Where Do I Put It? James Joyce’s Buck Mulligan, Bisexuality, and Contemporary Legislative Practice

This article argues that Buck Mulligan’s bisexuality in James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses reveals Joyce’s less-discussed interest in the figure of the bisexual at a time when bisexuality was beginning to be theorised by various sexual scientists (sexologists) in the early twentieth-century. In this article, I examine Buck Mulligan as a bisexual character who evidences Joyce’s engagement with contemporary sexological attempts to define bisexuality in psychological terms, rather than the previous century’s investigations into bisexuality as physical hermaphroditism. I explore how Mulligan, in embodying and enacting a model of bisexual subjectivity, also elicits both homosexual and heterosexual impulses from other characters. This article addresses not only Joyce’s treatment of bisexuality, but also his views towards what bisexual scholars describe as ‘mononormativity’: the cultural assumptions that a person is sexually and romantically attracted to exclusively one gender (Monro, 2015: 12). Through this, the article reflects critically on those Buck-like victims of bi-erasure within the legal landscape of ‘compulsory monosexuality’ at the-turn-of-this-century (James, 1996: 321).


Introduction
In this essay I argue that in recognising Buck Mulligan's bisexuality in James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses, we can observe Joyce's less-discussed engagement with various sexological ' diagnoses' of bisexuality. I explore how Joyce's construction of Mulligan as a 'bisexual prototype' in the 'Telemachus' and 'Scylla and Charybdis' episodes reveals Joyce's intention to revise and resist reductive ' categories' of sexual identities with a particular focus on non-normative homosexuality that, under sexological models, ostensibly opposed the 'normative' heterosexual subject (Moddelmog, 2004: 1;Valente, 2008: 23;Marcus, 2018). I then explore in 'Oxen of the Sun' Joyce's critique of summative sexual identity categories such as the absolute heterosexual or the absolute 'invert': a label deployed by Sigmund Freud to categorise a non-heterosexual person that was mostly used to denote a homosexual subject. By extension, I use 'Oxen of the Sun' to examine Joyce's treatment of ' compulsory monosexuality': a term that many queer theorists have used to describe the assumptions of some Victorian sexologists that the modern sexual subject was comprised of either an entirely normative/heterosexual disposition or lived as an ' absolute invert' with entirely homosexual desires (Freud, 1905(Freud, (2005: 45, 55). Finally, in 'Circe' I examine Mulligan's appearance in the guise of a doctor of sexology, which enables Joyce to critique the problematic notion of bisexuality existing only as a ' desire' or a 'state' in sexology that resulted in the modern bisexual subject never fully being granted a unified subject position (Prosser and Storr, 1997: 75). Through these areas of investigation, I examine Joyce's treatment of 'bi-erasure': a term used to describe the rendering of bisexuality as an invisible or silenced sexuality within a landscape of ' compulsory monosexuality' (James, 1996: 273;Marcus, 2015: 3).

