalized groups [101, 122, 132].
Although identity has received far more HCI research attention than culture, Swidler’s notion of culture as a “tool kit” from which people can construct strategies of action has received recent attention [30, 109, 132]. For instance, Wong-Villacres et al. [132] advocates for considering culture as a tool kit to inform assets-based design with Latino immigrant parents in the United States. In doing so, the authors extend the notion of assets to include culture in addition to more common notions of financial or technical assets. The study of Black American Cash App users by Cunningham et al. [30] extends the work of Wong-Villacres et al. by exploring the entanglements between cultural assets and financial assets in financial technolog. In their study of online interactions in Black American churches, Sackitey et al. [109] describe how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted offline care networks. However, Black churches were able to leverage their culture to construct new strategies of action to extend beyond their traditional place-bound care networks. This body of work emphasizes the role of culture as an asset to inform design and construct strategies of action using technology. Through our study of r/bisexual, we further elaborate on these studies of culture and, as we will describe in the next subsection, consider the implications for when one’s cultural toolbox is lacking.
3.4 Hermeneutical Injustice
Thinking of culture as a tool box of language, symbols, and rituals from which to construct strategies of action, what happens if this tool box is relatively empty? In this work, we use the theoretical lens of hermeneutical injustice, a type of epistemic injustice, to characterize such a knowledge gap. Miranda Fricker [51] identifies two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical. Testimonial injustice occurs when one’s word is not trusted due to their identity, preventing one from participating in knowledge construction. Fricker demonstrates this injustice using the stereotype that women are “emotional” rather than “rational,” which undermines women’s voices. Second, hermeneutical marginalization is when others have more power to interpret one’s social experiences than the experiencer. This marginalization rises to the level of an injustice when it causes a significant aspect of one’s life to be misunderstood by either oneself or others.
Fricker uses the term sexual harassment to demonstrate hermeneutical injustice. Prior to the advent of the phrase “sexual harassment” by feminists in the 1970s, some victims of sexual harassment struggled to describe to others or even understand themselves the myriad experiences we now understand as sexual harassment. This lack of understanding constituted a hermeneutical injustice as it is important for victims of sexual harassment to understand and be able to describe their experiences to escape or call attention to them. The term sexual harassment gave both victims of sexual harassment and the general public the language to understand victims’ experiences, mitigating the hermeneutical injustice. Similarly, Fricker [51] uses the example of a woman discovering “postpartum depression” to demonstrate the “astonishing and life-changing . . . cognitive achievement” of overcoming a hermeneutical injustice:
“In my group people started talking about postpartum depression. In that one forty-five-minute period I realized that what I’d been blaming myself for, and what my husband had blamed me for, wasn’t my personal deficiency. It was a combination of physiological things and a real societal thing, isolation. That realization was one of those moments that makes you a feminist forever.” [51]
Fricker notes that hermeneutical injustices can be situated in two axes: systemic versus attributable to specific agents, and structural versus one-off. Sometimes injustices can be attributed to individual agents, such as people or organizations, but they may also be systemic, and, as a result, not attributable to specific agents. Consider Fricker’s example of sexual harassment. There is not a single person, organization, or entity preventing the phrase “sexual harassment” from existing. However, the hermeneutical injustice of homosexuality being considered a mental illness up to the 1970s can be directly attributed to the American Psychological Association [8]. Hermeneutical injustices can also be structural or incidental. A structural hermeneutical injustice occurs when this lack of understanding is “caused and maintained by a wide-ranging and persistent hermeneutical marginalization” [51]. Yet, an incidental, or one-off, injustice occurs when the injustice is not caused or maintained by broader marginalization. In our prior example, the lack of language with which to understand “sexual harassment” likely reflects broader structural inequities experienced by women. Fricker uses the example of a straight, cisgender, man struggling to articulate his experience of being stalked to the police to demonstrate one-off hermeneutical injustices.
Epistemic injustice has recently received increased attention from the HCI research community. This work typically focuses on the politics of knowledge production in research domains like health [40, 94] and misinformation [37, 91]. Some have studied epistemic injustices experienced by marginalized researchers [78] (e.g., queer [68] and disabled [134] people) or, more broadly, issues of citational justice [25, 74, 107]. In doing so, this body of research echos recent conversations on the experiences of People of Color [96] and Black women in HCI research [44, 105]. Other work emphasizes the ways academic researchers can cause epistemic injustice through participatory design engagements [99, 102, 107] and not respecting how people make sense of their experiences [88]. Another collection of this work focuses on epistemic injustice concerning data, such as the silencing of marginalized people through data schemes [89], data standardization practices [11], ML/AI design practices [128], and misinformation classification [91].
Within social computing, an undercurrent of epistemic injustice can be seen in work on online counter-knowledge. Some look at countering political narratives such as leveraging an initially pro-police hashtag on Twitter to call attention to police brutality [66]. In a similar vein, researchers have looked at how conspiracy theory online communities (e.g., chemtrail [133] and anti-vaccine [76]) contest hegemonic knowledge via sensemaking [133] and data visualizations [76]. Recent work has looked at how marginalized communities on TikTok contest algorithmically elevated stereotypical representations of their identities [69, 117] via folk theories. The medical domain is also a common area where hegemonic knowledge meets marginalized identities. This is particularly common when the way doctors understand people maligns with how these people understand themselves, as in the cases of some autistic people [59] and people living with chronic illnesses [82]. Across all of this work on online counter-knowledge, Guberman’s research on “interactions between autistics and academia” is the only one we find that directly mentions epistemic injustice. In studying Twitter discourse surrounding #ActuallyAutistic, Guberman [59] finds autistic people pushing back against dominant autism discourses and constructing counter-interpretations for how to approach autism research and autistic people. We contribute to this body of work on counter-knowledge in online communities by using the theoretical lens of hermeneutical injustice to make sense of the knowledge construction we found taking place within r/bisexual.
4 Methods
To study the subreddit r/bisexual, we leveraged participant observation and semi-structured interviews, initially beginning as part of a university course.
4.0.1 Interviews, Participant Observation, and Analysis.
This research began as a four-person group project in a graduate-level class at a university located in the United States. At the conclusion of the class, all authors and the professor discussed whether to continue to work on this research for publication. One student, the first author, elected to continue work; the other students opted not to continue work on the project but gave permission for the work to continue without them. Their contributions are gratefully acknowledged.
First, four team members, including the first author, performed online participant observations totaling more than 40 hours. We participated by, for instance, posting artwork and sharing photos of lemon bars we baked, a reference to an in-group symbol. This participation allowed us to better understand the experience of newcomers, paralleling the legitimate peripheral participation process in online communities observed by Bryant et al. [20]. Moreover, this participation may have helped us recruit participants because, through posts and comments, we demonstrated familiarity with community norms. After independently participating, we shared field notes and discussed observations.
Following our initial observations, we conducted 13 semi-structured interviews: 4 via audio chat, 7 via synchronous text chat, and 2 via asynchronous text chat. In considering our sample size, we initially decided to interview 13 participants due to the structure of the course in which this project began. We then decided not to conduct additional interviews due to the strength of our dialogues [81]. Our synchronous interviews’ mean and median lengths were 68 and 65 minutes, respectively. Our shortest interview was 30 minutes, and our longest interviews were 90 minutes. One of our asynchronous interviews took place over a day and the other over 12 days. We recruited participants whose posts and comments we saw on r/bisexual by directly messaging them and filtering those younger than 18 years. In other words, our only inclusion criteria were that participants were 18 years old and had posted or commented in the subreddit. More information about our participants can be found in Table 1. Each synchronous audio and chat interview took no more than 90 minutes, and all interviews took place in English. As this project was unfunded, we did not financially compensate participants, and our university’s institutional review board approved our study.
