Low-Effort Rep: Bisexuality in Recent M/F Romances

[Content note: I'll exclusively use "bi" and "bisexual" in this post since that is the identity used in all the books I discuss.]

Picture this: you’re reading a buzzy new romance featuring a M/F pairing. Somewhere in the first half of the book—plonk!—there’s a passing reference to one (or both) of the main characters being bi. Maybe they have a queer ex, maybe they tell their new love interest, or maybe it just pops up in their internal monologue. Surprise!

Anyway, it’s never mentioned again and the romance concludes in heteronormative bliss.

If I’d had this reading experience only once, I probably would have raised an eyebrow and moved on. Oddly enough, however, I’ve encountered it multiple times in the last few months alone: for the first time in a recent release from Kate Canterbary, again in a new release by Katee Robert (more on that in a second), and a third time in Ann Aguirre’s latest book. Each time I came across it, I was left feeling uncomfortable. Was this…some form of bi tokenism?

I wondered if I was reading too much into it until I had my feelings affirmed thanks to an Alexis Hall review on Goodreads (thanks to u/monomatica for helping me find these posts again!) for one of the aforementioned books (emphasis my own):

…the hero is…bisexual. Bisexual in a way that seems to be currently on trend that I’m struggling to deal with and have written about before. Because while I absolutely believe it’s normalising and positive and unproblematic for a character to be queer and for it to be no big thing (after all, queer identity is not, and should not, be defined by suffering), I think if it is literally nothing more than a word on the page that can feel less like representation and more like… um. Marketing?

I dug around through AJH’s other reviews to see if I could find what else he had written on this topic, because I knew I might be able to better find my own words if I read his. I want to share this particular passage from his review of Electric Idol by Katee Robert:

…I should mention that both Eros and Psyche are bisexual in the way that Hades and Persephone are bisexual in Neon Gods. And I continue to be ambivalent about it. Which is not to say (as I said last time) bisexuality only counts if you’re screwing every gender you can lay your hands on but I’m kind of noticing a trend, not just with this series, but in other romances, where characters who end up in m/f relationships are textually flagged as bisexual. And yet, how can I say this, the bisexuality doesn’t seem to *mean* anything or the shape the character in any way. At which point, it’s just a word on the page. And I don’t think this is true of KR, because many of her characters feel queer (well, feel queer to me but that’s just me, I’m not the queer pope) and are engaged in queer relationships, but I don’t think I like this trend in general. And I’m definitely not trying to gatekeep who gets to write bisexual characters, or how bisexual characters should be written: but it’s hard for me to feel represented by characters who are queer identified but for whom its nothing more than a socially progressive label that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with who they are or how they exist in the world. But again, who knows. Maybe for some people queerness is that simple. And, y’know what, if it is… I guess that’s cool.

Like AJH, I don’t want this to come across as a call-out of Robert in particular (for the reasons he stated), but rather as an exploration of what seems to be a larger trend in newer romances (perhaps particularly those with wide releases?).

This can get complicated quickly, because obviously being bi isn’t a monolithic experience. I don’t want to imply that there’s only one “correct” way to write a bi character in romance, or that being bisexual in a book always has to ~*mean something*~ in the greater scheme of things. Different people have different experiences around, feelings about, and relationships with their sexual identities, so the same should be true of a book character.

At the same time, authors have to make a lot of choices about why a character is portrayed in certain ways, and what those parts of their identity mean to them, to their relationship, and are supposed to communicate to the readers. The more I encounter this trend, I’m left wondering what the implications of this “low effort rep” may be–intentional or unintentional.

If an author makes this choice, why are they doing it? Are they trying to make a protagonist look more progressive, or make a book appear more diverse and progressive? Is assigning bisexual identity coding to make a character seem more nonconformist, rebellious, or sexually liberal? Does it add something to the character, the narrative, or the reader experience for them to be bi? Is it just not that deep and I need to calm down?

I wonder what more authentic or nuanced representation of bi characters could look like and would love hear everyone’s ideas–especially from bi, pan, or queer readers in the sub. What are your thoughts? Have you encountered it in any books recently (new or old), and did it catch your attention?

Further reading: I recommend u/madigan459’s column about tokenism and harmful rep AND her column about authentic representation