Joyce, Bisexuality and Sexology
It is constructive to contextualise both the differing definitions of bisexuality as it exists today, as a stable identity with an attendant subjectivity, and the initial use of the term bisexuality to signify physical hermaphroditism. In contrast to Helt's (2010: 133) contemporary definition of bisexuality as 'the coexistence of sexual desire and affection for both men and women', historically the term 'bisexual' has been Wells: Where Do I Put It? James Joyce's Buck Mulligan, Bisexuality, and Contemporary Legislative Practice 3 used interchangeably as both a signifier of physical and psychical hermaphroditism.
Both Erickson-Schroth and Mitchel (2012) remind us that in its earliest treatment by evolutionary psychologists, including Charles Darwin in 1859 and Russian embryologist Aleksandr Kovalesky in 1886, bisexuality was diagnosed as a physical combination of male and female sexual organs; thus bisexuality was more indicative of the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of hermaphroditism as ' a person that has both male and female reproductive organs' (LeVay, 1991in Angelides, 2001Stevenson, 2015).
As early as 1886, Kiernan acknowledged the ' original bisexuality of the ancestors of the race' as people who embody ' different types of hermaphroditism'; physical hermaphroditism such as 'males who are born with female external genitals and vice versa' and cognitive hermaphroditism such as 'femininely functioning brains that can occupy a male body' (Kiernan, 1886in Angelides, 2001. In 1905, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud attempted to define psychological, or 'psychical', bisexuality as ' amphigenic inversion', a sub-category of inversion (a subject who deviated from the heterosexual paradigm), as a 'state' of 'psychosexual hermaphrodit[ism]' whereby 'sexual-objects may equally well be of their own or the opposite sex'. In Freud's Three Essays on Human Sexuality he noted that this bisexual 'state' was distinguished by its lacking of 'the characteristic of exclusiveness' (Freud, 1905(Freud, (2005: 282). Under this formulation of bisexuality as a mode of 'psychical hermaphroditism', Freud described a 'pronounced sexual desire' that was characterised by both a desire for both 'the same sex, [and] a desire towards the opposite'. This concept evolved from Freud's initial sexological theorisations into physical hermaphroditism as the 'true [form of] bisexuality' towards 'the mental sphere' of the subject's ' expression of psychical hermaphroditism' (Freud, 1905(Freud, (2005: 285).
In this episode Mulligan embodies what Garber describes as Freud's implication of an 'infantile unisex' whereby the ' child, whose body bore biological traces of both male and female elements, was erotically attracted to both males and females' (Garber, 1995: 12, 182). Freud proposed that the subject's initial 'state' of 'infantile sexuality' existed as a 'polymorphously perverse disposition' whereby the infant, ' at about two or three', does not align their sexual impulses towards an exclusive gender or gender-specific 'genitalia'. In childhood Freud believed that 'the sexuality of neurotics has remained, or been brought back to, an infantile state'. Within this 'polymorphous' infantile sexuality, Freud described the ' erotogenic zones' of the human body where pleasure is derived such as the mouth, the anus and the genitalia.
The polymorphous and bisexual desires, aroused through the specific erotogenic zones, are thus inherently bisexual in that they do not discriminate between male and female body parts (Freud, 1905(Freud, (2005 device (Freud, 1905(Freud, (2005: 354). It is this radically split self of two co-existing libidinal currents that functions as the episode's 'ghost by absence' or the unseen 'beast with two backs' (Joyce, 1922(Joyce, (2010Ellman, 1972: 45). Virginia Woolf, following Joyce, described Shakespeare's adept artistic abilities as the product of a 'manwomanly mind' which was 'naturally creative, incandescent and undivided' (Woolf, 1929: 12 hips' (Freud, 1905(Freud, (2005: 353). Bloom both observes and possesses an anus; he can align himself as both subject and sexual object. Thus the gazing is also a site of autoeroticism and as sadomasochistic fantasy: as both penetrator and penetrated.
The sexual object is thus a site that ' combines both the characters of both sexes'.
Freud argued that 'the playing of a sexual part by the anus is by no means limited to intercourse between men' and therefore 'preference for it is in no way characteristic of inverted feeling'. Bloom selectively omits explicitly feminine signifiers of sexuality, power as reliant on a binarized system wherein 'sex is placed by power into a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden' (Foucault, 1978(Foucault, (1990: 343). 3 Stephen's sexual ambiguity has been observed by many critics, including Heffner's observation of Stephen having both masculine and 'notably feminine energies' that 'undermine any claims of virile masculinity' (Heffner, 2017: 45). Similarly, Weir notes that Stephen's theory on Shakespeare is grounded in the transformational power that 'the state of artistic androgyny' can have upon the 'male artists to conceive, gestate, and reproduce himself in the form(s) of imaginative drama' (Weir, 1994: 45). 4 Perhaps the most symptomatic example of this occurs in the 'Proteus' episode wherein the simultaneous representation of homo-and heterosexual impulses frustrate Stephen's interior reflections on both Mulligan and a girl he 'knew from Paris' called 'Esther Osvalt'. These frustrations remain unresolved as Stephen pines for the secured knowingness inherent in a monosexual identification, illustrated as he says 'As I am. As I am. All or not at all'. This is indicative of Stephen's frustrated inability to align himself with a coherent and stable sexual identity position (Joyce, 1922(Joyce, (2010 Stephen to ' acknowledge fluid desires' that complicate monosexual ' correspondences between sex acts and identity, between erotic objects and sexualities and between identification and desire' (Bailey and Gurevich, 2012: 44). In this instance, the bisexual

