Reply to Bassin, Stimmel, and Elise

I am not so sure of myself that I can read over and over again the charge that I have misinterpreted, taken out of context, and stepped on the work of others without thinking long and hard about it. I began my thinking process by rereading all the works under consideration, and I found that I still read them the same way. I thought I would center this response, then, on trying to understand why that might be the case. I begin with a discussion of what it is I think I'm doing, of what project this essay is a piece. I do so to suggest that context in part informs why one reads the way she reads. Next, I look at some of the assumptions held by Bassin, Stimmel, and Elise, and I contrast them with the assumptions that structure my work. I do this because I have begun to wonder whether it may be the case that, when you read texts in an entirely different tradition from your own, your reading may feel like a misreading to others or even in some ways be a misreading. As I look at what I take to be some of the differing assumptions, I try again to explain what I think is at stake in our differences. I do want to join Stimmel, however, in urging readers of this exchange to go back to the original papers and decide for themselves what is at stake.

I think that the frame of my paper sets terms for reading it that do not adequately reflect what I was trying to do. The frame suggests that I am privileging actual bisexuality over bisexual fantasies, and that was not my intention. At least, it was not my intention to privilege actuality over fantasy, although I did mean to privilege the use of bisexuality to refer to object choice over the use of bisexuality to refer to a mix of masculinity and femininity. I privilege the former over the latter in part because I don't know what masculinity and femininity could possibly mean outside the context of gender polarities, and I find that when these terms are