Table 1.
| Participant Number | Age | Identities Shared | Country | Time on r/bisexual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P0 | 18+ | Trans, Bisexual | United States | 1+ Years |
| P1 | 31 | Woman, Bisexual | United States | 5+ Years |
| P2 | 32 | Non-Binary (they/she), Bisexual | United States | <1 Year |
| P3 | 28 | Male, Bisexual | United States | 6 Months |
| P4 | 30 | Cis Woman, Bisexual | Canada | >2 Years |
| P5 | 18 | Cis Man, Bisexual | Czech Republic | 3–5 Months |
| P6 | 36 | Man, Gynephilic Bisexual | United States | 1 Month |
| P7 | 21 | Cis Female, Bisexual | Canada | 1.5 Years |
| P8 | 18 | Cis Female, Bisexual | Egypt | 2 Months |
| P9 | 28 | Female, Pansexual | United Kingdom | 3 Months |
| P10 | 38 | Female, Bisexual, Demisexual, and Polyamorous | United States | 5 Months |
| P11 | 19 | Cis, Hetero-Romantic, Bisexual | Bangladesh | 1.5 Years |
| P12 | 24 | Agender, Bisexual | United States | 6 Months |
Table 1. Participant Demographic Information
Note: We tried to represent shared identities as closely as possible to those shared with us.
However, we replaced the single character “F” from chat interviews with the word it abbreviates (“female”) and abbreviated the word “cisgender” to “cis” for consistency.
In our interviews, we sought to understand participants’ experiences engaging in r/bisexual, their attitudes toward the community’s design, and how they situated the subreddit in the broader context of their lives. For instance, we asked interviewees about positive and negative experiences in the community, the subreddit’s design, their membership history, and the relationship between this online community and participants’ identities. We also asked participants to compare and contrast r/bisexual with other LGBTQ+ online and offline communities in their lives.
After transcribing each audio interview, we performed latent semantic inductive analysis [16] on our 13 transcripts. In particular, in line with the characterization of inductive thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke [16], we initially coded our data “without trying to fit it into a preexisting coding frame” or “analytic preconceptions.” That is to say, although we were broadly interested in understanding the role of r/bisexual in our participants lives, we did not have specific research questions in mind. After familiarizing ourselves with our data, our initial coding looked at surface-level patterns, such as participants feeling validated and enjoying in-group stereotypes. Next, we met to review and discuss the relationship between the patterns we identified. During these discussions, we made sense of these subpatterns by characterizing them as relating to either classifying bisexuality or expressing bisexuality via a variety of symbols. However, we interpreted these patterns of classifying or expressing bisexuality as contextualized, explicitly and implicitly, in a belief that bisexual identity is excluded from the public sphere. This observation led us to use the theoretical lens of hermeneutical injustice to make sense of our data.
During our thematic analysis of these interviews, the first author participated in r/bisexual by informally browsing popular posts in the subreddit each day. As participants frequently mentioned enjoying the memes in r/bisexual, to understand these memes in greater detail, we regularly browsed the most up-voted memes each day as well as the most up-voted memes of all time. Online communities can also change over time. To better understand the history and design of r/bisexual, we extended our observations and analysis to include each of the 113 moderator posts since the subreddit’s inception and all links included in the subreddit’s sidebar. Through this participation, the first author’s subjectivity shifted throughout the research project. When the interviews were conducted, the first author considered himself an outsider but through participation shifted to a hybrid subjectivity: both outside researcher and insider participant in r/bisexual.
4.0.2 Memes.
We include several memes and images in this article. We direct messaged the authors of each meme we wanted to include to request permission and asked how the authors would like to be credited. The author of each meme included in this article permitted us to use their work, but we only attributed some memes to specific authors based on their citation preferences. In addition to memes, members frequently posted photos of themselves to perform their bisexual identity. We chose not to include images of these performances due to the high risk of identifiability. For instance, these photos often contain pictures of people’s bodies, rooms, or homes. As a result, in our findings section on performing bisexuality (Section 7.2), we describe our performance observations using moderate disguise, describing images while potentially changing minor details to protect the posters’ identities [19].
Additionally, there is a limitation we must note in our analysis of these meme posts. Reddit allows users to vote up or down on posts or comments they approve or disapprove of, respectively. The difference between the number of up-votes and down-votes appears next to each post and comment. Unfortunately, the number of votes on a post is not a perfect proxy for community support because one can only see the total votes rather than the number of votes in each direction. That is to say, a post with 500 up-votes and 0 down-votes will have the same total as one with 900 up and 400 down, but the former suggests greater community agreement than the latter. However, we expect that this is a greater concern when studying posts with lower vote totals than the memes we included in this work, which often had up-vote totals in the thousands. In our findings, we suggest that memes with a large number of total up-votes are indicative of widespread community support for the memes’ messages, but we do not suggest that this support is universal.
4.0.3 Ethics.
There are a number of ethical considerations when engaging in online community research. Although the conversations we observed in r/bisexual were “publicly available” at the time of our study, this does not necessarily make our use ethical [136]. Rather, attitudes toward the use of “public” data in research is highly contextual [46, 92], such as concerns regarding identifiability and attitudes toward research goals. To protect the identifiability of those who did not directly consent to participating in our study, we describe our observations with minor details changed, or what Bruckman [19] refers to as moderate disguise. As Bruckman found studying contributors to online groups, obscuring identities is not always the best practice because creators may wish to be credited for their work. This is why we asked for permission to use each image in this article and cite each image according to their creators’ citation preferences. In this work, we try to strike a balance between the risk of identifiability with the potential benefits from attribution and our research contributions.
Beyond identifiability concerns, one must also look at research ethics considerations related to the specific community in question. One of the the rules in r/bisexual states that posts about research “must be related to bisexuality or the LGBT community” and “must be approved by an ethics board or similar body.” Our study is in accordance with these guidelines. Per our approved research protocol, we made sure no one saw a request for an interview more than once. Participants were not compensated, which is standard practice for some qualitative research because it means participants were intrinsically motivated to share their thoughts rather than motivated by compensation. Like the findings of Howard and Irani [64] regarding diversity research on Wikipedia, our participants were research subjects who cared, at times deeply, about our work. In particular, participants hoped that our research would help raise awareness of bisexuality and some advocated for specific areas of future research. In doing so, our participants recognized that academic research may help ameliorate epistemic injustices experienced by bisexual people.
4.0.4 Positionality.
Both authors of this submission identify as White, cisgender, and from the United States. The first author identifies as a bisexual man and the second as a bisexual woman. Neither author participated in r/bisexual prior to this research. As a result, our understanding of bisexual culture differed, at times, from the one constructed in r/bisexual. For instance, we both encountered new language and symbols to describe the experiences of bisexual people. Although both authors identify as bisexual, as an inter-generational research team, our understandings and experiences with bisexuality differed because language and norms change over time. As a specific example, the first author was more familiar with language related to pansexuality than the second author. This difference shaped how we each interpreted mentions of pansexuality in the design of r/bisexual and in our interviews.