Heterosexual Deviancy in 'Oxen of the Sun'
In this episode, I analyse Joyce's depiction of the destructive consequences of Mulligan's repression of homosexual impulses in order to perform an extreme form of exclusive heterosexuality. In doing so, I explore Joyce's critique of ' compulsory monosexuality', as well as the ideologies that espouse the normalcy of a monosexual subject-object coupling, which is described as 'mononormativity' (Angelides, 2001;Hemmings, 2002;Alexander, 2012;Helt, 2012;Ochs, 2019). Whereby heteronormativity restricts the representational tools and apparatus afforded to homosexuality, ' compulsory monosexuality' and thus mononormativity ensures that bisexual intimacies and identities remain invisible, unseen and silent in both straight and gay communities identifies the aim to 'free the female from all care that is not purely sexual, to permit her the most perfect accomplishment of her most important function' (Gourmont, 1903, in Brown, 1985 (Joyce, 1902, in Ellman andGilbert, 1957: 132, 32, 54). Thus the growth of the foetus (symbolized by the development of the history of language) is ultimately a biological product of non-inversion, of a 'monogamous appetite' and of the upholding of fidelity and of 'heterosexual inevitability' (Garber, 1995: 171, 175, 200).
Mulligan is the extreme exponent of this hetero-reproductive ideological imperative as he subsumes the act of procreative heterosexual intercourse itself to be his 'sexual object' as well as the absolute embodiment of Otto Weininger's model of the 'male principle' that is 'sexual and nothing more' (Weininger, 1905, in Bland andDoan, 1998: 23). Joyce's critique, enacted through exaggerated parody, mirrors Freud's revisionist afterthought in 1915 that exclusive heterosexuality was ' a problem that needed elucidating' (Garber, 1999: 212).

The 'State' of Sexology and the Modern Bisexual Subject in 'Circe'
After exploring the various models of bisexuality and ' compulsory monosexuality',  (Cixous, 1975: 388). While Bloom is on trial from 'the mob', he calls upon his ' old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist to give medical testimony' on his behalf in an attempt to prove himself 'guiltless as the unsunned snow'. 'Dr' Mulligan's appearance is a product of Bloom's subconscious fear of being exposed for having the 'undercurrent' of homosexual desire. The fear of being exposed as 'bisexually abnormal' taps into Bloom's own internalised anxieties that his version of masculinity as 'subjective agency and rational control' knowingly embodies and enacts both masculine signifiers of hetero-reproductive virility and 'feminine' sexual characteristics' of homosexual 'passivity' and 'submission' at the same time (Micale, 2004: 434  'Ambidexterity' also symbolizes the subjectivity of bisexuality as it was understood by Carpenter as a 'state' that existed 'between two poles' (Carpenter and Krafft-Ebing, 1896, in Bland andDoan, 1998: 12, 34, 243 Bloom is denied what Judith Butler describes as an 'interior fixity' (Butler, 1990: 212).
Bloom's projection of Mulligan's 'testimony', as an attempt to cement a 'fantasy' of a coherent bisexual subjectivity is confused and ruptured by Mulligan's sexological reasoning, in a way similar to Miss. D who attempts to define herself in sexological terms: As regards my physical sexual feelings which were well established during these few years, I don't think I often indulged in any erotic imaginations worth estimating, but so far as I did at all, I always imagined myself as a man loving a woman. I cannot recall ever imagining the opposite, but I seldom imagine anything at all, and I suppose ultimate sex sensations know no sex (Ellis, 1915, in Bland andDoan, 1998).
D' function as a 'form of resistance' to such case studies that attempt to explain the causes of bisexuality (Downing, 2012: 195). Hence, Mulligan's diagnosis serves as a 'transformative' case study of Bloom that, ironically, in using sexological modes of analyses to get to the truth of bisexuality, ' embarrasses' and ruptures them (Freud, 1905(Freud, (2005: 34, 45). Bisexuality resisted definition in sexology mostly because it was hypothesised by sexologists as a 'state rather than a subject position' and so bisexuals were 'scattered through the various categories of inversion' as 'psychological hermaphrodites'. The duality of homo-and heterosexual impulses was a 'state' rather than a fixed model of sexual identity (Prosser and Storr, 1998: 76 (Freud, 1915, in Garber, 1995

