Bisexual geographies: mapping bisexual experiences and imagining non-monosexual spaces in Catalonia

Despite a growing number of people identifying as bisexual, especially among younger generations, bisexuality continues to have limited visibility within academic research and everyday spaces. Drawing on data from 1,009 participants in Catalonia, including 140 who self-identify as bisexual, this article explores how bisexuality is lived and negotiated across spatial contexts. Using the ReliefMaps model to analyse participants’ experiences in everyday places through quantitative and qualitative data, we examine how bisexual individuals experience discomfort in environments structured by monosexual assumptions. The findings show that discomfort is configured differently across spaces, with home, public space, leisure, virtual spaces, and healthcare emerging as key sites of discomfort. These experiences are shaped by sexual orientation, but also through the articulation of multiple intersecting axes of inequality that condition how space is inhabited. While biphobia is rarely named explicitly, the data reveal subtle but pervasive forms of epistemic injustice, misrecognition or erasure of bisexuality. Rather than being visibly ‘out of place’, bisexual discomfort emerges from a lack of intelligibility within spaces organised through monosexual assumptions. We argue that the illegibility of non-monosexual positions within mononormative spatial arrangements opens up a way to reconsider how geographies of sexualities understand sexual identity in relation to space.