What is "polysexuality"

n. Any form of sexuality involving multiple types of sexual relationships.

Polysexuality is the attraction to multiple genders. A polysexual person is one "encompassing or characterized by many different kinds of sexuality." Authors Linda Garnets and Douglas Kimmel state that polysexual is a sexual identity "used by people who recognize that the term bisexual reifies the gender dichotomy that underlies the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality, implying that bisexuality is nothing more than a hybrid combination of these gender and sexual dichotomies." However, it is arguable that bisexuality does not actually enforce a gender dichotomy. Bisexual activists will often argue the "bi" part can refer to genders which are the same and genders which are different.

Polysexuality is the tenth issue of the journal Semiotext(e), designed to illustrate "the plural aspects of sexuality." Edited by Canadian psychoanalyst François Peraldi, it was first published in 1981. The work reproduces images of genocide, massacre, and political disaster. According to Sylvére Lotringer, the purpose of these images was not to communicate terror and despair, but rather to connect sexuality to all the other flows that permeate society and to represent the death drive. They were intended to communicate ecstasy or jouissance. Polysexuality was reprinted in 1995, in a new edition noting that Peraldi had died of AIDS in 1993.

It reprinted material by writers and philosophers such as Pierre Klossowski, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, William S. Burroughs, Paul Virilio, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Guy Hocquenghem, together with an introduction written by François Peraldi. It contains thirteen chapters: "Self Sex", "Soft Sex", "Alimentary Sex", "Sex of the Gaze", "Ambiguous Sex", "Animal Sex", "Child Sex", "Morbid Sex", "Violent Sex", "Discursive Sex", "Philosophical Sex", and "Critical Sex".

The anthology was attacked in the United States Congress for its alleged advocacy of bestiality.