5 Design of R/bisexual
In this section, we describe aspects of r/bisexual’s design. We do so to provide requisite context for our findings. Reddit is a social media platform which allows users to create forums, known as subreddits, centered on specific topics of the form r/SubredditName. Within one of these subreddits, one can create a post or comment on existing posts, as well as vote up or down on posts and comments. The subreddit r/bisexual was created in 2009 and, as of September 2023, boasts more than 550k subscribers, making it one of the largest LGBTQ+ subreddits. For comparison, one of the largest lesbian subreddits, r/actuallesbians, has 480k subscribers, and one of the largest gay subreddits, r/gaybros, has 397k (also as of September 2023). As a subreddit, or online community situated within Reddit, r/bisexual inherits some affordances from Reddit. In addition to certain affordances inherited from Reddit, subreddit moderators are responsible for the visual design, affordances, rules, and rule enforcement of their subreddit. However, these design decisions are subject to technological and policy constraints imposed by Reddit as a platform. Next, we detail aspects of r/bisexual’s design that are relevant to our later analyses.
5.0.5 Pseudonymity.
Reddit allows one to create multiple pseudonymous accounts, an affordance which prior work suggests can facilitate stigmatized self-disclosures [5].
5.0.6 Description.
At the time of our writing, moderators can provide a 500-character description for their subreddit. The description of r/bisexual can be seen in Figure 2.
Fig. 2.
5.0.7 Rules.
Subreddit moderators can create community-specific rules that, on a web browser, appear below the description on a right side panel. At the time of our writing, there are eight rules, the names of which can be seen in Figure 3 as they are displayed on the side of the subreddit. In addition to these brief names, each rule is given a detailed textual explanation in the sidebar. We will now briefly walk through the rules most relevant to our analysis.
Fig. 3.
Rule 1 (i.e., “No bigotry”) bans “biphobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, etc.” The moderators then further explain they classify the “fetishization” of transgender people as transphobia and link to a detailed post explaining their decision titled “Transphobia and /r/Bisexual” from 2019.
Rule 2 (i.e., “No erasure”) bars erasing “people’s sexual orientations and/or gender identities (e.g., denying the existence of bisexuality, asexuality, pansexuality, or non-binary gender).” The word “pansexual” in this description links to a post titled “Pansexuality and /r/Bisexual” from 2020. In this post, the moderators mention that they frequently see debates over the meaning of “Bisexuality vs Pansexuality.” In response, the moderation team uses this post to enumerate principles for how they approach pansexuality and how they would like other members of the subreddit to broach the subject, which can be seen in Figure 5.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.
Rule 3 bars “‘low effort’ and selfie posts,” which “includes selfie posts, bi colors posts, stereotype posts, and other trends.” However, the moderators acknowledge that since “‘low-effort’ is a very relative term, the mods will use [their] discretion to determine what is and is not low effort.” They go on to explain: “A rule of thumb we will generally use is intentionality: how much effort went into making this post? Is it a cell-phone photo of a sunset? Less likely to be high effort. A pride decoration or a chance sighting of a blue, purple, and pink bug side-by-side? More likely to be high effort.” In doing so, moderators establish quality standards for a genre of posts we describe in greater detail in the following.
Rule 4 declares “Wednesdays and Thursdays are reserved for discussion” and “On these days, no memes or jokes may be posted, only posts that foster meaningful discussion. This is to allow [r/bisexual] to remain an enjoyable place while also allowing for serious discussion to be heard.”
Rule 5 mandates “posts must be flaired to assist in post filtering.” A post flair is a tag one can annotate their posts with to communicate a post’s topic and filter for posts with the associated flair. While flairs are often optional in other subreddits, per Rule 5, posters must assign their posts 1 of 14 flairs shown in Figure 4 at the time of our writing.
5.0.8 Sidebar.
Below the list of rules, there is a sidebar on the far right of r/bisexual that provides additional resources. In this sidebar, there is announcement that the subreddit has optional profile flairs. These flairs are in the form of various pride flags one can assign to their profile, like subreddit specific badges. For instance, during participant observation the first author used the “Bisexual [bi pride flag image]” profile flair to both self-disclose his identity and signal in-group membership. The next section of the sidebar reads, “Before you ask, read this ‘Am I bi?’ FAQ!,” which hyperlinks to a moderator post titled “Before you ask r/bisexual, ‘Am I bi?’” that was written in 2011. The top portion of this post can be seen in Figure 6.
Fig. 6.
6 Bisexuality Outside R/bisexual: Hermeneutical Injustice
In both our interviews and observations, we found that members of this subreddit believe that bisexuality outside r/bisexual is poorly understood and represented in the general public sphere. Often as a result, we found members struggling to understand themselves or be understood by others. In other words, members were describing experiences of structural and systemic hermeneutical injustice.
We found that members often believe that bisexual identity is misunderstood and underrepresented in the public sphere. For instance, when asked why P4 had such positive experiences in r/bisexual, she warmly explained: “I think we’re kind of a misunderstood bunch of bisexual folk. And, I think the support and the like camaraderie in there in that subreddit, I don’t know! Just makes my experience really positive.” P4 later summarized these common misunderstandings when complaining about posts from outsiders that assume bisexual people are a “homogeneous, stereotyped group who love threesomes and cheat on everybody and can’t make up their minds and are probably either, you know, really gay or actually straight and looking for attention.” Outside of r/bisexual, P4 bemoaned: “My parents don’t understand, not in a real sense, what being bisexual is. And a lot of people in my own personal life at work and whatnot don’t really understand.” She attributes this gap in understanding to an observation that “the term bisexual has come out in [her] lifetime.” Despite the increasing visibility mentioned by P4, when asked what he envisioned for the future of r/bisexual, P3 hoped the subreddit would grow alongside a better “awareness” of bisexuality, “especially for bisexual men.” P3 further elaborates:
“I think there’s a lot of misunderstandings about what it means to identify as bisexual that like, I didn’t even know when I was kind of starting to go down this route of my personal journey.” (P3)
P4 and P7 attribute some of the confusion surrounding bisexual identity to the lack of bisexual representation in media and general social discourse:
“Identifying as something that isn’t talked about or represented in the media can be confusing and strange until you meet other people who feel the same way.” (P7)
“Some of my favorite content [in r/bisexual] is when people ask, you know, genuine questions and learn things. Because a lot of us were in a position, especially like, in older generations that just didn’t grow up with people expressing that they were bisexual, or even recognizing that they were bisexual because it just wasn’t discussed or represented in any type of media.” (P4)
Similarly, we observed discussions about bisexual media representation in popular memes during our observations, such as the one in Figure 7. The left image represents the hypersexualization of bisexual women in media and the blank image on the right comments on the absence of bisexual men. This meme also parallels P3’s hope for more awareness of bisexual men. We also saw new media representations discussed during our observations, such as a superhero indicating they are bisexual.
Fig. 7.
In response to this underrepresentation and negative attitudes toward bisexuality, we found that members often struggled to understand themselves. For instance, P3 believed that not only does the general public misunderstand “what it means to identify as bisexual” but that he himself initially believed some misconceptions. Multiple participants mentioned not knowing much about bisexuality (P1, P2), knowing few other bisexuals P1, P2, P3), and not having an offline LGBTQ+ community (P0, P6, P8) before participating in this subreddit. For instance, when asked what drew them to r/bisexual, P2 mentioned:
“I had struggled with my bisexuality since I was 15. Back then you were either straight or gay, there wasn’t anything in between, so I was incredibly confused on my thoughts/feelings. I wanted to talk to others who perhaps experienced it the same way or had difficulty with it as I did.” (P2)
P2, who is now in their early 30s, was “confused” for a majority of their life because of their understanding of bisexual identity. In addition, although P7 identified as bisexual before joining this subreddit, she mentioned not knowing “bisexual was an option” when she was younger:
“I identify as Bisexual (but also broadly as Queer), but when I first learned this about myself (2016) I genuinely didn’t know bisexual was an option. I assumed I had to be gay or straight, and while I wasn’t feeling direct physical attraction to any male-presenting people at the time, I remember knowing deep down that those attractions within me weren’t completely gone.” (P7)
In light of these experiences of bisexuality outside r/bisexual, participants described the joy of finding others with shared experiences. For instance, P4 mentioned that even though she does not “have a huge offline community to discuss [bisexuality] with and to support [her],” she can take “all those experiences and all that support from r/bisexual out into the offline world.” She goes on to explain that “it makes [her] feel stronger for it knowing that [she’s] not alone in experiencing those things.” Similarly, when asked about her first experience in the subreddit, P1 could not remember specific details, but she remembered feeling “valid” as a bisexual person for the “first time.” P1 described going her “whole life” feeling “completely isolated,” “broken,” and as if “there’s no one else in the planet like [her].” Then, she “stumbled on this subreddit and people are like basically reading [her] mind like their experiences are identical to [hers].” Likewise, the popularity of the meme in Figure 8 indicates that other members of r/bisexual may share P1’s experience. Although not always to the extent of P1, more than half of our interviewees (P1, P3, P4, P5, P7, P10, P12) mentioned r/bisexual helped “validate” their identities. Participants often mentioned this validation stemmed r/bisexual helping them define or perform their bisexual identity, which we expand on next.