Coda: Mulligan's 'Compulsory Monosexuality', Bi-Erasure and Contemporary Legislative Practice
In the same way that both Wilde and Mulligan's bisexuality is undermined by the scandal of absolute homosexual 'sodomy', so do many contemporary bisexuals fall victims to bi-erasure within legislative practice at the turn-of-this-century that operate through a legal lexicon of monosexuality. Like Buck's self-regulated 'invisibility' and self-reflexive 'bi-erasure' in 'Telemachus', bi-erasure is sustained in contemporary legislative practice because assumptions around sexual object choice determining sexual identity are not frequently challenged (Garber, 1995;Ault, 1996;Angelides, 2001;Hemmings, 2002;Ochs, 2012;Helt, 2012;Monro, 2015). James (1996: 354) argues that in assuming a subject's monosexuality, this has incited a cultural 'fear that so long as bisexuality is a valid possibility, the monosexual (i.e., gay or straight) identity can no longer be fairly inferred by one's partnerships and is thereby destabilized as a default identity'. Second, he offers, they are threatened by a world in which sex is no longer the primary distinguishing characteristic of attraction.
Finally, some (rather unfairly, but commonly) associate bisexuality with dangers such as HIV concerns, assumptions of non-monogamy, and the perception that bisexuals are assimilationists who can, unlike gays, avail themselves of 'heterosexual privilege' (Yoshino, 2000: 45).
Just as Mulligan uses mononormative modes of disguise, so too legislation has hidden bisexuality through such mono-normative terminology. Nowhere is this more relevant that in 2014 case of Garcia-Jaramillo v. INS. In this case, the immigration board rejected a man's marriage as a sham marriage after asking ' an inordinate number of questions concerning [his] homosexuality' and found that because of his past homosexual inclinations, his opposite-sex marriage must be a sham. The immigration board never addressed the possibility that the man was bisexual. A second, related case is currently pending in the United Kingdom. In the case of Orashia Edwards, a bisexual man seeking to emigrate from Jamaica (where same-sex relationships are illegal) to the United Kingdom, Edwards was originally denied asylum due to a finding of ' dishonest sexuality,' because the British Home Office did not view as valid his two-year relationship with another man, in light of the fact he had previously been married to a woman. In a move reflecting degrading desperation, Edwards, who feared being killed for his same-sex relationship if sent back to Jamaica, took the drastic step of sending photos of himself having sex with his male partner to the British Home Office, as a last resort in trying to prove that his bisexuality is not dishonest sexuality, but is in fact his true sexual orientation. A third example of the dangers caused by bisexual erasure in an immigration context is a case arising out of the United States. In the pending case of Ivo Widlak, a Polish journalist who has been married to his wife for over twelve years, Widlak, since coming out as bisexual, has been threatened with deportation after being accused of being in a 'sham' marriage (Joyce, 1922(Joyce, (2010Marcus, 2015: 45, 67).

Conclusion
Mulligan's bisexuality and subsequent bi-erasure within Ulysses enabled Joyce to engage with and critique the various sexological modes of bisexuality as 'states of inversion', from Freud's infantile bisexuality to Krafft-Ebing's maturation into an exclusively monosexual identity. In exploring both bi-erasure and the bisexual subject as a knowingly deviant participant within the heteronormative ideologies of the ' compulsory monosexuality' of modernism, Joyce only ever affords Mulligan a transitory, liminal and 'stately' space within the narrative that is both deeply encoded and erased by his entanglement within a 'landscape of compulsory monosexuality'.
From this, I would attest that Joyce's aim in depicting Mulligan's bisexuality and his knowing bi-erasure through such 'stately' inversions was to attempt to hold sexologists accountable for their inability to provide the bisexual subject with a coherent and fixed model of subjectivity. Here Joyce specifically challenges Krafft-Ebing's hypothesis that as an adult develops into maturity, so the subject's 'masculine and feminine brains' align with either homosexuality (or 'inverted' state) or heterosexuality ('normal' sexuality). In reading Mulligan's bisexuality as I have done, it shows that Joyce anticipated post-Freudian revisions within queer theory of the 'innate' state of the 'bisexual disposition by offering a model of composite perversity much more akin to Hélène Cixous' ' other bisexuality' that describes the 'location within oneself of the presence of both sexes'. I have shown here that Joyce deliberately counterpoises Mulligan's composite perversity, or his ' other bisexuality', against a cultural landscape of ' compulsory monosexuality' that sexology failed to diminish and thus problematized, rather than emancipated, the conflicted experiences of the modern bisexual. I posit that this reveals an as-of-yet unacknowledged aim of Joyce