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).