Fig. 8.
7 Mitigating Hermeneutical Injustice: Constructing A Bisexual Culture
As mentioned earlier, our participants characterized their experiences of bisexuality outside of r/bisexual as one of misunderstanding, underrepresentation, and isolation causing them to poorly understand themselves and be poorly understood by others. We characterized this knowledge gap surrounding bisexuality as a hermeneutical injustice. However, members were able to mitigate these hermeneutical injustices through r/bisexual, helping them feel “valid.” We find members are able to fill this knowledge gap through the culture constructed in r/bisexual, where culture consists of “symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life” [121]. Through both the discussions within and the design of r/bisexual, we find that this knowledge building corresponds to two intertwined aspects of bisexuality: (1) bisexuality as a sexual orientation category situated in a broader sexuality classification scheme and (2) bisexuality as a social identity. In other words, in this section, we describe how r/bisexual helps members both be and do bisexuality, thus helping to mitigate hermeneutical injustice.
7.1 Classifying Bisexuality
We found that r/bisexual helps members classify bisexuality or understand what it means to be bisexual. In particular, we found members constructing an anti-essentialist understanding of sexuality as well circulating counter-narratives and developing new language to assuage self-classification concerns. In doing so, members develop a particular system of meaning within this social world for understanding what it means to be bisexual.
7.1.1 Anti-Essentialist Understanding of Sexual Orientations.
Possibly as a prerequisite for understanding how to define bisexuality in particular, we found members created an anti-essentialist framework for understanding sexual orientations broadly. We can see this classification scheme embedded in the subreddit’s design. For instance, as we mentioned in Section 5, toward the top of the subreddit’s informational sidebar is a link to a 2011 post that reads, “Before you ask, read this ‘Am I bi?’ FAQ!,” the beginning of which can be seen in Figure 6. Although the post begins with a clinical, dictionary-style definition, the authors then undercut this rigidity with a more flexible interpretation: “Who cares if you’re bisexual or not? We surely don’t!” The post ends with a bold declaration: “The conclusion here is that it doesn’t matter what you are, who you are attracted to, or what you adhere to. Labels do not matter. It is up to you, and only you, to decide whether or not you want to call yourself a bisexual, a pansexual, an omnisexual—but do not let these labels define you.” The metaphor of sexual orientations as labels (P4, P10) and buckets (P1, P3) also came up in our interviews and observations. For instance, P10 mentioned that she participates in r/bisexual to support younger posters, often reminding them that “labels are just words . . . and they can take some time to try things out.” In other words, a system of meaning is constructed such that internal experiences are immutable while the words one uses to classify these experiences are “labels” one can choose for themselves.
Within this understanding of sexual orientations as labels, bisexuality is defined as a broad super category encompassing myriad experiences outside the gay/straight binary. This can be seen in the metaphors used by participants to make sense of bisexuality, such as an “umbrella” (P9) or “giant bucket” (P1). In particular, P1 explains that in this subreddit bisexuality is “not so finely defined like it is kind of a giant bucket and you can be a part of the community.” This construction of bisexuality as a super/parent category can also be seen in the community’s description (see Figure 2) that it is “for those who fall in between . . . or anyone who doesn’t quite fit the otherwise binary ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ pattern.”
While positioning bisexuality as an umbrella term may help define a broad audience, some definitional tensions may remain among those under this umbrella, such as conflict between bisexuals and pansexuals. For instance, P4 expressed exasperation over definitional debates over the similarities and differences between bisexuality versus pansexuality when asked about challenges in the subreddit. Similarly, the moderators explained that they created the pansexuality post, mentioned in Section 5, in response to the “frequency and vitriol” of “Bisexuality vs Pansexuality” debates, declaring any violation of the principle in Figure 5 “may result in a warning, a temporary ban or a permanent ban as warranted.” Through the definitional axioms in Figure 5, moderators reject the essentialist premise of any definitional debate by declaring “[n]either sexuality has a singular, universally accepted definition,” so “people use different definitions for both sexualities and this is okay.” Possibly due to this rule change a few months prior to our observations, we did not encounter hostile debates over the meaning of bisexuality versus pansexuality. Likewise, P9 (a pansexual member who joined after this rule change) initially worried about joining r/bisexual because she had “heard stories about bisexuals making fun of pansexuals.” However, P9 “found out that this wasn’t true at all in this subreddit. Maybe in [the] outside world there are people like that, but in r/bisexual it is just friendly people who accept anyone.”
Through this knowledge system, the members of r/bisexual built a social constructionist framework with which to interpret the meaning of sexual orientations and settle definitional disagreements. However, our findings suggest that this is insufficient to assuage all classification issues. In the next two sub-subsections, we elaborate on two concerns that lead members to struggle with their identities that, per P12, r/bisexual helps alleviate:
“[T]he entire atmosphere [in r/bisexual] is 100% supportive of the bi identity, regardless of cycles or past behavior or how long it took you to come around or any of that. The thought has entered my head, but I never really entertained the idea that I might not be bi - that’s because I’ve seen so much affirmation from the wonderful people there toward other people who are questioning. It’s like a big bear hug from the community lol - you’re here and you’re valid.” (P12)
7.1.2 Circulating Counter-Narratives.
We observed many discussions of the form “you’re still bi if [disqualifying experience]” in the subreddit. These conversations reveal factors that some members of r/bisexual question as potentially disqualifying, such as age, gender, and relationship status. For instance, P1, a bisexual woman married to a man, had difficulty making sense of her sexual orientation because of her relationship status. In response, we found the members of r/bisexual contradict ostensibly disqualifying experiences through sharing memes and their own experiences as a form of counter-discourse.
One prominent category of claims relates to whether one is “gay enough” to be bisexual. For instance, P2 described experiencing stigma from lesbian friends for dating a bisexual woman when they identified as a lesbian. P1 attributes this stigma from other LGBTQ+ people to a belief that “if you’re not gay enough you can’t be a part of the gay clique.” This experience is likely shared by many within r/bisexual because during our observations the meme in Figure 9 was one of the most total up-voted posts. One such “not gay enough” claim we noticed members disproving was that those in “mf relationships,” one with a man and a woman, are not bisexual. For instance, P1, a woman, mentions that she has “never felt more represented than in this community” because being “a bisexual person married to a man” made her question whether she was “faking” her bisexuality. The community supports those like P1 by demonstrating one can be bisexual and in an mf relationship, as we saw in popular memes, such as those in Figure 10.
Fig. 9.
Fig. 10.
The popular meme in Figure 11 comments on the heightened scrutiny faced by bisexual men by pushing back on external discourses which question men’s bisexuality. Moreover, P3, a bisexual man, observed, “Anytime that there is somebody who says, ‘ I’m bi, I’m a bi male’ everybody gets really excited. All the other bi men in the subreddit kind of chime in and stuff just to make sure that they know that they’re seen.” It appears that this outpouring of support and experience sharing from bisexual men both directly supports the original poster, while also indirectly supporting others who may see the comments. For instance, P12 described one of their best experiences in r/bisexual as when they saw a very highly up-voted post about misandry2 harming trans people:
Fig. 11.
“In progressive spheres, male issues are typically treated as no big deal. There’s often an attitude of ‘what the hell are you complaining for, you’re playing life on easy mode’ just because I was born with a penis. Reading some of the comments in there made me feel validated and hopeful for the future, and also like I had found my people.” (P12)
In fact, a moderator commented under this post to remind others that anti-male memes are not allowed in the subreddit, possibly due to the acute marginalization experienced by bisexual men.
Another potential disqualifier was age. For instance, P4 decided to post a photo with her face in it when she came out to provide “representation of somebody who’s older and coming out” in case “anybody else would like to see that people come out in their late 20s.” Using herself as an example, P4 contradicts the association between coming out and youth. Likewise, P3 mentioned he enjoys seeing older bisexual people in the subreddit:
“[T]here are some people that like, chime in and be like, ‘I’m 65 and I’ve been bisexual since I was a teenager.’ And, you know, it’s really cool to kind of see that that doesn’t really matter where you are in your journey or in what age you are in life.” (P3)
By including those in “straight” relationships, men, and older people in their definition of bisexuality, the members of r/bisexual push back on how bisexuality is interpreted by others, expanding who can be bisexual.
7.1.3 Developing New Language.
We found that members sometimes struggle to square their lived experiences with a widespread, essentialist social expectation that one has a static, internal sexual orientation. In particular, some experienced fluctuations in their attraction to different genders over time, leading them to question whether they were, in fact, bisexual. To make sense of these fluctuations, those in r/bisexual invented language to describe it: the “bi-cycle.”
According to P4:
“The bi-cycle can mean different things to different people, but it’s usually what’s described as liking different groups more at different points in your life. So might be more attractive to more masculine folks at a certain point of your life and then a little ways down the road experience a more intense attraction to more feminine folks. And that might change several times throughout your lifetime, so they call it the bicycle. That you’re the bi-cycle. That you’re going through this cycle of experiencing varying levels of attraction to different groups.” (P4)
Finding the language to describe one’s experiences can be life changing. For instance, when asked about P2’s first experience in r/bisexual, they recalled:
“My first memory was after I joined I read a few posts about others talking about the ‘bi-cycle’ and it was a huge ‘omg’ moment for me. It instantly solved 15 years of confusion, as weird as that may sound [sweat smile emoji].” (P2)
Not only did learning the term bi-cycle help P2 make sense of their experiences, but they also sought to elaborate its meaning through discussions with other members and organizing collective hypothesis testing, resembling a sort of bisexual citizen science project [26]:
“I actually made my own post asking others to start tracking their bi-cycles and it got a lot of traction, actually. I couldn’t really keep-up with the messages I was getting. But pretty much it was about seeing if the bi-cycle had anything to do with say hormones, diet, or conflicts/situations with current partners. I got a lot of very interesting responses! (as an aside, I would love to be a part of a study that focuses on fluidity with bisexuals and the bi-cycle because I think it causes a lot of emotional/anxiety/depressive issues with the community and our mental health is really neglected in that area).” (P2)
P2’s request for academic “bi-cycle” research further suggests the importance of this concept in making sense of their bi identity and, they believe, the identities of others. Likewise, P1, a friend of P2, remarked: “[P2] got so much support from the community and so it was just so heartwarming for me to see the community helping her out and that and her understanding that like so many other people have like a really strong bi cycle.” We can also see r/bisexual is designed to facilitate these “omg” revelations, like the one experienced by P2. For instance, one of the 14 mandatory post flairs in Figure 4 is titled “Bi-Cycle/Questioning.” The inclusion of bi-cycle and questioning in the same flair may help new members learn this word and may also indicate fluctuations in attraction are a frequent reason people question their bisexual identity. Likewise, the second section of the “Am I Bi FAQ”—titled “I’m more attracted to women one week, and men the next. Is there something wrong with me?”—addresses similar concerns.
7.1.4 Mitigating Hermeneutical Injustice.
In sum, our findings suggest that members of r/bisexual want to classify their sexual orientation. However, they do not always know how to do so due, in part, to a widespread lack of understanding of bisexuality and widespread essentialist understandings of sexual orientation that misalign with members’ experiences. Within Fricker’s theoretical lens, this knowledge gap constitutes a hermetical injustice that is systemic (i.e., not attributable to specific agents) and structural (i.e., wide-ranging rather than one-off). The particular language and system of meaning for classifying bisexuality within r/bisexual helps fill gaps in members’ cultural tool kits for understanding sexuality, which can be quite powerful. For example, P2 described learning of the “bi-cycle” metaphor within r/bisexual as a “huge omg moment” that “instantly solved 15 years of confusion” because, through this language, P2 was able to define themselves as bisexual by putting words to their experiences. Likewise, Fricker [51] tells a similar story of a woman learning about “postpartum depression” in a feminist consciousness raising session overcoming “extant routine social interpretive habits” to “arrive at exceptional interpretations of some of [her] formerly occluded experiences,” a “cognitive achievement” that is both “astonishing and life-changing.”
7.2 Performing Bisexuality
While collectively understanding how to define sexual orientations may be a necessary step in the construction of a system of meaning for understanding bisexuality, a classification system does not an identity make. As we described earlier, queer identities are also something one does or performs. As Gray notes, these performances “require tools” [56], but these tools—or “symbolicvehicles of meaning” [121]—are not always ready-to-hand, owing to, for example, a lack of media representation [56]. In addition to discussing what it means to be bisexual, we also found members discussing how to do and doing bisexuality. In particular, we found members appropriating existing tools and constructing new ones from which to perform their identities as well as using r/bisexual as a stage upon which to deploy these symbols.
7.2.1 Appropriating Existing Tools.
We found members of r/bisexual appropriating or retrofitting existing cultural tools, such as the general LGBTQ+ “coming out” ritual and the bisexual pride flag (Figure 12), to meet their particular needs. For instance, some members used r/bisexual to help them “come out” offline. P1 mentioned: “It was just really helpful to have a community of other people that I could talk to [about coming out], especially because when I wasn’t out at all and none of my friends knew I had no one to talk to about anything.” She goes on to explain that she is “very grateful for this sub” because she “really wouldn’t have come out without” it. Similarly, P8 “posted several times asking for advice on how to [come out to her friends] and so many people were quite helpful.”
While members may be be aware of “coming out” before participating in r/bisexual, we also found members refining and contesting the meaning of this ritual. Some within r/bisexual disagree over how or even if one should come out. For example, P10 was concerned when she first joined r/bisexual and “saw a group of ‘help me come out because I don’t want to but I feel like I have to’ type posts.” Rather than seeking support, P10 “mostly come[s] to support the younger people because [she has] lived with so much fear and so little support. [She is] not able to be publicly out and [has] adopted a very private lifestyle, as have [her] partners.” Similarly, P9 alluded to a disagreement about coming out to demonstrate the community’s positive tone: “we still discussed matters with a very friendly manner.” Furthermore, P3 mentioned one of his recent “good” experiences in r/bisexual was seeing a post from a woman seeking to better support her boyfriend after he came out as bisexual to her. These discourses are also facilitated through design by way of the “COMING OUT” flair (see Figure 4).
Fig. 12.
In addition to the “coming out” ritual, members retrofitted the existing bisexual pride flag symbol (see Figure 12) for performing bisexuality. Members did so by sharing photos of flags directly as well as myriad artifacts with the colors of the bisexual pride flag. These posts were usually assigned the “BI COLORS” post flair (see Figure 4). For instance, some shared photos of their bedrooms decorated with bi pride flags, which often garnered playful requests from commenters to “please iron it.” People also made artifacts using bi colors. For example, members shared photos of multiple cakes they baked whose layers were dyed to resemble the bi flag, and cakes and cupcakes iced to resemble the bi flag, such as the cake the Reddit user u/SugarBeeShelby made to celebrate pride month (see Figure 1). Others shared shared digital art, paintings, sketches, and needlework they had made. Some of these colorful performances were also embodied. For instance, popular posts included photos of tattoos with bi colors, such as a heart with a bi flag in the center. Some painted their nails such that each finger represented a color of the bi flag from left to right. Others dyed their hair horizontally or vertically to resemble the bi flag. Some also shared photos of rings, earrings, wrist-ware, foot-ware, and pins they wore.
We also encountered an instance in our interviews (P3, P4) and observations where bi flag performances were impeded: the lack of a bisexual pride flag emoji. For instance, when discussing the design of r/bisexual, P4 balked at the rainbow flag emoji, a symbol used to represent the broader LGBTQ+ community, being used in the “[rainbow flag emoji] PRIDE [rainbow flag emoji]” post flair (see Figure 4). Due to the absence of a bi flag emoji, P4 suggested that they use an alternative emoji representation, such as “bi colors” or “the man holding hands with the man, the woman holding hands at the woman and then the man holding hands with a woman.” During our observations, we also encountered posts proposing alternative emoji sequences of colored hearts intended to represent the colors of the bisexual and pansexual flags. P3 also mentioned that, coming from a tweet containing a “screenshot of a text thread,” bisexuals playfully appropriated the pirate flag emoji because “there’s a gay flag on the emoji keyboard, but there’s no bi flag,” leading to the creation of a bisexual meme subreddit called r/birates. In doing so, members made due with the emoji resources on hand to fill this gap.
7.2.2 Constructing New Tools.
In addition to appropriating existing tools, members constructed new ones. For instance, we encountered a symbol for bisexuality that members believe originated in r/bisexual: lemon bars. We first encountered lemon bars through the yellow “LEMON BARS” post flair (see Figure 4) during our initial observations, which typically accompanied photos of homemade lemon bars, pastry performances of bisexuality paralleling the aforementioned “BI COLORS” baked goods. We also observed that moderators configured an AutoModerator bot to comment below posts containing the words “lemon bar” with an explanation, “For the uninitiated, here’s a primer on lemon bars,” which links to a detailed post explaining the symbol’s origin. Lemon bars were also brought up independently by two of our interview participants (P1, P4). When asked about her feelings toward the subreddit’s design, P1 exclaimed:
“I love the tags! I love that lemon bars is a tag! Oh, I should add that like the community is just fun. And, like, the thread you know we have like our inside jokes about lemon bars and sitting weird in chairs and it’s just like having those like inside jokes, just feels fucking great. I love that like you can literally just have a tag about lemon bars.” (P1)
Not only does P1 enjoy the lemon bar post flair, she also “made them once for [her] friends because of this site, and [she] was like these are so good.” In other words, r/bisexual helped P1 perform bisexuality with her friends via the lemon bars symbol. Like P1’s mention of “sitting in chairs weird” as an “inside joke” along with lemon bars, P4 mentioned lemon bars when explaining in-group “stereotypes” in r/bisexual, which we will expand on in the following.
There were also a number of other symbols members referred to as in-group “stereotypes” (P4) or “inside jokes” (P1). When asked to describe r/bisexual, P4 referred to it as a place for memes, jokes, stories, sharing experiences, social support, and those who do not have an in-person community. She went on to laughingly explain that “it’s also a place where you will learn about bisexual stereotypes and fall into a lot of them and some not at all.” Then, she joyfully summarized a litany of in-group stereotypes, such as wearing cuffed jeans, flannel, hoodies, and leather jackets, liking “feminine men and masculine women,” and slouching or folding one’s legs rather than being able to “sit properly” in chairs. P4 contrasted these positive in-group stereotypes with negative out-group stereotypes about bisexual people, such as being “confused,” “looking for attention,” “greedy,” likely to cheat on one’s partner, and interested in threesomes. Likewise, P1 mentioned it “feels fucking great” to have “inside jokes” like “sitting weird in chairs.”
The culture of r/bisexual is not static. Rather, symbols phase in and out of cultural centrality. While P4 (the most senior member we spoke with) mentioned that there are fewer posts about lemon bars “now than there were when [she] first joined a couple years ago,” during our observations we found members frequently commenting on the emergence of frogs as a bi symbol. Some compared frogs to lemon bars and, analogous to lemon bars, asked the moderators to create a frog flair. Others shared photos of frogs waving a bi pride flag or of a bi pride flag with a frog in the center. When discussing the origins of the symbol, some mentioned “bi” in the word “amphibian” and others attributed it to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ claims that the U.S. government is putting chemicals in water that is making frogs gay [86]. Eventually, in mid-2022, the moderators of r/bisexual themselves posted about frogs for the first time, cross-posting from the subreddit r/frogs a matrix of cartoon frogs with the title “[Official Mod News] ribbit ribbit.”
7.2.3 Doing Bisexuality on r/Bisexual.
To perform, one must have an audience with the requisite shared system of meaning to understand these performances. P5 explained that he uses memes and photos, such as one he shared of his bi flag pin, as “a way to share with the community stuff that [he] can’t share with people [he is] not out to yet.” As alluded to by P5, some shared bisexual performances that those outside the bisexual community may not recognize or the author felt they could not share in person. For example, someone posted a bi flag pin, which the author mentioned they decided to post in the subreddit because they did not think they could wear [one] in public. We also observed members say that they are not “out” but painting their nails with the colors of the bisexual pride flag or making baked goods to signal bisexuality under the nose of unwitting observers. Invisibility can be beneficial. To those outside r/bisexual, the lemon bars one made are just lemon bars, but r/bisexual provides an audience who will understand. Not only can members construct or learn tools for doing bisexuality in r/bisexual, but this online community also provides a stage to deploy these symbols.
7.2.4 Mitigating Hermeneutical Injustice.
In sum, bisexuality is not just something one is but also something one does; however, this doing can be impeded by the lack of cultural tools on-hand, constituting a hermeneutical injustice. To mitigate this injustice, we found members retrofitting existing cultural tools (e.g., the coming out ritual and the bi pride flag) as well as constructing new ones (e.g., lemon bars and frogs). Recall that a hermeneutical injustice stems from a knowledge gap preventing one from (1) understanding themselves or (2) being understood by others. Therefore, to overcome the hermeneutical injustice of not knowing how to perform bisexual identity, one needs both (1) tools with which to perform or “give” impressions as well as (2) an audience capable of understanding these impressions “given off” [54]. This online community partially fulfills both of these requirements by (1) providing a bisexual cultural tool box of symbols, rituals, and stereotypes and (2) supporting the deployment of these tools through photo sharing and memes for an audience that can understand these performances.
8 Discussion
“If we look at the history of the women’s movement, we see that the method of consciousness raising through ‘speak-outs’ and the sharing of scantly understood, barely articulated experiences was a direct response to the fact that so much of women’s experience was obscure, even unspeakable, for the isolated individual, whereas the process of sharing these half-formed understandings awakened hitherto dormant resources for social meaning that brought clarity, cognitive confidence, and increased communicative facility.”–Miranda Fricker in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing [51]
In this section, we first discuss how members of r/bisexual mitigate hermeneutical injustice. We characterize this process as reclaiming residuality, one that is joyful but also has limitations outside of this particular social world. We then discuss considerations for hermeneutical injustice to inform the design of online communities and HCI research.
8.1 Mitigating Hermeneutical Injustice by Reclaiming Residuality
Fricker develops her theory of hermeneutical injustice based on the history of the women’s movement, which parallels our findings regarding r/bisexual. In Fricker’s example, the lack of language to describe “sexual assault” or “postpartum depression” prevented women from understanding shared experiences. This knowledge gap constituted a hermeneutical injustice because it prevented women from being able to understand their own experiences and be understood by others. However, women were able to mitigate this hermeneutical injustice by sharing “half-formed understandings” which “awakened hitherto dormant resources for social meaning that brought clarity, cognitive confidence, and increased communicative facility” [51]. As we found in Section 6, members of r/bisexual similarly struggled with “half-formed understandings” of bisexuality owing to widespread negative attitudes toward and underrepresentation of bisexuality in the public sphere. As a result, members had a lack of cultural tools from which to classify and perform or be and do bisexuality. Much like the feminist consciousness raising sessions described by Fricker, members of this online community were able to collectively fill this knowledge gap through the discussions within and design of r/bisexual.
In both r/bisexual and these feminist consciousness raising sessions, we see people coming together to address an experience of cultural residuality. Both are confronting the torque resulting from their individual and collective experiences falling outside systems of meaning readily available in the public sphere. For example, in Section 6, we found members struggled to be or do bisexuality due, in part, to poor media representation (P4, P7) and the expectation that one should be either gay or straight (P2, P7). However, as we found in Section 7.1, members actively reclaim residuality by constructing an anti-essentialist, anti-categorical sexual categorization system to, per the community’s description, support “those who fall in between.” Through constructing systems of meaning, language, and symbols through which to be and do bisexuality (i.e., by filling their cultural tool kit), members are able to survive and thrive in the negative space of sexuality. Future research should also explore how people collectively remedy issues of classification, such as the work of Das and Semaan [31] on collaborative identity decolonization.
Moreover, joy and play is central to how members of r/bisexual mitigate hermeneutical injustice by reclaiming residuality. Our findings largely emphasized the underlying meaning communicated via memes, language, and symbols. However, as P1 explains: “Oh, I should add that like the community is just fun.” The medium through which people are constructing understandings of how to classify and perform bisexuality (e.g., memes and lemon bars) are “fun.” This online community does not merely reduce harm, but it also increases joy. In this vein, HCI researchers are increasingly advocated for extending research with marginalized groups beyond “damage” [122] or “deficit” [101] centered narratives, such as our emphasis on hermeneutical injustice. Toward this, we wish to emphasize that joy itself can be an act of resistance [34] and seems crucial to the success of r/bisexual at mitigating hermeneutical injustice. We encourage future research to destabilize the binary between harm and benefit, trauma and joy, and deficit and asset, by considering the potential for joy both as a means to address harm and an end unto itself.
Our findings also problematize the relationship between residuality and harm. As we mentioned in Section 7.2, the illegibility of symbols for performing bisexuality outside r/bisexual, such as bi color nails or lemon bars, can allow members to perform their identities without, for instance, alerting homophobic parents. There can be benefits to residuality. This suggests that greater bisexual inclusion in technology design may not always be preferable. Likewise, Anna Lauren Hoffmann [63] suggests that greater inclusion of marginalized people in AI datasets may do more harm than good due to the “violent potentials of data science and technology.” In line with the advocacy of Anne Light [79] for queering interaction design, we similarly encourage designers to support those seeking to elude classification and consider the potential benefits of residuality.
We must also note the limitations of r/bisexual’s mitigation efforts. For instance, while most hermeneutic marginalization we described is systemic (i.e., not attributable to specific agents), we encountered an instance in Section 7.2 where this gap is attributable to specific agents: the bi flag emoji. In particular, the absence of a dedicated bi pride flag emoji is attributable to the Unicode Consortium, a tech industry supported non-profit standardization organization [10]. While members can construct alternative emoji representations of bisexuality, these may not be widely adopted or understood outside r/bisexual. More broadly, the relationship between the culture constructed within a particular social world in response to hermeneutical injustice and the diffusion of these ideas warrants further study. While words like “sexual assault” and “postpartum depression” are now widespread, the system of meaning for classifying and performing bisexuality constructed within r/bisexual may not extend beyond this particular social world. Future work should explore the relationship between systems of meaning constructed within a particular online communities, such as r/bisexual, and how these ideas circulate outside the specific counter-publics in which they were formed. That is to say, do self-identified bisexual people on other social media sites share similar understandings of how to be or do bisexuality? This gestures toward a problem we discuss further in the following: the relationship between how people understand themselves and are understood by others (e.g., HCI researchers).
Cultural residuality is also not the only form of hermeneutical injustice that some may experience, meaning that “reclaiming residuality” is only one way of mitigating epistemic injustice. While some, such as members of r/bisexual, may struggle with a knowledge gap, others may struggle with a large body of existing “authoritative” knowledge with which group members disagree, such as autistic people combating medical interpretations [59]. Future work should explore similarities and differences across how groups use CSCW systems to mitigate epistemic injustices, which may involve articulating a typology of these injustices. Relatedly, as we will discuss in the following, researchers should explore how online communities can be designed to mitigate epistemic injustices.
8.2 Hermeneutical Injustice and the Design of Online Communities
Some members of online communities may have a greater shared understanding of themselves and the world upon joining than others. In fact, those who experience hermeneutical injustice may be joining an online community because they are struggling to understand themselves. In the case of r/bisexual, we found that this community is designed in a way that helps members develop a shared understanding of the community’s culture, helping fill a knowledge gap surrounding bisexuality. For example, the “Bi-Cycle/Questioning” post flairs can help new members, like P2, learn the “bi-cycle” metaphor to assuage classification concerns owing to fluctuating attraction. The “AM I Bi FAQ” and community description provides a flexible, anti-essentialist framework to help members classify their sexuality. This online community is also designed to help members learn new symbols for performing bisexuality, such as the the lemon bar post flairs and explanation bot. While prior work has emphasized the importance of helping onboard newcomers to online communities [73], we anticipate that this is particularly important when designing online communities for hermeneutically marginalized people.
Although this may be the case, our findings also demonstrate the benefits of embracing some different interpretations when designing online communities for hermeneutically marginalized people. In absence of a shared understanding before joining an online community, new members may arrive with different beliefs. These different beliefs may lead to epistemological conflicts, such as disagreements over the distinction between bisexuality and pansexuality (Section 7.1). As we mentioned in Section 7.1, the moderators of r/bisexual addressed this problem by designing content moderation policies that establish a minimal standard for these discussions. This standard normalizes individual disagreements and enforces respecting different self-definitions. Rather than settling the debate through taking a specific position, the moderators settled it through deciding to embrace heterogeneity. In a similar vein, we caution against enforcing overly prescriptive systems of meaning. One should seek to establish a minimal floor of shared beliefs required for participation in the community. That is to say, members of r/bisexual do not need to agree on a specific definition of bisexuality to share memes.
Furthermore, the ability to establish a shared system of meaning within online communities is mediated by platform affordances. As a result, different platforms may be more conducive to counter-knowledge construction than others. The subreddit r/bisexual establishes a shared culture through Reddit forums’ malleable interface, formal boundaries, and local moderation practices. However, social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok have the same interface for all users, algorithmically mediated fuzzy boundaries, and global moderation practices. If establishing a shared system of meaning is an important activity for mitigating hermeneutical injustice, then algorithmically mediated fuzzy boundaries and global moderation practices may impede this knowledge work. However, hermeneutically marginalized people still build epistemic resilience in these more agent-based [115] social media sites (e.g., TikTok and Instagram). Promising research in this direction looks at hashtag activism in response to epistemic injustice (e.g., the research on autistic epistemic resistance by Guberman [59]) and folk theories/strategies for shaping algorithmic generated social media feeds [35, 70, 87, 116, 117]. Future research should explore the entanglements between platform affordances and counter-knowledge construction in response to epistemic injustice. In particular, this work should explore the construction of knowledge within different online communities/social media sites as well as across the social media ecosystem of hermeneutically marginalized groups.
8.3 Hermeneutical Injustice and HCI Research
A key consideration when thinking about hermeneutical injustice in HCI is the relationship between how people understand themselves and are understood by HCI researchers [25, 40, 74, 88, 94, 107]. In our case, the fuzzy, multiple, contested understandings of bisexuality within r/bisexual raise questions about “Bisexual People writ large” as a unit of analysis for research and design. While some pansexual people, such as P9, believe that pansexuality is a subset of bisexuality, others who identify as pansexual would disagree. Likewise, while members of r/bisexual often circulate anti-essentialist understandings of sexual orientation, other self-identified bisexual people may hold essentialist beliefs. In light of this heterogeneity, what does it mean for an HCI researcher to provide design implications for Bisexual People broadly?
To better represent how people understand themselves (i.e., to avoid exacerbating hermeneutical injustice), we encourage HCI researchers to distinguish between culture versus identity as units of analysis for research and design. Doing so allows HCI researchers to distinguish between, for instance, the system of meaning within a particular bisexual online community and the experiences of Bisexual People writ large. While all understandings of social groups are fuzzy and multiplicities, hermeneutical injustice calls attention to the fact that understandings of some groups may be fuzzier than others. As we mentioned in Section 6, participants had a better understanding of what it meant to be gay or straight than bisexual. For those who experience hermeneutical injustice, we expect to find greater heterogeneity among those with the same self-identity. However, for those with more settled identities, culture and identity may be more isomorphic. Systems of meaning may be more heterogeneous among those experiencing hermeneutical injustice because the same knowledge gap may be filled differently in different social worlds, of which r/bisexual is but one example. As an alternative to address within-identity-group differences and cross-identity-group similarities, we encourage HCI researchers to consider orienting knowledge claims and design implications around those with shared experiences and shared beliefs rather than shared identity.
An open question remains around who HCI researchers should consider epistemologically marginalized. Whose beliefs should be believed? As a starting point, we encourage HCI researchers to differentiate between epistemic injustice from the perspective of the experiencer (i.e., descriptive epistemic injustice) from the values of HCI researchers themselves (i.e., normative epistemic injustice). To demonstrate the need for this distinction, let us consider conspiracy theories. Much like we found in r/bisexual, prior work suggests that chemtrail conspiracy theory believers [133] and COVID-19 anti-maskers [76] construct complex systems of meaning in online communities in opposition to perceived epistemic marginalization. A descriptive application of epistemic injustice may help HCI researchers build theory by looking at similarities across seemingly different groups, such as anti-maskers and bisexuals. For instance, the same features of online communities that can support bisexual knowledge construction may also support far-right knowledge building. Meanwhile, normative applications of epistemic injustice will allow HCI researchers to advocate for and support particular social groups that HCI researchers more often think of as marginalized, such as LGBTQ+ people. Both descriptive and normative approaches are necessary to reckon with the contours of contested knowledge in HCI.
8.4 Limitations
Our findings provide only one particular view of r/bisexual’s culture. First, we reached out to people who participated in the subreddit to recruit participants, so this inclusion criteria excluded those who observed but did not post or comment, or “lurkers,” from participating in interviews. While we may be able to understand the beliefs of these lurkers, in part, through the posts and comments which receive the most up-votes, we are not able to understand r/bisexual’s role in the lives of lurkers. Future work could use methods which pose less risk of offline self-disclosure, such as surveys, to understand the experiences of lurkers. Second, from our observations and interviews, there appear to be many members of r/bisexual who are under the age of 18 years. However, we chose to restrict our study to participants who are at least 18 years old, because requesting parental consent could potentially compromise participants’ privacy. We do not know what percentage of subreddit members are minors. Future work could use posts with self-disclosed ages under 18 or privacy-conscious surveys to better understand the experiences of young people in r/bisexual. Our interpretations are also shaped by our positionalities, which we described earlier.
While we briefly explored the intersections of bisexuality with age and gender, future work should explore hermeneutical injustice through a more intersectional lens [27]. For instance, we failed to collect racial or ethnic demographic information from our participants to avoid projecting U.S. classification schemes on participants from around the world because, as Chen et al. [24] noted in 2022, “considerations and best practices for collecting and analyzing race and ethnicity data in a global context” for HCI research remains an open question. However, future work should attend to the specific intersection of race and bisexuality. Moreover, as most of our participants were from largely anglophone countries in the Global North, our findings may not apply to bisexual people in other cultural contexts. Furthermore, as we have discussed, the particular system of meaning for understanding bisexuality within r/bisexual likely does not apply to all self-identified bisexual. Future work should explore the relationship between the culture constructed in r/bisexual and other online and offline bisexual social worlds.
9 Conclusion
We found members of r/bisexual constructing a bisexual culture to overcome a shared knowledge gap, which we make sense of using the theoretical lens of hermeneutical injustice. Specifically, members of this online constructed a system of meaning through which to understand how to be and do bisexuality, thus mitigating hermeneutical injustice by joyfully reclaiming the negative space of sexuality between the gay-straight binary. We also found that r/bisexual is designed to leverage the affordances of Reddit to help members establish shared meaning. We, therefore, encourage future research on the relationship between platform affordances and counter-knowledge construction in response to epistemic injustice. As the same tools that members of r/bisexual use to develop counter-knowledge could be used to, for instance, promote conspiracy theories, future work should also explore how designers of online communities can support the former without unintentionally supporting the latter. More broadly, our findings regarding the specific system of meaning within r/bisexual—a culture that likely does not apply to all Bisexual People—highlight the need for HCI researchers to reflect on how we produce knowledge about social groups. Toward this, we encourage HCI researchers to distinguish between culture versus identity as units of analysis for research and design—particularly when studying epistemically marginalized populations. With the rise in attention to marginalized communities in HCI alongside growing information fragmentation in the public sphere, HCI researchers must consider how to approach multiple contested meanings. We suggest that the theoretical lens of hermeneutical injustice may help HCI researchers navigate these epistemological divides.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Elina Ebby, Fernanda Moreno, and DeLauryn Brown for their contributions to this work. The first author would also like to thank Blakeley H. Payne and Rose Chang as well as his advisors, Haiyi Zhu and Sarah Fox, for their support and feedback on early versions of this draft. We are also grateful for the insightful feedback offered by our reviewers.
Footnotes
1
LGBTQ+ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer/Questioning.
2
Misandry means prejudice toward men.
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Index Terms
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Published: 19 September 2024
Online AM: 16 February 2024
Accepted: 20 December 2023
Revised: 27 September 2023
Received: 16 November 2022
Published in TOCHI Volume 31, Issue 4
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